[CP 067-097 CD] André Almuró; Kosmos, Musiques Expérimentales, L'Envol, Ambitus, Prolegosphere

2021 reédition pairing both CP 067 & CP 097 into a Double Compact Disc-Recordable set (issued essentiallty to coincide w/ the CP-237 "'Avec' Poème, Poésie De Cruauté" set) with the first-time addition of the alternate version of "Prolegosphere" as issued by Disques Adès as a (similarly die-cut; in fact the tri-fold booklet here has the trademark rounded cover of the "Kosmos" LP) 7" 33 tours single at the end of disc one!

[CP 067] Creel Pone here kicking off the 2007 season with a reproduction of this ludicrously hard-to-find 1969 LP on the Ades label containing four pieces composed at the tail-end of the Psychedelic era by Artaud / Breton / Genet collaborator and Pierre Schaeffer student André Almuró. 

This music has been whispered about in closed circles for close to 40 years yet seldom heard - it’s some of the finest Musique Concrète in the “Underwater Vibrations” category: tons of mutated / processed percussion-sounds with their top-ends tailed-off, bathed in tape-echo and transducer-plate effects, yielding a dense murk of claustrophobic low-mid range explosions and filtered-out space.

For me; this is an absolute highlight of the series thus far, made even more so by Mr. P.C. C.P.‘s near-religious adherence to the design spec of the LP - reproduced here in its 2015 iteration as a 6-panel "Glossy" gatefold booklet.

[CP 097] Perfectly timed replication of the other - ref: “Kosmos,” issued 30 or so ‘Pones back - great André Almuró LP, initially issued by the oft-cited Boîte a Musique - aka Disques Bam or just BAM - imprint at the tail-end of the 1960s.

Almuró started out with Pierre Schaeffer, producing radio plays for the Club D’Essai in the late 40s before joining the GRM in 1958. He proceeded to produce dark, chilling Musique Concrète backings to recitations of work by authors such as Jean Genet & Antonin Artaud, but by the late 60s he had already begun working on even more sparse & creepy music, paring down the traditional sound-on-sound approach to focus on combinations of single & paired instruments, edited to mask their natural timbres & bathed in a virtual sea of reverb & tape-echo to blur the assembly stages, yielding a remarkably prescient approach to sound construction that set him apart considerably from his peers.

The two pieces here, “L’Envol” - or “The Take-Off” - clocking in at a remarkable 29 minutes; amazing they could fit this on an LP side back then! - & “Ambitus” are nothing if not trademarks of Almuró’s style. Along with the aforementioned “Musiques Expérimentales” we begin to get a clearer picture of this otherwise neglected composer’s contributions & inventions within the early Musique Concrète scene. Mr P.C. has done a fine job with the run here, again including detail from the LP itself in the “Gatefold.”