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CD
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GG 402CD
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"Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the '70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theater were porous and begging to be breached. During the '70s his uproarious performances routinely wound-up jazz and rock audiences alike, but earned the admiration of many musicians: Steven Stapleton invited him to perform on two Nurse With Wound albums, and other notable collaborators in his career include Sunny Murray, Lol Coxhill, and James Chance. Fenech cut his teeth in the mail-art scene of the early '90s, leading the Peu Importe collective in Grenoble. His 2000 solo debut was recently reissued by Felix Kubin's Gagarin label, and he has also worked as a software developer at IRCAM, and played with Jad Fair, Tom Cora, Rhys Chatham and James Plotkin; in 2011 he formed a trio with Berrocal and Ghedalia Tazartes for the Superdisque LP. Epplay is a highly regarded sonic and visual artist with a particular interest in aleatory composition and autonomous pieces, concrète, and the puckish reappropriation of vintage sound and film material, with dozens of published works to his name on labels like Alga Marghen and PPT/Stembogen. Transcodex is the fourth album by the trio. Turning more towards pop than in their beginnings, this fourth record follows the footsteps of their previous album, Exterior Lux. The trio seems limitless: they experiment with a large variety of styles (pop, dub, electronica, dark jazz), always colored by their very own touch. For this album, they invited two amazing musicians. Jah Wobble, founding member of the mighty Public Image Ltd. and Jean-Hervé Peron, one of the fathers of German krautrock legend Faust."
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AKU 1037LP
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Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay are back with a true gem of an album: Transcodex. Turning more towards pop than in their beginnings, this fourth record follows the footsteps of their previous album, Exterior Lux (AKU 1026LP, 2021). The trio seems limitless: they experiment with a large variety of styles (pop, dub, electronica, dark jazz), always colored by their very own touch. Jac Berrocal's trumpet, richer than ever, plays over an ever-changing sonic landscape engineered by the duet of musicians/producers Vincent Epplay and David Fenech. For this album, they invited two amazing musicians: Jah Wobble (founding member of Public Image Ltd and collaborator of African Head Charge, Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Evan Parker, Sinéad O'Connor) plays deep bass lines on two tracks and Jean-Hervé Peron (founding member of the German band Faust, and who recorded with Tony Conrad, Nurse With Wound, Pascal Comelade) brings his prowess to two tracks as well. Peron writes lyrics in French, German, and Russian -- and plays the French horn like no one else/ The closing track of the A side is a tribute to Christophe Bevilacqua (1945-2020), friend to Jac Berrocal. The song summons the place Bevilacqua used to live in: an Art Deco flat on Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris. Even if its intentions are clear, Transcodex does not reveal all its secrets right away. It's up to you to find the solution, the key, the Transcodex yourself. It must be revisited over and over again for its beauty to be fully revealed.
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AKU 1026LP
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Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the '70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theater were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock 'n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and unstoppable trail across the underground throughout the '70s and '80s, both solo and as part of the Catalogue group he co-founded. During this time his uproarious performances routinely wound-up jazz and rock audiences alike, but earned the admiration of many musicians: Steven Stapleton invited him to perform on two Nurse With Wound albums, and other notable collaborators in his career include Sunny Murray, Lizzy Mercier-Descloux, Lol Coxhill, Yvette Horner, and James Chance. In the '90s his protean achievements were celebrated on the Fatal Encounters compilation, but far from slowing down in the autumn of his life, Berrocal has maintained an extraordinary work-rate, keeping studio dates with Pascal Comelade, Telectu, and Jaki Liebezeit, among others. Now, Berrocal has found the perfect foil in David Fenech and Vincent Epplay, two fearlessly inventive improvisers, composers and catalysts who create challenging, acutely modernist yet historically aware settings -- wrought out of synthesis, guitars, computer processing, field recordings and unorthodox percussions -- for Berrocal's unmistakeable voice and breathtakingly lyrical horn sound to flourish. Fenech cut his teeth in the mail-art scene of the early '90s, leading the Peu Importe collective in Grenoble. His 2000 solo debut was recently reissued by Felix Kubin's Gagarin label, and he has also worked as a software developer at IRCAM, and played with Jad Fair, Tom Cora, Rhys Chatham, and James Plotkin; in 2011 he formed a trio with Berrocal and Ghedalia Tazartes for the Superdisque LP. Epplay is a highly regarded sonic and visual artist with a particular interest in aleatory composition and autonomous pieces, concrète, and the puckish reappropriation of vintage sound and film material, with dozens of published works to his name on labels like Planam/Alga Marghen and PPT/Stembogen. Exterior Lux is the third part in the series of albums and was again mastered by the legendary Noel Summerville.
