Los Pélieu Lovers - Bruits De L'Ombre LP

Rouen, 2024. Under the influence of reading aloud some poems by french beat poet Claude Pélieu while music was playing in the room, and despite finding much tributes to his work online, Tom Val, Maximilien Douche and Magali Genuite decided to do a record in praise of him. Rather than a usual music & poetry reading, that could have been an obvious choice, the trio decided to apply Pélieu’s techniques and style into the form of an album. Automatic writing, cut-up, degradation, collages… You can see where it goes. Result is completely freeform, landscape is changing everytime. Bird singings below a detuned piano, destroyed voice loops, flutes comes in and out, bait and switch… As every single Tom Val’s project rule : expect the unexpected. What could go wrong ?

Los Pélieu Lovers : towards a minor music (Essay by PAM)

"What entrance should one take to delve into Los Pélieu Lovers, the latest iteration of Orion Music Workshop, or, to be more precise, another triangular emanation from Tom Val’s label, Les Disques Omnison, in the wake of recent Krakatoa and HWYUIOD projects? None matters more than another: they all lead to a burrow - both a refuge and a trap - a system of galleries, some intricately connected, others designless dead-ends.

It does not mean that the music released as Bruits de l’Ombre is due to merge with the aforementioned projects into a larger, undifferentiated block (the “omnison” of Les Disques Omnison), on the contrary. As a scrupulous witness, I ought to point out what seems to me Bruits de l’Ombre’s specificity: it doesn’t deviate as much as it strongly asserts a principle, that also emanates from former LP’s on the label but in a cryptogrammic state: that of accumulations and cut-ups, quotations and pastiches as techniques of collective creation. In the case of Los Pélieu Lovers, the quotation is clear, direct and eminently literary: the election of French poet Claude Pélieu as a tutelary figure works both as a saint-like poetic model, and a gateway to the Beat Generation.

Claude Pélieu, and via Pélieu, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, leading yet again to another tunnel: Ramuntcho Matta, Dashiell Hedayat, Sub Rosa and a cohort of industrial magi and tape manipulating iconoclasts… There’s another literary figure worth convoking, Kafka, and moreover Deleuze & Guattari via their 1975 essay Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, that I have been crudely borrowing from in the present text. Not only the images used by Deleuze & Guattari fits Los Pélieu Lovers just as well as Kafka (burrows and proliferation, deterritorialization, music swelling up out of nothingness, a cry that escaped signification), the concept of “minor literature” also applies to a minor music I believe Bruits de l’Ombre offers.

According to the French theorists, a) everything in minor literature is political: “[minor literature’s] cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” and b) everything takes on a collective value: “precisely because talent isn't abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that "master" and that could be separated from a collective enunciation”.

These “Bruits de l’Ombre” literally obey these principles. The enunciation emanates from a triangle formed by Tom Val, Maximilien Douche & Magali Genuite, on which other triangles plugged themselves, in an infinite aggregate. Bits of scrambled texts, from Claude Pélieu and Maximilien Douche (aka ‘Oedipe Purple’), agglomerated like strips of newspapers, are cut up and pasted onto a digital patchwork. Furthermore, Los Pélieu Lovers not only recalls a theoretical moment, but also a scent of the time, that during which Deleuze and Guattari wrote their seminal essays, a very French kind of artistic tumult at the end of the Trentes Glorieuses, echoing Raymond Hains’s décollages and Ghédalia Tazartès’s grunts and mumbles. May this reminiscence be prophetic."