Emmanuel Booz

Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic

Dans Quel Etat J'Erre (1979)

Dans Quel Etat J'Erre ranks among the best French progressive rock albums that have not seen the light of day on CD format. One can already tell with the three pieces, one side-long, that Booz has gone for a much more complex and innovative style and has signified this by dropping his first name. The backing musicians on this album are generally much more obscure than on Clochard, although there is a great violin duel by Didier Lockwood and Jean-Louis Mahjun that adds to the recognizability factor. The music is dark, complex, progressive rock with all sorts of time and key changes, an approach that Clochard hinted at times, but never quite reached. It's actually surprising that a musician who would spend so much time working on vocal-oriented compositions would so drastically turn to such an instrumentally dominated work of music. This is progressive rock at its finest, the melodies are anything but obvious and seem uncommonly researched, the structures are often constantly in motion, changing from measure to measure, and there is a palpable sense of adventure. It's no surprise that Booz's vocal work here is the closest to Ange of the four albums, but even Ange never created a work of such obvious dissonance and experimentation. In fact the only albums even close to this amazing work of art only hint at the edges, such as the eponymous album by Arachnoid or the weird vocal experiments of Philippe Doray. It's an amazing success, particularly in that it belonged more to the progressive rock tradition of a few years earlier rather than that of the digital 80s. 
[As of 2002, bootleg versions of the last three albums are in circulation in Japan. Booz went from singer to actor in recent years and has played parts in many films, as of this writing, most recently in The Bourne Identity.] 

Edited by DallasBryan - December 11 2006 at 18:39