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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Carefully restored and remastered from by Gilles Laujol
    Graphic design by Stefan Thanneur
    2 page booklet
    Heavyweight 180 gr. LP
    425 gsm brownboard outer sleeve
    Licensed from United Dairies

    Includes unlimited streaming of In Fractured Silence via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    Carefully restored and remastered from by Gilles Laujol
    Graphic design by Stefan Thanneur
    2 page booklet
    Heavyweight 180 gr. LP
    425 gsm brownboard outer sleeve
    Licensed from United Dairies

    Includes unlimited streaming of In Fractured Silence via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 4 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      €25 EUR or more 

     

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Carefully restored and remastered from by Gilles Laujol
    Graphic design by Stefan Thanneur
    Digipack CD
    Licensed from United Dairies

    Includes unlimited streaming of In Fractured Silence via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 4 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      €12 EUR or more 

     

  • Test Pressing - Ltd. 10 numbered copies
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

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about

Have you heard of the Nurse With Wound List? If you are a fan of creative-experimental-unlikely music, certainly. You would therefore be aware that amongst the recommendations that Steven Stapleton slipped into the first album of his group Nurse With Wound, were to be found a few restless frogs: Jef Gilson, Luc Ferrari, Jacques Thollot, Urban Sax, Horde Catalytique and last…

… but not least Jean-Jacques Birgé and Francis Gorgé.
Stapleton admired their album Défense de. The two Frenchmen just had to conceive of a fabulous precursor to the channel tunnel (check out the inside of the record, you’ll see) to enable Stapleton to come to France in 1980. The Englishman was looking for contributions to a compilation to be released on his United Dairies label that he had created with John Fothergill, and he naturally called on Birgé and Gorgé, who were then playing with Bernard Vitet in ‘Un drame musical Instantané’.

It was a done deal and the compilation would be named In Fractured Silence. Alongside Nurse With Wound and Un drame musical instantané, could be heard Hélène Sage (whom Birgé introduced to Stapleton) and Sema, a project from the experimental British musician Robert Haigh who had participated in key records in the Nurse With Wound discography, such as Homotopy to Marie and Spiral Insana.

The curtain is raised and it is Un drame musical instantané who start the ball rolling. Mystery abounds; synthesisers lurk, percussion clatters and the sounds (creaks, whistles, vocal insertions…) fire in all directions. For the piano, it’s a debacle, the Drame won, Hélène Sage can take over. Heading up a quintette including Gorgé and Vitet, she creates a cushioned chamber music with strings and many silences.

On the B side, it’s the other side of the channel. Sema’s piano first off, which dares everything, even melody, before spilling out its darkest ideas in a raucous requiem. Finally, Stapleton appears, delving into his collection of female voices to devote himself to an iconoclastic transformation and concoct a song which collapses under the assault like Marianne at Agincourt. After having listened to In Fractured Silence, you will simply have to choose sides.

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released October 13, 2023

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Souffle Continu Records Paris, France

Treasures of the French Underground since 2014.

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