Pole - Besombes/Rizet

 

 

Besombes handled synths, claviers, accordion, guitar and voice, and Rizet contributed synths, claviers, flute, trumpet, guitar and voice. Guests were Jacky Vander Elstraete – drums; Alain Petit – sax; and Françoise Legros – voice, character improvement(!). A great array of keyboards and synthesizers were used – VCS 3 AKS, ARP 2600, Electrocomp 101 & 500, Farfisa Synthorchestra, Yamaha FY 1, Oberheim Expander, Solina String-ensemble, Crumor & Fender Rhodes electric pianos, Hammond organ and Mellotron 400. Incidentally, Besombes had developed connections with the Mellotron people and became their French agent for a while; other contacts gave him access to the latest synth equipment. They would all be used to full effect on this album (though particularly the synths), which would turn out to be a double, packed with ideas and sonic wizardry.
This album is sometimes considered as being ‘Besombes-Rizet’ by the group Pôle, due to both names appearing on the cover in similar size. Not that it really matters either way, given the intended extra confusion generated by the label name (see my reviews for Pôle’s ‘Kotrill’ and ‘Inside the Dream’), but although Rizet played on two tracks of the second Pôle album ‘Inside the Dream’, this should be considered primarily a Philippe Besombes/Jean Louis Rizet collaboration. Besombes told me that ‘Pôle’ had been put on the cover at the last minute without the consent of himself or Rizet, who were opposed to it. The album was probably the best-selling title from the whole label catalogue (and consequently, one of the easiest to find – though still scarce), selling approximately 20,000 copies. It was reissued by Tapioca a few years later, after the Pôle label went out of business. Tapioca pressings of Pôle titles generally have lower sound quality. In 2004 this album was reissued for the first time on CD by MIO, at last making it more readily (and cheaply) available to a wider audience.

This epic album just oozes sanctified mystery, psychic menace and playful insanity and exists in a timeless zone of tripped-out lysergicity all its own. I’ve never heard anything quite like it, nor quite as special for the kind of music that it is (and really, there’s not that much of this kind of thing, from then or now). Have you heard Achim Reichel’s ‘Echo’? That special – but quite different again, in another parallel sphere but just as exalted in my mind and heart. Psychedelic progressive synth-based music doesn’t get much better than this, in my opinion, though it’s clearly not for everyone – some people just find it cold, too weird, and occasionally too repetitive or slow and can’t get into it. It’s the kind of album with heaps of textural depth you need to give time and attention to, and I’d never put it on as background music. It demands to be taken seriously (though it occasionally has some strange fun) and I treat this album as a piece of sacramental music to be played only when all present are prepared to lay back quietly, shut their eyes and let it work its way inside for the next 75 minutes (maybe with a smoke break and breather in the middle!). Indeed, it’s ideal for thorough shamanic journeying without New Age namby-pambying, and after previewing some of the first track when a friend introduced it to me (the same friend and the same time I was introduced to Besombes’ ‘Libra’), I first listened to the whole album whilst tripping on mushrooms, and was utterly blown away. Those two albums changed my life, completely altered my perspective of what was possible on that mind-bending night. Likewise both are still potent aural experiences listened to without psychedelic boosting (and still never fail to impress me), but they are totally and authentically in their element with it – again, even more impressive given the lack of psychedelic experience of the modest genius from whose mind they sprang (although, certainly this collaborative album under review here must give equal credit to Rizet, I still believe most of the insane and often unpredictable creative madness to be heard here derives primarily from Besombes, but both men are brilliant at creating incredible, vivid and deeply psychically affecting synth textures). I can’t guarantee of course that you’ll embrace this stuff as warmly and completely as I have, as I’m a bit of a rarely rabid enthusiast for 70’s Besombes, but you should at least give it a listen to see how it grabs you if you haven’t heard it before and like vintage experimental synth rock.

 

For more on what Besombes did next, see the review for ‘Ceci Est Cela’. Rizet went in to production, opening his Ramases Studio, and would occasionally pop up in guest slots on other albums such as Philippe Grancher’s ‘3,000 Miles Away’ (also on the Pôle label, and has been due for reissue on Mellow for many years now – they haven’t responded to my occasional enquiries over the years, nor has Grancher himself) and Jean Philippe Goude’s excellent zeuhl-tinged experimental synth prog rock ‘Drones’.