"Deluxe reissue to mark the 40th anniversary of the vinyl release in October 1983!

Remastered CD version, finally accompanied by the 32-page booklet originally dreamed of but abandoned at the time due to lack of financial resources."-Jean-Marc Foussat

Laurent Fairon for Continuo:

"Jean-Marc Foussat (b.1955) is a French guitar player, VCS synth player, label founder and recording engineer. He played with a band called Mandragore in the 1970s, as wel as collaborating with Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Roger Turner, Raymond Boni and Claude Parle. In the 1980s he worked as a recording engineer for Incus, Hat Hut, Po Torch, Rec Rec, Celluloid, etc. He founded Potlatch Records along Jacques Oger in 1997. On 'Abattage' (1983), he self released his studio experiments under his own Pyjama imprint. The tracks were apparently recorded between 1975 and 1981 and feature extensive use of field recordings from out of the window (see cover), as well as piano, guitar, VCS III synth and found vocals. The main instrument has to be the recording studio, though, with obsessive care in balance, transitions and dynamic, that is: much definition in the very low sounds and lots of details in the loudest sounds. #3 Ruines is a solo piano (played by Jean-François Ballèvre); #4 Petit Paysage is a street cleaner engine recording; #5 Petit Paysage is someone lighting a cigarette; #6 includes people laughing and coughing, electric guitar; and then monumental #7 starts as a jackhammer+piano duo, before morphing into a fierce VCS solo. Noise art of the highest caliber!"

From a bootleg liner notes:

"Popcorn bursts of pointillist plucks and gristly electroacoustic splatter set the stage on this first solo outing by this somewhat obscure French electronic musician, guitarist and improvisor. His recording career would pick up again decades later, with recent outings for both Leo and Ayler records alongside the likes of Noel Akchote and Roger Turner, but this would be his sole document under his own banner for some 18 years, Foussat having been principally engaged as an engineer during this time for a broad swath of Europe's free improv culture and it's evident in his own music's prickly keen attention to detail and sharp attack.

With its initial salvo of air raid sirens, coughing and tap dancing you know you're in for something edgy and peculiar with this one. And indeed, it's not long before the aforementioned plucks rush to the fore and then coagulate into dense Agencement-like thickets before being sent tumbling down the nearest stairwell. Foussat generates a lot of compelling tension here between slurries of free music gabbiness and concise electroacoustic vivisections while still somehow finding room for ruminative piano doodling, Eraserhead ambience and Barbara Streisand's bellowing pipes across the A side, while the flip finds him initially ferreting away at his guitar to substantially more musical ends, but alas, it's a honeytrap, as Foussat whips it all up into a frothy Futurist lather of buzzing bandsaws and stuttering power drills."

"A fantastic loony French LP from the early 1980s, now presumably long since unavailable and here repackaged in CD form.

Begorrah! There's enough wild energy in Jean-Marc Foussat's outpourings to rostain the basic needs of a small French village (wine, bread, electricity, sex) for about the next ten years... this twitching, grinning octopus of music plays anything and everything he get his tentacles on, from guitars, pianos, the mighty EMS synth and assorted bric-a-brac, plus he did the (very original) field recordings and engineered his own sessions, composed and edited everything - his only collaborator is Jean--Francois Ballèvre on the piano on one track !

If your hunger is for wild, unexpected combinations of far-flung freewheeling ideas, then this record (with the exception of first Faust LP, which oddly enough it does kinda resemble) absolutely takes the biscuit; lets cut to the chase, because the piano with pneumatic drill track is one of the most effective and most intensive examples of such demented mixings, but then you also get such things as truck drivers delivering huge vats of good French wine, screams, hammerings and poundings, and - I personnally guarantee it - absolutely the wildest synth playing you have heard in your life. I can't over-exaggerate the value of the unfettered, screaming barbarity of Foussat's insane EMS work, which will ignite your spirit like a fucking sky-rocket and launch you 100 miles into the stratosphere.

Zoosh!

Algerian-born Foussat started out as a guitarist in the mid-1970s, playing in various ensembles which were either very experimental or didn't last very long. Either way I assume nobody took much notice He got more interested in playing the synth and then made a deliberate decision to stop performing in public, instead working at home with his tape recorders and magnetic tape.By the end of 1979 he secured a job in a studio and recorded lots of improvised music - and the labels he worked with from that point read like an A-list of independent labels that championed that early 1980s dream, that one day we could make the world safe for experimental music : Incus, Bead, Hat Hut. Po-Torch, Claxon, Rift, Rec Rec, Celluloid... any self--respecting weirdo in my circle of friends has LPs from all those labels in their collections, and it makes one nostalgic almost for a golden age when people Who got involved in experimental music stiil had roch things as commitment. integrity, and good ideas, Not quite like nowadays, thats for sure!He finished Abattage in August 1981; the French word means 'demolition' or literaily, 'felling' - as though he were a lumberjack knocking down a forest of trees, using his slicing hands for axes!!As to how available this hand-made reissue is (stiil waiting an official reissue apparently), you'd better work fast and send your shekels to Jean-Marc, or be kicking yourself for evermore."- Ed Pinsent
Includes a 32-page booklet of color images and credits.