C’est une ritournelle qui s’éveille, se déploie, s’absente, resurgit, se transforme, s’oublie, s’éveille encore.
Une ritournelle tout en plis et en creux, qui donne à voir autant qu’à écouter, théâtre d’ombres acoustiques où chaque timbre, chaque rythme, chaque modulation, naît d’un geste minutieusement affiné. « Je n’écris pas la musique, c’est un assemblage de mémoires de gestes. », dit Thomas Bonvalet. Des gestes trouvés, accidentellement ou pas, au fil d’une longue pratique : tel clavier qui frotte sur cette guitare lors de la préparation d’un concert, tel tambourin qui vibre de façon singulière lorsqu’il est posé sur cet ampli, la durée et l’intensité de souffle à donner à la flûte pour que les cordes du piano ouvert en déclinent et réverbèrent les harmoniques...
Des gestes à la fois très savants et très simples, qui refusent souverainement les catégories du moderne et de l’archaïque, du naturel et du culturel. Ils convoquent plutôt toute une généalogie intime et collective, musicale et technique, la mémoire de mille musiques et de mille temps. Il n’y a pas de chemin, en effet, plus aucun chemin dans ce monde défait.
En revanche il y a ces gestes qui permettent de chercher la mesure humaine, qui donnent la possibilité d’une attention nouvelle... aux corps, aux objets, à l’espace, des gestes qui inventent d’autres relations entre eux et d’autres manières d’être vivant, des gestes à travailler et partager sans cesse. « C’est fragile, ça peut toujours se disloquer. Je dois lutter, rester à l’écoute de ce qui est en jeu dans un morceau, insuffler ce qui va le faire tenir debout.»
Et la ritournelle de poursuivre ses mutations dans les plis et les creux de nos propres souvenirs.

By now counting more than four decades of constantactivity, Pierre Bastien erected such a towering and influential body of work that any blurb attempt regarding his music could easily fall into redundancy. Not that his revolving soundworld, deeply personal and unique, has ever stalled into gimmick or self mimicry, being Bastien the tireless explorer whose vision can never be complete, only continuously redefined in a process of discovery equally playful and challenging. So, completely in touch with Discrepant'sethos.
Returning to the label after 2017The Mecanocentric Worlds of Pierre Bastien, the french musician, composer and instrument builder, brings an array of instruments from different cartographies and legacies with the appropriatelytitledSonic Folkways. Resorting to different types of horns, prepared trumpet, an army of percussion, from gongs and tambourine to castanets and maracas, violin and too many others to mention here, Bastien weaves together a highly textured and hypnotic mosaic that projects an exotica beamed from scraps of the future. 'Aha! Master' in the same interstellar wavelengthas Sun Ra's cosmic tones, 'Moor's Room Master's almost orchestral tapestry of small percussion and insects or the non-western strings and tunings salvaged from ancient alien ceremonies on 'Pan's Nap Master'.
In an era where so much ink has been shed about world building in experimental music, Bastien can actually claim that to himself. The otherworld is right here, indeed.

