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Jean-Louis Brau (1930-1985)


  1. Elegie Elementaire (1961)
  2. Ataloche Roche (1961)
  3. Instrumentation Verbale (1963)
  4. Cantate pour l'interdiction de Mandrake (1963)
  5. Turn Back Nightingale (1972)



    Liner notes by Frédéric Acquaviva

    After releasing the first LPs ever published by Isidore Isou, Gil J Wolman, Hidlgo & Marchetti's ZAJ... here is another historical premiere, or the first LP ever issued by French pre-situationist Jean-Louis Brau. Jean-Louis Brau (1930-1985) at the age of 20 joined along with Gil J Wolman, Isidore Isou's Lettrist group, creating in this context (the same of Wolman's 'mégapneums', Dufrêne's 'crirythmes', Lemaître's 'hyperphonies' and Isou's 'poèmes ciselants') what he called 'instrumentations verbales'. In 1952 he recorded on a lathe the soundtrack to the unfinished film La barque de la vie courante (the first ever recording of experimental poetry). In the same year, with Debord, Berna and Wolman, he gave birth to the Internationale Lettriste, from which he was eventually rejected for his military deviation. After the Indochina war (where he ran a brothel and traded opium), Brau joined the French Army in Algeria, between 1956 and 1958. In 1963, back in Paris, Brau gave birth to a Deuxième Internationale Lettriste together with Wolman and Dufrêne. He also designed an astonishing métagraphic roman: No More. He approached everything in an explosive way, creating a body of work which is discontinuous, small and incomplete, in which he sometimes achieved some major results: for example with his sound poetry, as demonstrated by 'Turn back nightingale' (1972), in which Brau makes references to François Dufrêne, on a background of disarticulated drums and pre-punk saturations. Also included on this one-sided LP are 'Elégie Elémentaire' and 'Ataloche Roche', both recorded in 1961 during Isidore Isou's conference at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris, as well as 'Instrumentation Verbale' and 'Cantate pour l'interdiction de Mandrake', both recorded in 1963 and first published in Poésie Physique, book with 3 singles (Brau, Dufrêne, Wolman), Achèle, in 1965.



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