Subversion - s/t (1976 France). Certainly the most obscure album on Phillippe Besombes’ Pole label. I hadn’t even heard of it until recently (2008), and I think I’d heard every other Pole/Tapioca album by 1992! Featuring a crude black and white cover, it’s exactly the sort of album you would expect to find on the FLVM label a few years later. This pre-Falstaff outfit mixed complex prog in the Memoriance / Pulsar vein, along with jazz rock sections and some introspective folky moments. Not much cohesion, but they did well with each style they attempted. Very different from anything else on the label, except maybe Emergency Exit. And, like EE, Subversion was also not repressed by Tapioca later in the decade, adding to its obscurity.
Jean-Pierre Massiera & Bernard Torelli - Turn Radio On (1976 France). Well here he is again. Mr. Massiera, the king of arcane underground music. You never know what you’ll get with a JP Massiera album, but rest assured it will contain music no one else was doing at the time. He seemed to be the original artist with a keen eye for the ironic. In fact, I think the entire post 1990 Japanese pop scene could be described as similar, whether one was actually clued in on the joke or not. Jean-Pierre Massiera is the original post modernist hipster! Here he joins Mr. Torelli (not sure what his role is, since I’ve never actually seen an original LP, and it may not tell anyway) in a completely nutty, primarily instrumental (with odd voices and narration) album, that is as much indebted to the late 60s grooving horns jetset scene as it is to Studio 54 era disco.
Les Chats Renaissance - Hermaphrodites (1973 France). Yet another JP Massiera project, this one not quite so “wink wink” as some of his other works. Pretty much a straight ahead rock album, with some flute and heavy guitar, and a lot of vocals. Quite a bit of old fashioned 50s rock-n-roll to wade through. Would seem to be a companion piece to the much more progressive oriented Visitors album from the same year. In Parisian English they may say “Uhhhhh, may beee it’s sooo, how you say? Obscure, becaaauuussee uhhh may beee it’s not soo good, no?” Uhh, oui!