V/A-MUSIQUE ACTION INTERNATIONALE 85, LP, 1985, VARIOUS

A nice adjunct to the trio of M.I.M.I. Festival LP documents that I recently shared, the particular shindig that this compendium commemorates corralled together a curious and disparate cast of characters from the worlds of R.I.O. and improv, and if the resulting artifact is sometimes scattershot, it's never less than amiably so. From my vantage point, the clear standouts here are David Thomas And The Pedestrians' ramshackle reading of Whale Head King, whose personnel goes unlisted here (unless I'm missing an insert or something...), but is clearly comprised of the Chris Cutler and Lindsay Cooper line-up featured on the live Winter Comes Home LP. Elsewhere, French improv gadflies and wily song structure deformers Catalogue (aka Gilbert Artman, Jac Berrocal and Jean-Francois Pauvros) enact a deliberately slack but oddly enervated dialogue between detuned string figure, trumpet smear and an irony-tinged wobbly jazzbo swing and the idiosyncratic French avant big band La Marmite Infernale chime in with their boisterous (and ultimately jubilantly celebratory) take on ethno-tinged avant jazz in the spirit of Bengt Berger's Bitter Funeral Beer Band.

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