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All the stuff he did for Smash.

Legendary, underground French rock from 1980, ranging from lo-fi fuzz to full-blown prog. Each song is presented as the hallucination of a possessed six-year-old. Featuring the fourteen-minute Theme Guerre.

Late-60s, minimal, ambient classic, with Riley’s lovely synth and organ-playing deftly elucidating seven phases scored here for large orchestra with extra percussion and electronics.

Taut horror soundtrack from 1963: dramatically orchestral, with jazzy intervals.

In its entirety for the first time ever, the soundtrack of the wonderful French TV cartoon series, aired between 1968 and 1974. The GRM luminary goes to town: ‘a fascinating and bizarre collage of wacky electro pop (à la Jean-Jacques Perrey), drones, musique concrète, classical, and dadaist sound experiments seamlessly mixing into a cohesive and cinematic listening experience.’

Late-60s psych folk — a massive underground smash in South Africa — with the calypsofried drug-sick masterpiece Sugar Man.

“We entered the shadowy mouth of a new space, descending into a realm that precedes the underworld, the arcane, far from our time. We met beasts that gave us lessons about their language which we started learning without grammar.”

Bocca D’ombra is built on a series of whispers and breaths, panting and rustling. A closeness sometimes verging on claustrophobia is fissured with the sounds of crackling fireworks, birdsong, church bells, muffled cries from a children’s playground, like shafts of faraway light, or an insurgent subconscious. A kind of musical animism — influenced by ecological writers like Timothy Morton and Gregory Bateson — with a heavy heart it haunts the porous limits of human and natural realms. Improvisations with traditional instruments like electric and acoustic guitars, monophonic synths, horns or flutes meet natural noise-making tools like branches, nuts, and rocks.
Heady, intoxicating, highly personal, thought-provoking music from Milan. Check it out.

The soundtrack to the French TV series adapting Henri de Monfreid’s account of his travels in the Middle East. The music for the first series in 1967 features various flutes and marine conches; for underwater settings a celesta or a crystal xylophone. For the later 1975 series, de Roubaix composed a new music score, mixing old and new sounds, his EMS VCS3 synthesizer subtly mixed with acoustic instruments.

Moss-green, rooted, bodily crossings of Folk, Ambient, Drone, and experimental electroacoustic music, using violin, woodwind, percussion, voice, and various effects. Captivatingly story-based and ancient as fairy tales. The inner life of a pearl of sap in song. Warmly recommended.