Holding fast to some heartfelt theory, I do believe the best musicians aren’t always, exactly “musicians” themselves. Joining us today in our personal, illustrious group which includes Steve Hiett and Brian Eno, is native Frenchman Jean-Michel Gascuel. In the span of two years, from 1982 through 1984, Jean-Michel Gascuel released two albums C’Est L’Premier Pas Qui Coûte! and (my highlighted pick) La Vie Continue capping off a very brief, but quite wild set of leftfield pop albums that sound like few else out there. What did it sound like? Like music that could only have been created by someone who would much rather been known as a multi-disciplinary artist, art teacher, inventor, haute couture fashion designer, producer and then singer-songwriter.
Jean-Michel Gascuel began his career not as musician but as a professor of drawing design in Geneva, Switzerland. That self-designed cover you see above shows you a bit of his known aesthetic — a mix of primitivism and blur modernism. In the beginning, only on the periphery, was he involved in music at all.
As a freelance illustrator he’d design album covers or posters for artists like Daniel Guichard and Mathias, whatever would pay the bills. Somewhere down the line, back in France, while working in the offices of Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF), Jean-Michel struck up a working friendship with Pierre Schaeffer. Somehow, this pioneering composer of electroacoustic music, musique concréte, and sampling technique, was aided from Jean-Michel in helping create one of his more contemporary loop machines. Even then, music wasn’t quite still Jean-Michel’s bag.
Shortly thereafter, or maybe during this time, (much of this time in the ‘70s remains nebulous), Jean-Michel led a career as a stylist and fashion designer producing haute couture and ready-to-wear pieces for brands like Lanvin, Yves Saint-Laurent, and Emilio Pucci. In the early ‘80s, while disco was still en vogue in Europe, Jean-Michel took a sabbatical from clothing design to try his hand as record producer.
Working with sometime New Paradise (hello… “I Love Video”) vocalist Vivian Reed, Jean-Michel produced a pair of hit singles which touched a bit on the sound/influence he seemed to be mining. As heard on “Faith And Fire”, it was leftfield filter disco that sounded like it took cues from the Holger Czukay school of unlikely rhythm, see: “Cool In the Pool” for further study. Taking advantage of this bit of notoriety, Jean-Michel convinced the Pathé record label to sign him as a solo act. Would they know that Jean-Michel never intended to be a disco act? Jean-Michel Gascuel never gave them much time to ponder this.
First came the trippy, hypnagogic, danceable Art Pop, lead single “La Longue Nuit” with a B-side that mixed Mediterranean vibes with vibrating Morricone-esque guitars and dubby drum machines. Somehow, the lead track became a quiet hit. The album proper would then flesh out these ideas even further. Mixing experimental tape editing technique with very, very Gallic musical atmosphere, Jean-Michel took it upon himself to write, record, and perform nearly everything on C’Est L’Premier Pas Qui Coûte!. Imagine a mix of J.J. Cale, Neu, Michel Polnareff, and Can’s Soon Over Babaluma but even then you’ll be a ways off to getting close the sound of this album. The self-designed album cover now serving as a perfect visual cue of the “Pop Art” in it.
Things would get even headier just a year later when Jean-Michel Gascuel did his best Bill Wyman impression and took to the stage to perform new songs that were even more leftfield than before. Although the record company aimed to have him be another Line Renaud, a bad boy that can hang with the New Wavers, Jean-Michel had something else coming. Exploring samplers, the Oberheim DMX drum machine (hip-hop’s heavy hitter), and modern musique concréte (in the form of early industrial and EBM music — think peak Cabaret Voltaire), Jean-Michel Gascuel made something that translated the underlying tropical rhythms of his previous work into something a bit darker, minimal, and surprisingly dance floor ready. If Jean-Michel Gascuel stunning album cover tipped you of on something is that this album was going to much fiercer. It’s almost as if being on a far larger label, Epic, gave Jean-Michel the venue to push his luck even more.
Take a song like “Tiens Reprends Un Kir”. On “Tiens Reprends Un Kir” Jean-Michel uses a decidedly leftfield tropical polyrhythmic groove to hover over it sounds that both float around it and twist/wind around it like some form of alien techno or mutant funk that found a dopamine kick. In hindsight, the balearic opener “Le Chien Aux Yeux Jaunes”, a slice of Chic on a motorik bender, made sense to kick you on this trip. Jean-Michel Gascuel would appear on TV “singing”, half-assedly promoting the single, but most audiences were left stunned wondering what to make of it. Jean-Michel Gascuel’s audience wasn’t the old crowd but one ready for the new wiggier music being played in backstreet discotheques. “Keep The Highway” features a rhythm that sounds like the welcome evolution of Can’s “Hunter and Collectors”, this time the ethnic forgery series collage replaced by urbane ones.
Should I go on with the rest of La Vie Continue? “Tache De Soleil” rides a majestic J.J. Cale groove that seems to find its way to King Tubby’s studio and somehow end up against Berlin’s wall. The fascinating electro-tango workouts of “Les “Maillol” Sont Tombés” or “Un Clou En Chasse Un Autre” merits them to be called out as well. I’ll skip over another unlikely, would-be dancefloor monster “Dominus” (the midway point between Soul Makossa and glitchy, dadaist electronic dance music) and land on “Rêve, Mauvais Rêve”. “Rêve, Mauvais Rêve” ends the album by changing its tone to one of a dream. Calling it proto-Air or proto-Stereolab, does it no justice. It trumps whatever heady mix of Pink Floyd-style moodiness by ending the album on quite a personal, almost spiritual note. Here the machines slow down enough to appreciate the design of this whole thing.
Just a year later, in 1986, after an one-off single was tossed off, Jean-Michel Gascuel would take cease making any more music. Jean-Michel Gascuel would now entertain the idea of being an inventor and go ahead to create things like “Generative Music” machines and micro-CD’s that Sony would later take off and run with as Minidiscs. Still designing and still inventing, I do wonder if Jean-Michel Gascuel would like to create music again. His first go around had the makings of a fabrique of something else.