Jean-Claude Camors - Strates

Absolutely bonkers and very French one-of-kind avant-garde LP.  Highly cinematic pocket chamber music experimentations, led by Camors's falsetto voice. Somewhere between Michael Nyman, Pascal Comelade & Christian Vander's Offering. Warmly Recommended.

While it's relatively easy to broadly sonically define Italian, German, or British experimental scenes of the 1980's, I feel like the tones and moods that make an experimental piece sounds undeniably French are not as easy to pin. Maybe is it because I've always been immersed in this French ambience that I have difficulties to identify what makes such a record sounds French to me, lacking the distance, the exoticness that allows one to perceive striking  features and patterns. I'd say there's a certain quirkiness, the same one hears on Nato's albums for instance, (made by French or non French people - Steve Beresford's Nato albums don’t sound like his UK records), a purposely naive feature and an overall playfulness that makes an experimental record sounds French, even when it comes to the most radical examples.

Jean-Claude Camors’s self-released Strates checks all of the above. It lightheartedly offers a set of lyrically arranged string quartets, vaguely recalling British post-modern chamber music by the likes of Michael Nyman or the Penguin Cafe Society, however, Camors’s compositions are less linear, probably under the influence of Magma and the French prog-jazz tradition. The abstract falsetto singing of Camors, especially, reminds of Magma’s zeuhl. This carefree dive into wordless singing inevitably evokes the music composed for contemporary dance and theatre pieces by René Aubry, Hugues Le Bar or Henry Torgue & Serge Houppin in the 1980’s.

However, Strates is free from any prerogatives. It may sometimes feel like a soundtrack, especially on songs like “un siphon”, but it never has to match soundtracks standards. It’s just an immensely joyful, leftfield and beautiful piece of self-released acoustic experimentations. A huge favorite from the weirdest side of French music. (NM/VG+)

Tracklist

1. Sequenza
2. Olo-Oa
3. Récital
4. Elipse
5. Un Siphon
6. Bulzeboules
7. Sequenza Au Bain
8. Oupam
9. Strates
10. Pickup