CD – Sub Rosa

Compared to the previous decade, the eighties were a period of political and philosophical retreat. However, during this period, many experimental trends were still in play, especially among the counter-cultural groups located in the main European cities. In Paris, for example, there was the meeting between Jacques Barbéri (a science-fiction writer), Denis Frajerman (a musician focused on themes in between orality and literature), Philippe Masson (a clarinettist) and Philippe Perreaudin (an experimenter with some experience of organization, studio work and production). The group’s eclectic debut, À la Mode, was marked out by a passion for DIY sound and an infatuation with innovative art rock. Their music relied heavily on the outlined structures, effects, mixing and production of what was recorded in their fiery jam sessions. Collaboration with other artists has been one of the defining characteristics of Palo Alto and there have been many collaborations that have led individual musicians to leave their comfort zones. It was a strategy that was typical of that generation, the first to work closely with new technologies. Now only Jacques Barbéri and Philippe Perreaudin remain of the seminal ensemble of experimenters, who were then joined at the end of nineties by Laurent Pernice, a former member of the French industrial band Nox. The inspiration for the project, despite its fundamentally improvisational musical drifts, remains somewhat circumscribed by a philosophical-literary imaginary. If previously writers such as Antoine Volodine, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Lewis Carroll and JG Ballard were involved in the band’s riffs, now it’s Giles Deleuze’s turn, the philosopher of A Thousand Plateaus, the theorist of the rupture of all the significant concatenations embedded in the norm. The evocation of Deleuze definitely fits this multiform collective, who express some complex electrical ramifications and are able to find some highly articulated and elegant free forms. Deconstructions and reconstructions generate a whole set of texts and sounds, like cogs in a “machine”, a desiring machine that now includes Richard Pinhas, Thierry Zaboitzeff, Alain Damasio and Rhys Chatham.

 

Palo Alto – Difference and Repetition / A Musical Evocation Of Gilles Deleuze