I See Through You

OISEAUX-TEMPÊTE
WHAT ON EARTH (QUE DIABLE)
Double LP | CD | DL SR531 & NAHAL016
For almost a decade, Oiseaux-Tempête has been slipping through the cracks of any music genre or definition one tries to apply and perhaps it is because, like the wild and furtive creatures that escape all tracking, it disappears then is reborn under new forms, sketches playful mirages where we eagerly come to collide. Not quite a collective nor a conventional band, Oiseaux-Tempête rather takes the form of the radioactive nucleus of an atom whose electron cloud is in constant mutation. At the center of this project, which blurs lines and genres, the duo turned trio of multi-instrumentalists Frédéric D. Oberland, Stéphane Pigneul and Mondkopf have been building dialogues between their own reality, their vocabulary, and those of fellow travelers met all around the surface of the world. From their Mediterranean trilogy (S/T, ÜTOPIYA?, AL-'AN!) to their forray into Canada with the explosive From Somewhere Invisible, deeply instinctive albums shrouded in mystery take shape, in parallel with feverish and incendiary live performances, punk in their urgency to tell the world by blasting the boundaries of space and time.
After having signed the soundtrack of the bewitching Tunisian film Tlamess (Sortilège) by Ala Eddine Slim in 2020, Oiseaux-Tempête immerses us with WHAT ON EARTH (Que Diable) in a collapsed future. A psychedelic/psychological roadmap, the album gathers around Frédéric D. Oberland, Stéphane Pigneul, Mondkopf and Jean-Michel Pirès (Bruit Noir), the voices of Ben Shemie (SUUNS), G.W.Sok (formerly The Ex), Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) or the electric strings of Jessica Moss (Thee Silver Mt. Zion). If the planetary reality of 2022 looks like a bad spin-off of a pre/post-apocalyptic series, this new record invites us to another kind of anticipative present where the only weapons are poems chanted against the wind. Ben Shemie opens the projection on Black Elephant and sets the tone for this magnetic dance. With his modulated and processed voice, he spews his spoken word into a robotic and sensual monster on a modular synth loop slashed by heart beats and bursts of electricity, between futuristic hip-hop and a bad-ass addictive ritornello. A fitting introduction to the sensory deluge which follows and will have you spellbound, lost in landscapes both radically urban and deserted. Drum machines, analog synths, percussions, guitars, mellotron, flute, saxophone, vocals, rhodes, piano, violin and electric buzuk come to life in a sort of disaster aesthetic, pushing back the walls of the decor, against the current of any calibrated music.
From the mammoth riffs of Partout Le Feu, progressively thickened by explosive sound textures and sirens ringing the alarm, we levitate on Terminal Velocity, a minimalist interlude with a crepuscular feel that is jostled by the hypnotic pulsations of Voodoo Spinning and then the call of the dungeon The Crying Eye - I Forget, an electro mystical trance that deploys its philters in a troubled moat haunted by the psalmodies of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. The tempo speeds up in A Man Alone in a One Man Poem, a meeting of body and mind, of mechanical energy and burning breath where the spoken word of G.W.Sok sneaks in, before the pastoral crossing of Waldgänger and its forest of electronic chimeras. We dance naked under the comet, ridden by the whirlwind of piano and bass snaking over a drone before reaching the peak of this prophetic vision in Dôme, recorded live acoustic in Oscar Niemeyer’s abandoned architectural complex in Lebanon. The echo of a last discharge before the collapse.
Oiseaux-Tempête unveils a new facet of its mythology through a dense work that carries darkness towards the light of day, that rumbles, calms down and warms up again. Like the silhouette of a lighthouse that reveals itself as its torch rises and shines, the powerful beauty of WHAT ON EARTH (Que Diable) radiates into an expanding musical cosmos.
(Text by Alice Butterlin)

Out 28th February 2020 on Vicious Circle and Stolen Body Records
For sulfur guitar lovers, Prog from beyond the grave and blip blup blop of old synthesizers. Blitzkrieg fuzz and geyser Free. Bass escaping from the Minas Morgül's dungeons, and Nostromo’s drums travelling at the speed of light. Vicious solos and assassins bends. Acid krautrock and cosmic-comics jazz. There are distant echoes and reveries, celestial choirs illuminating space. And r r e e p p e e t t i i t t i i o o n n. Ancestral voices and ancient extraterrestrial rites. Abyssal doom and apocalyptic noise. There's chaos. And there's silence.
Artwork by CAZA

Contemplation, a spiritual and inner journey by sonic explorer, composer and sound designer Hélène Vogelsinger. Audio fabric woven to echo the feeling of coming home. A personal soundwave diary describing her inner worlds. An invitation to contemplate the meaning of existence. Collectively carried by circuit generated patterns colored with the amorphous vibe of a floating otherworldliness. Mirroring the constellation of experiences transformed into moving air.
Performed, recorded, and mixed by Hélène Vogelsinger
Mastered by Stefan Eichinger
Art Direction & Layout by Markus Scholz
Original Artwork by Maria Kassab

Wanna drop an absolutely unique album to the streets? Take 32 pop records from Vietnamese flea markets, chop them up to the tiniest pieces, find some tough bassline and fill the whole thing up with some Dilla-like clapper spirit. The result is French Onra’s instrumental joint.