We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Abattage

by Jean-Marc Foussat

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      €7 EUR  or more

     

1.
Abattage (1) 05:33
2.
3.
4.
Abattage (3) 01:00

about

The record that started it all.

This digital download features the whole of the original album, mastered from Jean-Marc Foussat's original tapes (real reels).

It will be reissued on LP in the Spring of 2018 by Souffle Continu records.

By Laurent Fairon for Continuo:

"Jean-Marc Foussat (b.1955) is a French guitar player, VCS synth player, label founder and recording engineer. He played with a band called Mandragore in the 1970s, as wel as collaborating with Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Roger Turner, Raymond Boni and Claude Parle. In the 1980s he worked as a recording engineer for Incus, Hat Hut, Po Torch, Rec Rec, Celluloid, etc. He founded Potlatch Records along Jacques Oger in 1997. On ‘Abattage’ (1983), he self released his studio experiments under his own Pyjama imprint. The tracks were apparently recorded between 1975 and 1981 and feature extensive use of field recordings from out of the window (see cover), as well as piano, guitar, VCS III synth and found vocals. The main instrument has to be the recording studio, though, with obsessive care in balance, transitions and dynamic, that is: much definition in the very low sounds and lots of details in the loudest sounds. #3 Ruines is a solo piano (played by Jean-François Ballèvre); #4 Petit Paysage is a street cleaner engine recording; #5 Petit Paysage is someone lighting a cigarette; #6 includes people laughing and coughing, electric guitar; and then monumental #7 starts as a jackhammer+piano duo, before morphing into a fierce VCS solo. Noise art of the highest caliber!"

From a bootleg liner notes:

"Popcorn bursts of pointillist plucks and gristly electroacoustic splatter set the stage on this first solo outing by this somewhat obscure French electronic musician, guitarist and improvisor. His recording career would pick up again decades later, with recent outings for both Leo and Ayler records alongside the likes of Noel Akchote and Roger Turner, but this would be his sole document under his own banner for some 18 years, Foussat having been principally engaged as an engineer during this time for a broad swath of Europe's free improv culture and it's evident in his own music's prickly keen attention to detail and sharp attack.

With its initial salvo of air raid sirens, coughing and tap dancing you know you're in for something edgy and peculiar with this one. And indeed, it's not long before the aforementioned plucks rush to the fore and then coagulate into dense Agencement-like thickets before being sent tumbling down the nearest stairwell. Foussat generates a lot of compelling tension here between slurries of free music gabbiness and concise electroacoustic vivisections while still somehow finding room for ruminative piano doodling, Eraserhead ambience and Barbara Streisand's bellowing pipes across the A side, while the flip finds him initially ferreting away at his guitar to substantially more musical ends, but alas, it's a honeytrap, as Foussat whips it all up into a frothy Futurist lather of buzzing bandsaws and stuttering power drills."

credits

released March 1, 1983

Jean-Marc Foussat: EMS Synthi AKS and VCS3, electro-acoustic treatments, voice, tapes, piano, electric guitar, sound.

Recorded 1973-1981.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Jean-Marc Foussat Le Thoronet, France

Homepage of Jean-Marc Foussat's solo / electronic projects.

Jean-Marc Foussat, founder of Studio Pyjama, sound recordist, improviser and electro-acoustic composer on the EMS Synthi AKS and VCS3

contact / help

Contact Jean-Marc Foussat

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like Jean-Marc Foussat, you may also like: