JEAN-CLAUDE ELOY

[online prowler]

]

French electronic composer of instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music. Many of you have probably at one point come across Eloy. For those who haven't, I highly recommend checking out his opus maximum "Gaku-no-Michi" anno 1977 - 78. One of my personal favs.




LINKS

http://www.eloyjeanclaude.com/

http://www.hors-territoires.com/

[Bloated Slutbag]

Train-spotting electronics! Should be linked in the "sound of engine & industrial mechanisms" thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD4_FZyFNSE

Great stuff. Keep em coming online prowler...

[Andrew McIntosh]

Great stuff. Keep em coming online prowler...

Co-signed. And thanks Bloated Slutbag for the YouTube link, great late-at-night viewing/listening.

[ddmurph]

Train-spotting electronics! Should be linked in the "sound of engine & industrial mechanisms" thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD4_FZyFNSE

Great stuff. Keep em coming online prowler...

thanks for the link! i only know shanti. stockhausen comparisons are pretty inevitable but it's an awesome piece

[online prowler]

Interview

Ode to Gravity: Jean-Claude Eloy in Paris (July 4, 1973).

Stream via Internet archive// 41:15 minutes runtime.
http://archive.org/details/OTG_1973_07_04_c2

[online prowler]

New cds released. Avail via Metamkine.

http://www.metamkine.com/?monlabelrec=1505

[online prowler]

The trainspotting electronics video Slutbag posted is great! I may have to track down the 4cd set in the US.

True BW. In my opinion this is Eloy's best record. Worth the currency output.

[Bloated Slutbag]

Would anyone have any words to share regarding A L'Approche Du Feu Meditant? Comments, opinions, trivia? I understand this to be Eloy's first proper composition for full gagaku orchestra, in this instance The Imperial Court Ensemble and the Tokyo Gakuso Orchestra. Story has it that a good share of the original (Tokyo) audience took this for authentic Japanese court music. Takemitsu himself is said to have begged, if somewhat in jest, for the honor of further study in the Eloy school of gagaku.

A L'Approche Du Feu, covering four sides of vinyl over 2 hours and recorded in 1981 (possibly 1983), remains the single principle Eloy I've yet to get hold of and is therefore the single most fascinating. According to Jean-Claude Eloy's Sound Archives a 2 ½ hour performance from 1983 has been / will be (?) available in digital format, listed here under CDs 5, 6, and 21. (Actually, I can't quite make heads or tails of these Archives. Do they simply exist in principle, as private archives, or what?)

The subject of gagaku in the avant garde is itself worthy of separate discussion, but I'm too obsessed the the Eloy side of it to bother opening a new topic. Still, one of my favorite examples of avant garde gagaku would be the supremely dramatic Invasion-Explosion mit Abschied from Stockhausen's Dienstag aus Licht:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl9scN4NWgU

Also while looking for more info on A L'Approche, I came across an interview with Kojun Arai- one of monks employed by Eloy in this and other later-period works – talking about the relationship between the shomyo style of Japanese Buddhist chant and the avant garde. Choice Special Interests quote, referring to a 1973 overseas tour titled "Japanese Tradition and Avant-garde Music":

What was the response overseas?
I'm sure that the audiences were surprised by our performances. It was so different from what people think of as music and it seemed that it was a shocking experience for many people. What's more, the piece we performed was Daihannya Tendoku-e, which is a chant where we literally shout. For Europeans, music usually means singing beautifully in harmonious chords. But this particular shomyo chant is one to drive out demons, so it develops into a harsh shouting.

[Bloated Slutbag]

A L'Approche Du Feu, covering four sides of vinyl over 2 hours and recorded in 1981 (possibly 1983), remains the single principle Eloy I've yet to get hold of and is therefore the single most fascinating. According to Jean-Claude Eloy's Sound Archives a 2 ½ hour performance from 1983 has been / will be (?) available in digital format, listed here under CDs 5, 6, and 21.