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GG 326CD
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"Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician, poet and film actor who came of age in the '70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theatre were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock 'n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and unstoppable trail across the underground throughout the '70s and '80s, both solo and as part of the Catalogue group he co-founded. During this time his uproarious performances routinely wound up jazz and rock audiences alike, but earned the admiration of many musicians: Steven Stapleton invited him to perform on two Nurse With Wound albums, and other notable collaborators in his career include Sunny Murray, Lol Coxhill and James Chance. Now Berrocal has found the perfect foil in David Fenech and Vincent Epplay, two fearlessly inventive improvisers, composers and catalysts who create challenging, acutely modernist yet historically aware settings -- wrought out of synthesis, guitars, computer processing, field recordings and unorthodox percussions. Fenech cut his teeth in the mail-art scene of the early '90s, leading the Peu Importe collective in Grenoble. Epplay is a highly regarded sonic and visual artist with a particular interest in aleatory composition and autonomous pieces, concrète. Ice exposure is the sequel and companion piece to 2015's Antigravity, its title couldn't be more apt: sonically it is both colder, and more exposed -- in the sense of rawer, more volatile, more vulnerable -- than its predecessor, capturing the combustible energy and barely suppressed violence of the trio's celebrated live performances with aspects of noir jazz, musique concrète, no wave art-rock, sound poetry and spectral electronics all interpenetrating in unpredictable and exhilarating ways."
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BLACKEST 071LP
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Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay return with Ice Exposure, their second album for Blackest Ever Black. A sequel and companion piece of sorts to 2015's Antigravity (BLACKEST 011CD/LP), its title couldn't be more apt: sonically it is both colder, and more exposed -- in the sense of rawer, more volatile, more vulnerable -- than its predecessor, capturing the combustible energy and barely suppressed violence of the trio's celebrated live performances with aspects of noir jazz, musique concrète, no wave art-rock, sound poetry, and spectral electronics all interpenetrating in unpredictable and exhilarating ways. While there are moments of great sensitivity and even a cautious romanticism, the prevailing mood is one of anxiety, paranoia, and mounting psychodrama: close your eyes and Ice Exposure feels like a dissociative Hörspiel broadcasting from the seedy backstreets of your own troubled mind. Before he picks up an instrument or opens his mouth, Berrocal's unique and compelling presence can be felt: a combination of studied, glacial cool and anarchic, in-the-moment intensity that has served him well over a long and storied career. Now in his eighth decade, it comes with an added gravitas, perhaps, but no less energy or vitality. On Ice Exposure, his lyrical, instantly recognizable trumpet playing is a key feature -- see especially the ghostly, dub-wise take on Ornette's "Lonely Woman", the dissolute exotica of "Salta Girls", and the sublime echo-chamber soliloquy "Opportunity". But more often it's his voice that commands center-stage, whether casually discharging surreal poetic monologues or moaning in animal despair -- a vocal tour de force that transcends language and culminates in the Dionysian frenzy of "Why", Berrocal's half-spoken, half-howled exclamations jostling with David Fenech's slashes of dissonant guitar, over Badalamenti-ish, panther-stalk drums. Fenech and Epplay are responsible for Ice Exposure's inspired arrangements and vivid, vertiginous sound design. He and Fenech fashion a remarkable mise-en-scene for Berrocal to inhabit, one that embraces cutting-edge electronics while also paying homage to the best traditions of outlaw jazz and libidinous rock n' roll. On "Blanche de Blanc", Berrocal's voice is framed by a groaning, ghoulish orchestra of industrial drones, while "Equivoque" evokes the most humid and hostile Fourth World landscapes and "Panic In Surabaya" lives up to its name, a hectic, pulse-quickening concrète collage that leaves you gasping for air. Ice Exposure is a triumph of a group mind, an underworld dérive as life-affirming as it is unnerving and psychologically precarious.
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BLACKEST 062EP
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Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay return with their first record since 2015's Antigravity (BLACKEST 011CD/LP). The title track is a louche but volatile art-rock panther-stalk... a cracked jazz ode on street hassle, pitched somewhere between Vince Taylor-in-exile and PiL's Metal Box (1979)... Berrocal on vocals, a slurring stream-of-consciousness that becomes a yowl of despair; drums loose and dub-delayed; Fenech's jagged guitar phrasing, and Epplay's electronics set to flay. "Ice Exposure" situates Bef's mournful, muted trumpet in the eerie deep-freeze ambience that characterized Antigravity, and "Alienor En Aout" coaxes a gloomy poetry from affectless cold war radio broadcasts. Last copies...
