Label: Fou Records - FR - CD38&39

やっぱりこの人物の録音は違います。今尚現役で使用している"EMS - Synthi AKS"を用い83年に発表した名盤[Abattage]、そして自主レーベルからはEvan Parker、Derek Bailey、Han BenninkによるIncusカタログ1[The Topography Of The Lungs]の続編的ボックスもリリースした、アルジェリア出身の電子/実験界の重要人物Jean-Marc Foussat。2020年新作は、お馴染みSynthi AKSシンセサイザーを操る氏のソロと、Evan Parker、Daunik Lazroを迎えたトリオでのテイクを2枚のディスクに分けて収録したCafe Otoでの録音。ボイスとSynthi AKSのみという1枚目のソロはとにかく濃密、電子/実験音楽家としてJean-Marcが如何に引き出しの多い人物なのか確認できます。そして2枚目のセッションでは多彩なライブエレクトロニクス&即興を展開。大推薦。

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We are listening to a solo. And yet... one has already become two.

Jean-Marc Foussat has invented for himself a made-to measure instrument, in bringing an inextricable mix – it's his trademark – of all kinds of gleaned sounds, rumours, and 'sound postcards'. Andthenthe voice, solitary or choral: one voice but made up of all voices that are possible, and even some that aren't really voices.
When he gives them expression, overlays them, confronts them, and pulls them apart, he selects the most diverse among them: captured there, in the moment, at the microphone; or extracted from the raw material; or else synthesised, outrageously at times. After all, as the phenomenologist says, 'a material obstacle (...) is only an opportunity for me to project myself towards other possibilities, it cannot give them an outside'

And those of us who lend our ears and listen to this 'outside', are its outside, which is to say that we are not 'inside' – not entirely, and not immediately.
Without the presence of the 'other' – the voice that replays the other voices and manifests the outside – the outside would be an inside.
In this internalised reflection of the outside, the voice reintroduces 'otherness'.
Or rather manifests it. Isolated and multiplied, praying and chanting, falling in a curtain of rain, the voice runs in a counter current against the electronic stridulations that start the movement with a strikingly brutal and provocative nakedness. The dramatic action that follows is a measure of the respective force of the incitement; even the silence joins in.

And midway, between the surging forward and the retreat, in the liminal area where opposite forces overlap, looms the far away – the 'distant' that is beyond the categories of inside and outside.

Neither point of origin, nor destination, it is the edge of nothing. It is the home of pure emergence, of outpourings – gentle and violent by turn – and also of dissolution; a groundless ground. The outside and the inside become two sides of a reciprocal flow, and the reconfiguration continues, bringing about a decantation, a transfusion, which recreates, in the fabrication of the music itself, the very phenomenon of listening.

We are listening to three musicians. Not quite a trio, ­but also more than that. Evan Parker creates multiple threads in his voice and braids them together, Daunik Lazro shreds his to produce a sound that skins it, then sculpts its flayed form, and Jean-Marc Foussat brings out of the box all the voices in the world, adding a song that he diffracts, at leisure. Each musician manipulates the solo exercise in his own singular way, so that it is opened up and populated. A trio, even supposing that's what it really is, is always more than that. The third shatters the mirror-like relationship between the other two and, in any formation of this type, introduces the vanishing point of a factorial function. This feature isn't repeated with an increase in the number involved. But in this trio, beside the two saxophonists, the added presence of a electronic synthesiser, a sampler, and a voice processing device, significantly extends the sound palette. And the 'outside' is brought in.

Since the invention, in the 1960s, of free improvisation, Evan Parker and Daunik Lazro have tirelessly carved out a path, and invented new ways, sounds and symbols – a signature that has never been set in stone, as it has for their imitators. Jean-Marc Foussat had faithfully recorded them, in such close association over so many years, that his role as a sound engineer was that of a phantom musician whose presence was always with them, although he remained on the threshold. When he finally decided to cross it, it was with the invention of the tailor-made instrument mentioned earlier. Parker was also involved with the rainbow colours of Lawrence Casserley, and with Marteau Rouge and, therefore, Foussat, making a foursome. Lazro threw himself into the 'reported' atmospheres of Kristoff K. Roll; they joined their braids and their abrasions, to create sumptuous canvases, as a trio, with a third player, Joe McPhee.

The outside is what lies beyond a city. It's been a long time since Evan Parker and Daunik Lazro have crossed the walls, but here, together, in the singular arrangement mentioned before, it's quite a different story. What remains of their citadel is behind them – a blue silhouette in the mist of its confines. They venture out once more, into the village squares, into the peaceful life of a circle of dwellings, graft the elemental onto the organic, and rouse up the gathering, and the excitement. They take a step towards the disorder, face the chorus, straddling a raft of melancholies. They forget themselves and then, reborn, remember themselves again, carried back to one another by the water wheel of the outside, fed by inexhaustible springs, and regularly, sensitively and profoundly renewed.

And, from the rampart of our ear, we tune the eardrum to these rumoured sounds, and in its vibration we too re-invent ourselves, disarmed before we ever knew we were battle-hardened.

Philippe AlenEnglish translation : Janette Par