Well, it was finally made available and it is better than I could have hoped.
https://www.discogs.com/Jean-Claude-Eloy-A-LApproche-du-Feu-Meditant/release/11065490

It's funny but from some of the descriptions found online I imagined that this would be a fairly straight-ahead presentation of traditional Japanese Gagaku, albeit filtered through a European ear. And that it is: traditional Japanese Gagaku filtered through the European-obsessed-with-Eastern-ritual-drone-collage ear of Jean-Claude Eloy!

From the spare and straight-ahead solo chant consuming the opening twelve minutes, I am put in mind of Anahata, the grandiose electroacoustic-buddhist epic conceived just one year later and first performed in 1986. The same performers appear in both recordings, so I would take this to be a precursor of sorts. Track two is even more Anahata-esque and it is simply... divine. Slow wordless chanting monks seemingly layered and drawn out over droning hichikiri-cum-sho as bells and other percussion instruments lend a distinctly ritual flair. As the performance progresses, sequences of solo chanting alternate with much more robust passages filled with a range of Gagaku instrumentation. Despite the range of instrumentation, the various sounds and voices float together in quite an immense mass that almost seems to speak with a single, mesmerizing voice. Part II is a more serene procession of "nine Gagaku wind instruments", if prone to ascend to high-pitched whale-like calls. At peak, some of this might disturb the poor monk struggling for serenity... out of his gourd. The final installment, at eighty minutes, is a truly epic attempt at pulling out all stops. The bells, the whistles, the solo chanting, the overlapping sometimes consonant sometimes competing voices, the keening wind instrumentation, and an ample delivery of heavy-handed percussion. At a few climactic intervals there is a sense of dense, almost shambolic, cacophony. By track 20, coming to the end of the performance, I even wonder if we are hearing this, as quoted previously in this thread:

It was so different from what people think of as music and it seemed that it was a shocking experience for many people. What's more, the piece we performed was Daihannya Tendoku-e, which is a chant where we literally shout. For Europeans, music usually means singing beautifully in harmonious chords. But this particular shomyo chant is one to drive out demons, so it develops into a harsh shouting.

Though this is relatively brief and of course, in fitting with the composed and ritual mood, things do settle down in the very end, to finally conclude in modest waves of solo hichikiri (and two minutes of enthusiastic applause).

Discogs lists this as split into three tracks, which as indicated above is not quite right. There are three parts, but the whole is divided into twenty-two tracks for easy reference and replay.

[Zeno Marx]

I don't know how I missed him or this thread, but I didn't know about him until a year or two ago.   A favorite since then.

[impulse manslaughter]

I only heard the Shanti LP before and it has been on my wantlist since. I seems i have to check out and hunt down his other stuff as well..

[Bloated Slutbag]

A L'Approche Du Feu, covering four sides of vinyl over 2 hours and recorded in 1981 (possibly 1983), remains the single principle Eloy I've yet to get hold of and is therefore the single most fascinating.

Well, it was finally made available and it is better than I could have hoped.
https://www.discogs.com/Jean-Claude-Eloy-A-LApproche-du-Feu-Meditant/release/11065490

I'd meant to add the following quote from the liner notes, which struck me as total Eloy in the push for larger-than-life epic-ness. To think what could have been:

I first asked whether the use of multitrack recording technology would allow me to use several "virtual" Gagaku orchestras with the actual live Gagaku Orchestra, which was limited to 27 instrumentalists. I had been reading historical documents dealing with huge Gagaku orchestras performing outdoors, with no less than one hundred Hichiriki, one hundred Sho, etc. They didn't follow through on the idea.

Is that not, I ask, the effing spirit?

[Bloated Slutbag]

Jean-Claude Eloy ‎– Gaia-Songs (Chants pour l'autre moitie du ciel n. V-VI)
This was the one Eloy I was (mistakenly) hesitant in approaching. Mainly owing, if I correctly recall, to the way it was characterized in Eloy's own liner notes to (I think) Butsumyôe. Then I heard an online soundclip and knew I needed it.
https://soundcloud.com/meditations/jean-claude-eloy-gaia-songs

At its best moments, the 2-disc set exceeds the metal-tinged densities of the above clip. At its worst, there is a distinct flavor of modern classical wtf. The wtf I actually quite like, but rather think to be an acquired taste: affective, un-effected operatic vocals-cum-amateur dramatics of vocalist calling out names of The Goddess, in Greek. One may be forgiven the occasional temptation to cringe. Similar wtf moments are to be found in the above Butsumyôe, but again none of that is what induced the hesitation. It was more the suggestion, in the liner notes also above, that the voices were presented simply "as is", with none of the meticulous electroacoustic manipulation normally to render the work so distinctly larger-than-life. So Eloy-esque. So... I'm glad to report report this as larger-than life and Eloy-esque as ever! And perhaps the most quintessential Eloy in its unalloyed ode to the female voice that has so occupied his attentions all these years.

