BERROCAL, JACQUES - Catalogue

Released in 1979 in a limited edition on his own dAvantage label, Catalogue, with its overt theatricality is every bit as wild as the previous Paralleles. Not really jazz, not rock, having nothing to do with contemporary music either, Catalogue is a kind of sonic postcard which features not the group of the same name but instead numerous Berrocal associates including Potage (co-founder of the dAvantage label in 1976), Parle, Ferlet, Pauvros and recording engineer Daniel Deshays, plus many musicians from the French underground collective scene of the 1970s. Not content with manhandling a toy piano on Tango (which features mind-blowing accordion from Parle), abusing an arsenal of instruments including saw blades, pistols, shower attachment and even gingerbread, Berrocal pushes his own voice way over the edge on Incontrolablslaooo and Faits Divers, moving from a 60-a-day smokers cough to a terrifying sequence of gargles and vomits. The grungy free rock of No More Dirty Bla Blaps, the Portsmouth Sinfonia-like spoof Dixieland of Rideau, the distressing punk of Signe Particulier and all manner of fields recordings and cut-ups in Berrocals Artaudian theatre style, combining the excesses of glam and punk cold-wave to post-1968 Situationist perspective. With the same creative attitude documented through the mythic dAvantage label (1976-1979) Berrocal later accumulated an extensive archive of unreleased recordings, some of which finally surface now on this new edition.-Ç -Ç -Ç -Ç Catalogue represents the most experimental and complex of Berrocals records, as historical as contemporary modern, classic and at the same time as fresh and strange as if it had been recorded last week. During the same year Steven Stapleton frequently travelled to Paris to meet Jaques Berrocal and discuss a possible collaboration. In 1980, Berrocal travelled to London with his pocket trumpet and Tibetan oboe and recorded with Stapleton, Heman Patak and John Fothergill on NWWs second album, but thats another story. - Alga Marghen.