Planète-Concrète is both an homage to, and an investigation of the occult dimension found in French avantgarde music and spoken word from the second half of the 20th century, emphasizing the cosmic and musique concrète riches of the period. Premiered as a continuous 2-hour-mix on LYL Radio in July 2019, Planète-Concrète was almost entirely created with the music of others, with a lot of reshaping and reconfiguring of music excerpts, like backward playing, extreme equalization, superposition, interpolation, sound collage, loops, as well as added synth parts and found vocals. For this Bandcamp version self-help and spoken word records, private pressings and public domain material have been favoured as sound sources.

You can listen to the whole 2-hour mix here:
www.mixcloud.com/lylradio/bobine-vide-6/

The title refers to writer and publisher Louis Pauwels (1920-1997), famous co-author of Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians, 1960) and publisher of Planète magazine, 1961-71. Through numerous activities, Pauwels explored mysteries of ancient civilizations as well as modern occultism found in contemporary science, art or literature. In fact, Pauwels' unique vision inspired the whole Planète-Concrète project – the Planète magazine logo is even used in the artwork. The opening track features his voice from a 1963 conference titled Introduction au Réalisme Fantastique (Introduction to Magic Realism, my translation).

Accordingly, the rest of the album was build on samples and excerpts from obscure LPs in my record collection, be it Rosicrucian or Yoga records, mystic musicians like Sri Danesh and Antoine Tisné, or avantgarde, private press releases by Alain Louvier, Armand Lemal, Patrice Boyer or Théatre Aleph. The sounds of harpsichord and carillon reappear repeatedly throughout Planète-Concrète like a dotted line, their abundant harmonics representing a bridge between cosmic and avantgarde music, a quality also found in the Ondes Martenot, here featured (tr.#6) in a cut-up of Antoine Tisné's boisterous score for the instrument, Visions des Temps Immémoriaux (1972).

Central piece L'Hermaphrodite is based on the reading by two 1950s French actors of a famous passage from ur-Surrealist writer Comte de Lautréamont's masterpiece Les Chants de Maldoror (1869). This peculiar poem –a queer manifesto avant la lettre– is used as an excuse for grotesque reverb, insane synth sounds and intense vocal treatments. The original LP, issued in the 1950s, features music concrète interjections by Michel Philippot, a member of Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de Recherches Musicales at the time.

L.F.: records, loops, sound collages, virtual synth, sound processing
Artwork after a portrait of Eugene Ionesco