Pascal Comelade

Pascal Comelade was born in Montpellier, France. After living in Barcelona for several years, he made his first album, under the name of Fluence, influenced by electronic music and by the group Heldon. Since 1980 Comelade releases music under his own name. Ever since, his music has become more acoustic and is often characterised by the sounds of toy instruments, used as solo-instruments or as an integral part of the sound of his group, the Bel Canto Orchestra. Marc Hurtado is one half of the experimental French duo Étant Donnés. Active since the end of the 1970s, the group has released several albums, also collaborating with people like Alan Vega, Lydia Lunch, Michael Gira or Genesis P-Orridge.

Quikion - Japanese band influenced by French minimalists, such as Pascal Comelade or Klimperi…

Long on the Creel Pone radar has been this pair of LPs by French bandleader Philippe Doray, recorded in conjunction with the aid of his five "Asociaux Associés" & issued in 1977 & 1980, respectively, via Jean-Marc Patrat & José Serré's Gratte-Ciel & Invisible, the house-label of the inimitable Jacques Pasquier's Société Coopérative d'Ouvriers-Producteurs Artistiques. Centered around Doray's Synthi VCS3 playing & sprech-stimme vocal stylings, the selections here run the gamut from puerile, absurdist ad hoc rants, munged ring-modulated rhythm box experiments & general minimal-synth filigree, to straight up octave-pedal choogle, all laced with a particularly gallic sensibility. This is one of the more deconstructed and head-scratchingly odd entrants into the canon, with a similar studio-as-orchestra modus as Faust in spots, tethered by Doray's group of droogs, his "Asociaux Associés" who provide more traditional rhythm-section moves, only to disappear into voids of effects & Electronic treatments. One of the truly great, outsider statements from the late 70s Francophone Art / Punk / Damage milieu, on par with La Perversita, Ilitch, Pascal Comelade, Jac Berrocal, and Regrelh's formative work.

Quand le temps s’étire, quand le paysage que l’on parcourt est sans fin, c’est en cet instant, ici même, que la sérénité approche et qu’elle s’offre à nous. Lorsque le futur et le passé se confondent, là où le Nord et le Sud ne sont plus qu’un, la paix sans doute se comprend et peut enfin s’affirmer. C’est ce que nous dit à sa manière la musique du guitariste Gérard Pansanel, qui pour son dernier enregistrement, Future Early Years (label Nord/Sud ; Coadex), a réuni comme à un point de maturité maîtrisée le contrebassiste Arild Andersen et le batteur Patrice Héral. Ces trois musiciens ont trouvé ici pour leur première rencontre une sorte d’équilibre, d’écoute réciproque et partagée, mais aussi d’attention aux choses du monde, à tous les univers possibles et imaginables. L’équilibre est parfait. A chaque instant, chaque mesure. Pansanel a beaucoup voyagé.

French keyboardist Frédéric Truong has been composing under the name Leitmøtiv. His influences are both classic (Erik Satie) and modern (Michael Nyman, Pascal Comelade…).

Hauschka's The Prepared Piano is the distillation of Erik Satie's stripped-down languor, John Cage's innovations, and Klimperei's toy pop. Or in other words: the prepared piano technique applied to simple tunes that have a childlike quality to them. Cage had desecrated and reinvented the bourgeois instrument par excellence in the 1940s, taping, screwing, and placing almost every small object possible on its strings to conjure up new sounds.