Brussels in the early ’80s must have been a really cool place to be, with Marc Hollander starting up Crammed Discs just as Tuxedomoon arrive, spreading their stateside art rock sensibilities across the city.
Douzième Journée feels like a journey, but one that takes you into forbidden, mysterious territory; one from which perhaps you aren’t really expected to return. There is a nod to Marcel Griaule and his studies of a Malian people in the ’30s; but really, this goes beyond recognition to a place of intrigue and shadow. The groan of horns feels like some port town, abandoned and dark, a clarinet possibly adding a dreamy bed of gauze or an oily filter through which the start of a sea voyage looms, heading for some intoxicated land; but as ever, arrival can’t be guaranteed.
There is a sinister feel to some of Douzième Journée, I think because it is difficult to work out how some of these sounds were discovered. Tipsy percussion is coated in brief loops that wind around your ears like a spider around a trapped fly, or like a hypnotising snake giving as brief moment of safety before it is gone.The interchange of sounds gives us no indication of where we might be and considering this is 1982, it sounds bizarrely out of time, as if we are lifted from reality and dropped headlong into something totally unexpected. In fact, it is difficult to focus with the scuffed strings and clarinet loop squeezing the blood, making you lightheaded and just about able to hang on to the drunken piano that manages to briefly trap time, skewering you to a given moment.
Towards the end, a shaker and metallic bird noises appear; they are an alien species, the sounds unfamiliar, heralding arrival on some African shore. Celebrations are taking place by the light of a campfire, but are we truly welcome here? The deep resonant drums leave everything half-remembered, as if it is evoking some long hidden memory; but as the intensity increases, so the familiarity fades and the shriek of the birds overwhelms. At one point, the rhythms and sounds drop away, and a brief drone and found voices echo around a hotel room, casting you adrift in a fever dream of all that has preceded, leaving the question of whether any of it really took place. And then the final track returns us to normality; the synth line, the basic rhythm and the curling Eastern burble hinting at what may have taken place.The ideas here are just extraordinary and the coming together of Brown, Lew, Hollander and sound engineer Gilles Martin is a recipe for an extravaganza of thoughts and directions, all of which are unique in their conception. Talk was made of comparisons to Can‘s Ethnological Forgery series or Jon Hassell‘s 4th world, but really those are irrelevant. This album and the one that came a few years later stand on their own, four musicians producing an imaginary north African journey in a little Brussels bar. Douzième Journée is just sublime.
-Mr Olivetti-