Things start very promising, building very rapidly into richly woven, darkened, drone, whispered voice, or metal, scraping in counterpoint to squeaky outer edges. Quick fade to the un-effected operatic voice, here acquiring an almost haunting pitch underscored by subtle whispery scrapes wafting in shifts from far below. By gradations, the whispery scrapes acquire mass, body, less the ritual atmosphere more cold, alien, frozen landscapes of a faraway planet. Much of the album proceeds in this fashion, plain and lonely voices offering their pleas before interwoven textures of pure tones, processed voice, (cow?) bells and dynamic oscillations take their turns in blotting out the sky, the drone at times inhuman, even machine-like. Processed voice and cow bell or low-flying airplane? As with any of the great Eloy projects, the shifting layers never settle, always seemingly inclined to rush about through continuous builds and crests. There are, yes, the potentially cringe-inducing wtf moments. Perhaps no Eloy would be complete without them. And then the extended applause at the end, just in case one forgets this was all done live! I also had to smile at the liner notes here included, wherein the man confesses (in parenthetical aside) that it is not only the female voice that has so occupied his attention all these years. No apologies necessary, sir!

[Bloated Slutbag]

Jean-Claude Eloy - Chants Pour L'Autre Moitié Du Ciel : III - Erkos / IV - Galaxies (... Kono Yo No Hoka ...)
The name synonymous with longform epic, bottomless drone, ritual percussion, bells, chants, all the good stuff, layered into spiraling infinities. Mix in sporadic spikes of metal-on-metal thwack, smack, crack. Forget not the ubiquitous interludes of head-scratching WTF.

As far as the longform is concerned, this one cheats a bit, each disc repping a self-enclosed piece with no direct correlation to the other. Save a singular muse in the name of Junko Ueda.

Ms. Ueda brings a musicianship and a voice, undeniable as it is indomitable. Strident tenor intonations soar over steely Biwa'd slaps, lovingly laced Ligeti-an atmospheres congealing amongst coruscating thwacks, drawn out through deeply pitched shifts in perspective, taut amplified biwas, plural, whipped and lashing, scarring the cosmos. A throw-back, centuries, to unadorned vocal insistence, emerging dead center of the Erkos mini-epic, a-capella reigning supreme, going on far longer, and better, wtfer, than expectation might prescribe. So to the inevitable electro-acoustic dissolution, densely overlapping elements bringing the swirling spirals to climax after climax. Searing slaps of steel upon steel, strident Ueda'd tenors, bottomless infinities of orgiastic drone, coming in wave after wave after

One thing I'd like to add, which does not appear in my original post, above (and elsewhere). Erkos might very well occupy the very pinnacle of the man's achievement. What it may lack in the way of visionary epic-ness is counterbalanced by the sheer crushing weight of compositional brilliance.

Listening to this I'm put in mind of the fairly recent Endo collab with Kaori Komura, the main achievement of which is to bring through just how heavy traditional Korean percussion can sound when set off against more traditional harsh noise. I mean, Endo's harshwork on the collab is solid but mostly serves to set off the jaggedly harsh liquescent spikiness of centuries old metals-thwacking-upon-metals.

Jean-Claude Eloy's work in this collaborative project is stellar, but in the layering and re-arrangement of the traditional Japanese instrumentation lends the source material just that much more power, without- and here's the trick- without doing anything that alters the source in any noticeable way. Again, per Endo-cum-Komura, it's more in the spaces between the sounds, in the taut and precisely poised counterpoint, the composition proper, that the brilliant furies, ancient and otherwise, come so indelibly home.

At least, for me.