LA SOCIETE DES TIMIDES A LA PARADE DES OISEAUX-UN OBJET DE PLAINE, TAPE, 1995, FRANCE

An artfully arranged fracas of pantomimes, pirouettes and prankish raspberries blown in the face of polite good taste, La Societe Des Timides A La Parade Des Oiseaux (translation: Shy Society At The Bird Parade, or La STPO for short) are longstanding arbiters of the far flung French musical fringe. Since 1984, and across many shifting line-ups, they've established a musical voice that takes the effervescence and sly asymmetries of French R.I.O. architects like Albert Marcoeur and Etron Fou Leloublan and refracts them through the lens of both eruptive Pere Ubu-like post punk and the kind of Art Brut song form deconstructions proposed by labels like Ayaa and DDAA's Illusion Productions. The resulting all-knees-and-elbows thrust and parry is then used as a springboard for the glossolalian attack of vocalist Pascal Godjikian and his repertoire of alternately blustering, simpering, hectoring, cajoling and capering histrionics.

La STPO are in fact one of the groups that I'm most happy to finally be able to bring to your willing ears, as their dislike of compressed audio has now been surmounted by my offering to share this cassette EP of theirs in .WAV format. The document at hand, Un Objet De Plaine was issued on cassette by Prikosnovenie in advance of their release of STPO's remarkable Les Explositionnistes CD and features an alternate version of its opening track, "Dada Max Stellt Loplop Vor". Full disclosure: La STPO have been involved in a recently completed three-way collaboration with both my ongoing band Vas Deferens Organization and my one-time outfit Sound that's been some 13 years in the making, so I'm hardly a neutral third party in my endorsement of their music.

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