Orion Music Workshop - Territoires Fluences

Les Disques Omnison - LP

France, 2024

Experimental / Electronic / 4th World

Tom Val has been releasing music - other people's as well as his own - for the next past 6 years on his label Les Disques Omnison (formerly Tom Val Records) in the truest DIY fashion: hand drawn artworks, small runs of CDR's and tapes. Last year, both his music and his label took a relative "professional" turn with the release of Orion Music Workshop's second LP, Mâlemort. Sonically, it began to leave the extreme lo-fi territories from where the project ignited; for the first time also, Tom Val dared (and probably financially could) press 200 copies of his record, which quickly sold out. Two other surprised hit records followed: Turner Williams Jr.'s sundreched Shahi Baaja improvisations and Shelter and Orion's kraut jams. 

Territoires Fluences marks another step for the musician and the label as its sound is much less bare and lushier than his previous production's sound, for the better, in my opinion. Indeed, such a mutation expresses a form of musical maturity, a broader understanding of arrangements and music production or, even better, Tom Val's new ability to seamlessly blend his (very) broad influences into an album that turns to be much greater than the sum of its parts.

As its name suggests, Territoires Fluences is all about the exploration of musical territories and the underground connections between them. Oscillating freely between musique concrete, field recordings, ambient, soft-guitar led instrumentals, ethno jazz etc., etc. etc. it summons, in no particular order, the ghosts of Muslimgauze, a cohort of French jazz mavericks (Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Joëlle Léandre etc.) and the members of deterritorialized contemporary electronics (from Discreet Music to Thomas Bush and The Sprigs). True French hauntology.

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