Los Pélieu Lovers - Bruits De L'Ombre

Les Disques Omnison - LP
France, 2025
Surreal Experimental / Leftfield Poetry / Minimal

What entrance should one take to delve into Los Pélieu Lovers, the latest iteration of Orion Music Workshop, or, to be more precise, another triangular emanation from Tom Val’s label, Les Disques Omnison, in the wake of recent Krakatoa and HWYUIOD projects? None matters more than another: they all lead to a burrow - both a refuge and a trap - a system of galleries, some intricately connected, others designless dead-ends.

It does not mean that the music released as Bruits de l’Ombre is due to merge with the aforementioned projects into a larger, undifferentiated block (the “omnison” of Les Disques Omnison), on the contrary. As a scrupulous witness, I ought to point out what seems to me Bruits de l’Ombre’s specificity: it doesn’t deviate as much as it strongly asserts a principle, that also emanates from former LP’s on the label but in a cryptogrammic state: that of accumulations and cut-ups, quotations and pastiches as techniques of collective creation. In the case of Los Pélieu Lovers, the quotation is clear, direct and eminently literary: the election of French poet Claude Pélieu as a tutelary figure works both as a saint-like poetic model, and a gateway to the Beat Generation.

Claude Pélieu, and via Pélieu, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, leading yet again to another tunnel: Ramuntcho Matta, Dashiell Hedayat, Sub Rosa and a cohort of industrial magi and tape manipulating iconoclasts… There’s another literary figure worth convoking, Kafka, and moreover Deleuze & Guattari via their 1975 essay Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, that I have been crudely borrowing from in the present text. Not only the images used by Deleuze & Guattari fits Los Pélieu Lovers just as well as Kafka (burrows and proliferation, deterritorialization, music swelling up out of nothingness, a cry that escaped signification), the concept of “minor literature” also applies to a minor music I believe Bruits de l’Ombre offers.

According to the French theorists, a) everything in minor literature is political: “[minor literature’s] cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” and b) everything takes on a collective value: “precisely because talent isn't abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that "master" and that could be separated from a collective enunciation”.

1. Vin Acier
2. Information Subie
3. Idylle De Printemps
4. Breizh Incandescante
5. Flûte En Cave
6. Bruits De L'Ombre
7. Roze Poussière
8. Le Jardin Vidé
9. Sous La Boue
10. Y
11. Écrin Casanier
12. Jass
13. Chuchotements Vitaux