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GRVTS 014LP
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After scrawling his name on releases with close affiliates the Mannequin (Laugh Tool, MNQ 080LP, 2016) and Unknown Precept (A-Tranquility, PRECEPT 003EP, 2014), new Brussels transplant Maoupa Mazzocchetti finds good company among the oddballs on Editions Gravats for Gag Flag's blend of avant-dance music and absurdist experimental pop. For Gag Flag, Mazzocchetti adopts the persona of "Snippet Boy", a fictional avatar who first came to life in his live shows, and now on the album sleeve. Lurking behind this persona, Mazzocchetti becomes an art-dance-pop puppeteer who yanks the listener's strings and takes popshots at industry overproduction, deflating egotism and hackneyed convention in a way that echoes the subversive approach of his heroes such as Devo and The Residents. Using a blend of plugged-in and acoustic instruments, Mazzocchetti conjures nine psychedelically misshapen and inexorably funked-up grooves, splashing from the lysergic swagger of "Looking For Cheese" to the Arabian electro-acid styles of "How To Hate You Without H?" via the lap-steel dancehall slosh of "Ron's Roof", demented yacht-boogie in "Fonk Left The Ytown", and what sounds like Depeche Mode doing knackered EBM on "Sultan 1997". This is the sound of an artist unafraid to pursue their own sound and really coming into their own, albeit channeled thru a deflated, winking rubber avatar. Edition of 300.
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GRVTS 012LP
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Mutant troubadour Laurent Gérard, aka Èlg, makes an ideal addition to the misfits at Editions Gravats with Vu Du Dôme, a patently strange record resembling a sort of cryptic opera or the dramaturgy of a waking dream. Leading listeners up the garden path after the Mauve Zone album (NP 021LP, 2016), the French-Belgian artist's latest album feels like a stroll around a topiary maze at twilight on a warm night, with Èlg acting as a spectral protagonist narrating/ranting in first person while a supporting cast including Catherine Hershey, Borja Flames, and Ernest Bergez only make the trip more unfathomable. Forming a bridge between improbable dimensions of musique concrète and chanson, or electro-acoustic and literary spheres, on Vu Du Dôme Èlg riddles his music to life with literal and metaphorical take on sound poetry; blending French language vocals with glossolalic babble against quietly enigmatic backdrops whose low, shifting lighting and mid-fi resolution lends them to comparison with illusive theater stage designs as much as the overgrown niches of the imagination explored by Luc Ferrari or Èlg's Reines D'Angleterre bandmate Ghédalia Tazartès before him. A dusty revenant, an epileptic bard, a peaceful messenger: Èlg plays all those roles simultaneously. Combining pointedly purposed production and cryptic incantation, he acts as a souterrain psycho-pomp relaying energies from one reality to another, taking care not to stray too far explicitly in either direction and hold his ground ambiguously with the nous of an ancient Greek play or the kind of pathos and logic likely to baffle a computer. Taken in context of Roope Eronen's artwork -- a naive illustration of smiling cone faces on a bouncy castle -- each listener's perception of Vu Du Dôme is bound to differ from the next in an all too rare and precious way that's testament to the genius avant-garde vision of its mercurial creator. Èlg's first release for fellow Francophone freaks at Jean Carval and Low Jack's Editions Gravats. Art and design by Roope Eronen and David Coquelin. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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GRVTS 010LP
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French artist, Max P aka Black Zone Myth Chant, presents the project's most adventurous and urgent dispatch yet, dosing with the unfathomably layered and immersive Feng Shen for Low Jack's Editions Gravats. What was initially intended as a one-away project has now morphed into something powerfully undefinable and strangely affective over the course of two albums, Straight Cassette (2011) and Mane Thecel Phares (2015), an EP and a mixtape, realizing something of a butterfly effect feedback between the gestures of his strangely formed objects and their dilated reception by listeners around the world. For Feng Shen, the artist gleaned inspiration from the struggles of the Sioux people, and their conscientious allies, against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in the United States in 2016. It's an issue that resonated most with his music and the particular lines of philosophy he was reading before recording, particularly Axel Honneth's reading of Frankfurt School leader, Max Horkheimer, asserting that: "The knowing subject and the object are mutually determined from the beginning by the social process of the cultivation of nature, the product of which is the history of the species as a whole." In this sense, Black Zone Myth Chant uses his music on Feng Shen -- meaning "Wind Spirit" -- as a means to model methods of resolution between the physical and the spiritual, or opposing world views. Over the course of eight tracks, he renders a phenomenal space where he can best describe the paradoxical, impossible physics of a psychedelic soul, by toying with the listener's gauge of anticipation, perspective, and temporality with a poetic clash of ideas lent from chopped & screwed hip hop, deep space new age electronics, and liminal club music. Its music, which exists in two states at once, driving yet floating, as with the pull-and-push of pitched-down voices and rolling rhythms in "Their Love For You", or with impenetrable density of clarity in the layered dimensions of "Kubara", following a line that binds kosmische and dancehall in "Under Protest/Telos", to the polymetric harmonic swirl of "War Paint (DAPL Resistance)", and connects the heat-seeking techno impulses of "Ideas In Action", to the center-less ambient panorama of "Feng Jing". Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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GRVTS 007LP
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Low Jack's unpredictable Editions Gravats twist out gruff, grooving extracts, or Extraits, of textural and rhythmic sound art from Jean-François Plomb's JiFlure installation, making up the French artist/plastician's idiosyncratic debut release. These are tightly coiled yet wickedly chaotic creations, gleaned from a jerry-rigged set-up of three compressed cardboard suitcases containing four mechanical sanzas (mbiras aka "thumb pianos") built from circular saw blades and brochette spikes (metal skewers), all powered and excited by windscreen wiper motors and an array of homemade vibrators, mechanical drums, metronome and harmonica. The workshopped results are inarguably congruous with what you'll find out of Düsseldorf's Diskant label and bears a striking resemblance with the ferric tang of Konono No.1's thumb piano techno, yet they hail from a rather different artistic process altogether, which possibly shares more in common with Jeff Keen's self-built sound blatz or Pierre Bastien's mechanical instrument compositions. However, they all share a ruggedly rhythmic charge between them, one that relishes in the grit and infidelity of hypnotically repetitive, moiré-like pattern, and the friction of gear-grinding texture: something universally understood by DJs and dancers looking for ruder, unique styles to move mind and body. Also comparable to: Don't DJ, Black Zone Myth Chant and Mica Levi. Includes art insert. Edition of 350.
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