Gilbert Deflez - Je Sus Vivant, Mais J'Ai Peur De Gilbert Deflez

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4...according to our Brett on Thu 12 Aug, 2010.

Finders Keepers have served up a bit of treat with this one. Without the time to fully figure it all out, I'm getting the impression that this was a studio-based project initiated in the early/mid 1970s by Gilbert Deflez, a radio personality known for his sci-fi readings, who got a group of musicians together to jam some backing tunes to suit his tones before then cutting, splicing, speeding up and slowing it all down in the studio until the result started to resemble something of a spacey, experimental lounge-prog opus. The first track is a particular beauty with its bassy repetition calling to mind everyone from Magma to King Crimson to Om and it's no surprise that it continues to pop up throughout the record (in part or in full) as a sort of anchor point around which everything else revolves. Often I find that the stuff on the label's a little bit too kitsch for me but this one really hits a sweet spot between exotic weirdness and darker-toned musical invention.. I wish I knew what they were all talking about but then again, sometimes it's best not to know! Tres bon!

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Surrealist sci-fi psych concept album combining the leading bastions of the French No-No rock scene with the Parisian cosmic-art cognoscenti.

• Anyone lucky enough to own an original copy of ‘Je Suis Vivant, Mais J’aiPeur’ holds an actual rare chunk of French pop history - a secret psychedelic science fictional cosmic concept LP by one of the leading bands of the No-No generation.

• Most music fans will draw a blank on the name Gilbert Deflez. However, thousands of Paris based fans of French comic books and Fantastique literature eagerly tuned into his weekly radio show to hear Deflez read science fiction stories. Deflez wasn’t a disc jockey like his other friends at the station, he was a story teller and voice actor who, on the strength of his show, would publish a book under the same name ‘Je Suis Vivant, Mais J'ai Peur’ (‘I Am Alive, I Am Afraid’) as an extension of his freakish fables feature, while balancing his spare time as a book critic and karate teacher in the heart of the bustling city.

• Add to this story the combination of ex-members of French-based rock & roll bands The Mayfair Group (Jacky Chalard) and Jelly Roll (Jacques Mercier), the writing team behind one of France’s top progressive pop bands of the early 1970s alongside The Martin Circus, Triangle and The Variations. After an unshakable discography of killer singles including tracks like ‘Le Corbeau Et Le Renard’ and ‘Faust 72’ the group won the enviable job as both backing band and support group for Michel Polnareff which would later take the four piece on a tour of Japan. Dynastie Crisis released approximately two and a half LPs (the middle one was a re-dux of there under exposed debut) for the labels of Francis Dreyfuss and the French leg of Harvest Records.

• Like most forward thinking LPs of the era ‘Je Suis Vivant, Mais J’ai Peur’ was too progressive for its 1974 release, and for an LP designed to sound like it was made 25 years in the future it was quite clearly ahead of its time by design. Perhaps a reissue in 1999 might have bought the LP up to date but given an extra decade to hibernate, a lot like the story’s leading protagonist, maybe the characters of ‘Je Suis Vivant, Mais J’ai Peur’ can finally be unleashed on Planet Earth to inspect how our musical tastes have.

Tracklisting:

L'Agonie Instrumental * L'Agonie * L'Interrogatoire * Interligne 1La Collecte Des Cœurs * Interligne 2 * Le Perroquet *Si Je T'Offrais Une Branche D'Amour (La Mandragore) *Les Scandales * Interligne 3 * Pollution * Interligne 4 *Apres L'Apocalypse * Corto Maltese (featuring Sylvia Fels) (CD only) *Corto Maltese (Instrumental) (CD only) *Super Man - Super Cool (LP Version) (CD only)

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