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BLACKEST 011LP
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LP version. Includes MP3/FLAC download code. Legendary trumpeter Jac Berrocal joins two fellow travelers in the French avant-garde, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. A lugubrious mise-en-scène in which ice-cold outlaw jazz meets musique concrète, DIY whimsy, and dubwise studio science, all watched over by the lost souls and hungry ghosts of rock 'n' roll. The trio's first album together, Antigravity is a richly imagined universe combining original compositions and détourned standards. Berrocal revisits his own signature piece "Rock 'n Roll Station," which first appeared on his '77 LP Parallèles (TES 037CD) with chain-wielding, leather-clad wildman of British rock 'n roll Vince Taylor singing the lead, and Berrocal on mic'd up bicycle; here, the Frenchman takes the vocal reins. A barely recognizable interpretation of Talking Heads' "The Overload" pushes beyond the bush of ghosts into a fourth world dread-zone of stalking drum-machine rhythms, humid electronics, and jagged guitar phrasing, while "Where Flamingos Fly" reroutes the Gil Evans Orchestra's classic rendition through the seamiest back-streets of the 13th arrondissement; there, as on the trio's reading of "Kinder Lieder," the mood is romantic, but stark, isolationist: imagine Chet Baker falling through the glacial sound-world of early PiL or Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter. Originals include the agitated Iberian psychedelia of "Spain," and "Panic in Bali," which begins in seemingly trad-jazz fashion only to swell into a cacophony of a gurgling electronics and fevered "Lonely Woman" quotations. "Solaris" is a swirling, suspenseful arabesque of whiplash guitars and Black Ark FX, Berrocal's trumpet hitting deep blue notes while his vocals are sliced and diced and tossed into a yawning void of tape-delay -- like Antigravity at large, the result is oblique, dissolving, forever out of reach. Despite the chilly, sometimes austere mood of the album, it is, ultimately, a deeply human and welcoming work, with a playfulness and sly humor pervading; see the anarchic cross-hatch of "Ife Layo," or the CD-only track "L'essai des Suintes ou le bal des Futaies," Berrocal's poetic disquisition on the infinite variety of female genitalia. Mischief and misdirection are rife here, and fans of Officer!, Henry Cow, and the ReR axis will find much to chew on. Play, as we know, is serious business. Put another way, and to quote Berrocal entirely out of context, Antigravity is completely crazy, completely timeless, completely out. As its title suggests, the objective is nothing less than lift-off, weightlessness, a total unshackling from earth. Sunglasses on, collar up, let's go.
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BLACKEST 011CD
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Legendary trumpeter Jac Berrocal joins two fellow travelers in the French avant-garde, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. A lugubrious mise-en-scène in which ice-cold outlaw jazz meets musique concrète, DIY whimsy, and dubwise studio science, all watched over by the lost souls and hungry ghosts of rock 'n' roll. The trio's first album together, Antigravity is a richly imagined universe combining original compositions and détourned standards. Berrocal revisits his own signature piece "Rock 'n Roll Station," which first appeared on his '77 LP Parallèles (TES 037CD) with chain-wielding, leather-clad wildman of British rock 'n roll Vince Taylor singing the lead, and Berrocal on mic'd up bicycle; here, the Frenchman takes the vocal reins. A barely recognizable interpretation of Talking Heads' "The Overload" pushes beyond the bush of ghosts into a fourth world dread-zone of stalking drum-machine rhythms, humid electronics, and jagged guitar phrasing, while "Where Flamingos Fly" reroutes the Gil Evans Orchestra's classic rendition through the seamiest back-streets of the 13th arrondissement; there, as on the trio's reading of "Kinder Lieder," the mood is romantic, but stark, isolationist: imagine Chet Baker falling through the glacial sound-world of early PiL or Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter. Originals include the agitated Iberian psychedelia of "Spain," and "Panic in Bali," which begins in seemingly trad-jazz fashion only to swell into a cacophony of a gurgling electronics and fevered "Lonely Woman" quotations. "Solaris" is a swirling, suspenseful arabesque of whiplash guitars and Black Ark FX, Berrocal's trumpet hitting deep blue notes while his vocals are sliced and diced and tossed into a yawning void of tape-delay -- like Antigravity at large, the result is oblique, dissolving, forever out of reach. Despite the chilly, sometimes austere mood of the album, it is, ultimately, a deeply human and welcoming work, with a playfulness and sly humor pervading; see the anarchic cross-hatch of "Ife Layo," or the CD-only track "L'essai des Suintes ou le bal des Futaies," Berrocal's poetic disquisition on the infinite variety of female genitalia. Mischief and misdirection are rife here, and fans of Officer!, Henry Cow, and the ReR axis will find much to chew on. Play, as we know, is serious business. Put another way, and to quote Berrocal entirely out of context, Antigravity is completely crazy, completely timeless, completely out. As its title suggests, the objective is nothing less than lift-off, weightlessness, a total unshackling from earth. Sunglasses on, collar up, let's go.
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