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Co-founder of the Art Zoyd collective, Thierry Zaboitzeff now looks back over 50 years of music(s) on 3 CDs. An opportunity to rediscover one of the most singular and transgenre adventures in the French musical landscape.
In 1984, musician Thierry Zaboitzeff released his first solo album, Prométhée, on the Cryonic label. The album cover, a painting by Raymond Majchrzak, shows two visibly worried doctors at the bedside of a dying man, who probably doesn't have long to live. The strange relationship between this image and the name Prometheus has haunted me ever since I discovered this record, a few years after its release. The deconstruction of myth to anchor it in everyday life as banal as it is sordid suggests a music rooted in the same dichotomy, linking the sacred to the dullness of everyday life.
When his first solo opus, Prométhée, came out, Maubeuge-born Thierry Zaboitzeff already had a long career behind him, with the Art Zoyd collective, active since 1968. More of a collective than a group, since some thirty musicians have joined over the years, even if the core group was made up of Zaboitzeff, Patricia Dallio and Gérard Hourbette, whose death in 2018 marked the end of their activities after 50 years of loyal service. Initially trained for stage, theater and dance music, Art Zoyd released his first album in 1976, the already highly successful Symphonie Pour Le Jour Où Brûleront Les Cités, and the fifteen years that followed saw masterpieces flourish: Musique pour l'Odyssée (1979), Génération sans Futur (1980), Phase IV (1982), Les Espaces Inquiets (1983), Le Mariage du Ciel et de l'Enfer (1985), and our two favorites, Berlin (1987) and Nosferatu (1990).
When the group debuted, it was without equal; this music had never been heard before, nor would it be copied thereafter. Yet Art Zoyd's influence would be decisive on all the adventurous music of the late 20th century. Influential, but inimitable. Right from the start, the strong characteristics of the Art Zoyd sound were asserted. The music is liturgical, unafraid to use symbols, and blends influences as diverse as progressive rock, free jazz, neo-classical, contemporary music and, a distant cousin, experimental music. The works are often instrumental, and when the voice is heard, it is guttural, seeming to emerge from the darkness, chanting more than singing.
Accustomed to composing for the stage, Art Zoyd developed a passion for another discipline: composing for film. But their speciality was to compose music for films from the golden age of the silent era. Pioneers in the genre, they created gigantic and impressive cine-concerts, an exercise to which many musicians are now accustomed, but which, at the time, was a real event. They opened the series with Murnau's Nosferatu, followed by Faust by the same director, and then introduced audiences to Benjamin Christensen's marvellous Häxan, at a time when the film was invisible. This was followed by soundtracks for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher and Dziga Vertov's The Man with the Camera. These cine-concerts are true stage experiences. Art Zoyd doesn't just play the music of a film, hiding behind or next to the screen, but stages himself in a spectacular, sometimes grandiloquent manner, creating a living spectacle where image and sound are in constant communication. The films have thus emerged from their programmed museification to find a salvific contemporary resonance.
The record we're talking about here from Thierry Zaboitzeff has the merit of being called quite simply: 50 ans de musique(s). Apart from the impressive number 50 (who can boast of having composed for 50 years and still do so with the same ease?), it's the " s " in brackets that catches the eye. A true jack-of-all-trades, a multi-instrumentalist (even if the bass has always been his instrument of choice), Zaboitzeff has multiplied styles, desires and projects, which means that, 50 years on, his music is inevitably plural. This copious 3-CD set, packed to overflowing, presents almost 4 hours of music spread over 43 tracks. The intelligence of the tracklist is not to organize the tracks in chronological order, nor by formation, but rather to reorganize the whole in the most harmonious way possible, creating a new work, gigantic, protean, seemingly in perpetual mutation, offering us the possibility of devouring this incandescent and forever regenerated liver anew.
We hear Art Zoyd, excerpts from Les Espaces Inquiets, Phase IV, a remix of Marathonnerre I, and reinterpretations of two of his best songs: Unsex Me Here and Baboon's Blood, whose original versions appeared on the Berlin CD version. Zaboitzeff composed a great deal for Art Zoyd, he and Hourbette being the two masterminds behind the project, but he has deliberately chosen to under-represent this prolific part of his career, favoring recordings that are probably less well known to the public. The boxed set also features two excellent tracks by Aria Primitiva, a trio formed with Cécile Thévenot and Nadia Ratsimandresy and offering syncopated, ambient electronic atmospheres of the utmost beauty; as well as six tracks from the Zaboitzeff & Crew project, the crew in question being made up of Gerda Rippel and Sandrine Rohrmoser. The bulk of the album is devoted to his solo work. Since his inaugural Prométhée, Thierry Zaboitzeff has released almost twenty albums under his own name. We're delighted to rediscover extracts from the excellent Dr. Zab & His Robotic Strings Orchestra (1992) and Heartbeat (1997), from which comes the superb El Amor Brujo (Live), one of the box set's most exciting tracks.
Although this triple album is a compilation, it's worth pointing out that many of the tracks have been reworked for the occasion. Between remakes, remixes, remastered versions, piano versions, live versions, short versions, long versions, even the most attentive listener of Thierry Zaboitzeff's work will have the legitimate feeling of rediscovering a constantly reinvented work. After all, that's what it's all about. These 50 de musique(s) take us from the ashes of progressive rock in the late '60s to techno in the early 21st century, from the wildest experiments to moments of contemplation full of reserve and intensity, and this journey, these journeys, are not those made from point A, which would be the departure of something, to point B, its arrival ; No, the journey Thierry Zaboitzeff invites us on plunges us into the eye of the hurricane, into a moving spiral whose only conceivable, reliable path through this inextricable maze of music(s) is the one chosen by the listener. Alone, but beautifully accompanied.
Franck Marguin
