Jacques Bekaert

First vinyl reissue after 41 years! Jacques Bekaert’s 1981 eponymous LP – following 1979’s “Summer Music” for Lovely – containing three tape pieces composed between 1969 & 1978, featuring contributions by a who’s who of 60s & 70s Avant Garde & Fluxus figures – Takehisa Kosugi, Shigeko Kubota, David Behrman, David Rosenboom, Maggi Payne, George Lewis, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Ryo Koike, amongst many others
The extended “Late Lunch” – at 28 minutes barely fitting onto an LP side – was composed in 1978; it’s a bizarre pastiche of instrumental Concrète figures, subtly tape-delayed per each stereo channel & bordering on the inaudible at times that has, in spots, the same aleatoric Tape-Collage energy of pieces such as Dub Taylor’s “Lumiére” or Luis De Pablos’s “We (Nosotros)”. “A Summer Day At Stony Point” was composed in 1969 Brussels’ Studio de Musique Electronique APELAC & comes out of the gate with all pistons firing via a spectacularly bleep-oriented phase of errant electronics & backwards-masked squawks before heading into a long section of tape-echo’ed insectoid formations & vague held-tone Oscillator drift
Finally, “Mon Petit Album” was prepared in 1974 at Mills’ CCM – Center of Contemporary Music & consists of Bekaert & Kosugi’s flute & violin phrasings wrapped around a subtly transfigured array of processed sounds, both alienating & simultaneously quite welcoming. Both “Late Lunch” & “Mon Petit Album” were used as scores to experimental films by Akiko Iimura. An amazing selection of pieces that straddle the divide between Ensemble Composition, Live Electronic augmentation & GRM styled assemblage of constituent instrumental playing; if you’ve only heard the – frankly, tepid – Lovely outing, this should rewire your brain suitably as to Bekaert’s range & prowess