In 1979 an album was released by a bunch of postpunk weirdoes who had never owned music instruments before they went into the studio one weekend to record it. Only five hundred copies of this record were made.

Well, this isn't that record. This is even more obscure and strange. For years Fille Qui Mousse was known only as a name on the checklist of influential "electronic experimental music" that graced the aforementioned record, Nurse with Wound's Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella". Fille Qui Mousse never released an album - they recording one for the little known French Futura label in 1971 but its release was shelved and only ten test copies were ever made and the last known copy was sold for $3,000. Of such things are legends made, amongst obsessive record geeks, at least.

After two dubious appearances on different labels under the title Trixie Stapelton 231 and with incorrect track titles, the album finally has a fully authorized release, 31 years after it was recorded. I'm not sure who they expect to buy it, however The sort of person who feels a need for this sort of arcane, esoteric and willfully obscure racket will no doubt have already grabbed the earlier reissues and you'd need to be an obsessive of a very special genus to want to buy it again just for the definitive track listing - and a new cover showing a cat and a glass of beer.

But what about the actual music on this thing? Do the playful, experimental squeaks and clatter of 1971 have anything going for them today, beyond a quaint, nostalgic charm or mere curiosity value? Is it just another cacophonous diversion for those of us who get our kicks from disdaining everything contemporary, reasonable or popular, to play once or twice and then file away amongst all those other supposedly important classics of collectible avant-rock? Obviously it's not easy listening. It's not recognizable as rock music, not even if you stretch your parameters to include the wackiest stuff around today or yesterday. And unlike many of the German bands of the early 70s who were chasing their own freaky vision of hard (American) electronic rock out into space or deep into their own acid-tweaked heads, the almost unknown pioneers of avant guard 70s French rock - like Mahogany Brain, whose determination not to be able to play their instruments somehow gave them (in hindsight at least) a pristine, darkly poetic insouciance that made the Velvet Underground seem like Herman's Hermits - aspired to something that wasn't just anti-rock but flagrantly anti-music/non-music. Whether this was born of a genuine revolutionary spirit or just to épater les bourgeois probably no longer matters. Se taire pour une femme trop belle, is, ultimately, even after trying to place it in historical, cultural or goddamn psychogeographical context, just too detached from anything recognizable for me to be able to venture an opinion as to whether it's good or bad. It just is - slabs of sounds out of context, springs twanging, two-fingered piano abuse, detuned guitars, a few moments of gibberish chanting, dogs barking, some lackadaisical folksy jamming that opens and closes the album - and at its heart a single, unplaceable, inhuman shriek that goes on for at least six minutes and feels like it'll never end and probably causes brain damage no matter how quietly you play it. How does that sound to you?

Album of the year, undoubtable.

Fille Qui Mousse
Se taire pour une femme trop belle
Fractal 016