C'ÉTAIENT DE TRÈS GRANDS VENTS

3.5 stars really!!!

This album is the proof that Musea record was an adventurous label right from the start, not just re-issuing 70's albums or releasing early 90's French neo-prog, but to have taken a chance on such an incredibly dark and experimental album is quite a feat in itself.

This is probably one of the most slowly moving album included in the archives (a sort of Univers Zero meets Henry Cow or Art Zoyd) , but it has a sort of solemnity that makes it unique in its genre. The music is never truly dissonant, never truly abstract, and never really "concrete" and that is really its strengths as this unlikely quintet (actually two drummers were used in this album) is using a trombone as one of its lead instrument if not the only one. Sounds intriguing? Even after a few listens, the album still holds a mystery and a sort of fascination that makes you hang on to the end even if this kind of music is not your cup of tea. Actually, to the end is maybe is one too far, as everything that I told you about this album holds for all tracks until the last one when this one actually breaks all the rules set for the previous tracks. This last track is called (in English) It Was Very Big Winds Indeed, and it might give you an idea of what a hurricane might sound like if you were stuck in the middle of it , with almost every stage represented even with the calm of the eye of the storm passing over your head in the quieter moments of the tracks. The rest of it is pure mayhem.

Not the easiest album, but if ever your nosy and daft neighbour wants to invade your living room trying to get acquainted better, you might want to give him a listen at "your favourite album" (this one) , and the man will surely get the urge to mow his lawn for the second time today. Mission accomplished , this album is an excellent pest-repeller and should be always be kept next to the fly-tox. Accessorily it might also fit in your RIO collection if the mood sets you for this kind of music ;-)

The first question I asked myself when listening to this album was "does C'Étaient De Très Grands Vents possess "shubbage"? Does it take you to that dark and eerie realm where malevolent trombones batter you with their slides, and concepts like 'sunshine' and 'puppies' seem insane and from another dimension? The answer was 'yes'. This album has shubbage. I was suitably shubbed. Does that make this creation an automatic personal favorite, considering that their previous album is beyond incredible and the very essence of shubbage in which all other albums possessing some form of shubbage are measured against? Not really.

The creepy dissonance remains intact. The vibe is oppressive, lonely and dreary. This time, though, the structure is often lacking, causing the tunes to spread thin like a cloud. Without a base structure, some of these pieces sound like the band mistakenly recorded themselves tuning their instruments and then stopped recording just before playing the actual song. Atmospheric but meandering.

That's not always the case. "D'un Seul Et Meme Souffle" has a melodic pattern, and it's amazingly dark. Music to conjure nightmares. Also, "Promethee" has signature vocals from their previous album to reel in the track to a cohesive tightness. As an entire opus though, it's quite difficult to listen to this album after a period of time...there's a lot of quiet moments that seem to drag on with no theme except possibly wandering a wasteland at night. As background music for a haunted house amusement ride, it has more than enough shubbage to be the most memorable aspect, disturbing adults while their kids look at themselves through warped mirrors. As a recommendation, it's good, but not the first place to start with this band. That would be Les Morts Vont Vite, which is shubtastic.

After the excellent debut Shub Niggurath are back with a work even more dark and evily than the previous one. It's ambient music, slowly progressing, with noisy accents.

"Glaciations" takes five minutes of ambient sounds similar to the darkest parts of Vangelis Heaven and Hell before becoming noisy and chaotic, with strings crying like somebody is killing them over a frenetic drum. When the drums stop we are in a realm of deadly bells with strings, guitar and trombone slowly dying. From the track title I think the music represents the extintion. And it does it very well.

"Ocean" is more grotesque. The guitar plays a major chord on which the other instruments build what apparently is chaos but is I think perfectly planned. The trombone is the lead instrument and the guitar crescendo seems to announce an emerging Cthulhu from the abyss. Effectively after a short pause the second part of the track is heavily and evily chaotic. A sonic tsunami. Like a tsunami, when the chaos is gone what remains is desolation, for the last 20 seconds of the track.

"Promethee " (or Prometeus) has lyrics. It's incredible how Sylvette Claudet sings with her soprano voice just a quarter of tone out of tune in order to increase the weirdness of the track. The impression is like a follow-up of the dark hymn to Yog-Sototh on their first album, but this time more than a hymn is an elegy.

"D'un Seul Et Meme Souffle" (A single identical breathe) is again very cemeterial. One has to be in the right mood for this music, but this time the link to classical music is more evident. Even with fulfilled of darkness I hear a bit of Stravinskij. It's classical contemporary more than Zeuhl. The album's highlight. "La Nef De Fous" (The Ship Of Fools) is a chaotic crescendo over a heavily distorted bass, like in death metal. Differently from the other tracks this has a jazz mood with a touch of psychedelia. The chaos of this track is not too different from the most acid Floyd.

"Contrincante" start with trombone and bass. A bit of relax after all the chaos, but the sounds are sinister and one can expect everything. Some bass passages appear to be melodic, surely a mistake of the bassist...the guitar joins and now we have three instruments apparently going on their own, but this is jazz, I can't tell what chord they play, but they are playing on the same chords.

The title track closes the album with the longest piece. It starts with percussions and noises just enhanced by trombone and bass. After a couple of minutes Edward Perraud shows what he can do with drums: a jazz base on which the other instrumentists put their dark effort. The track takes about 6 minutes to become more chaotic, thanks to the distorted bass, but it's the drums which lead it until the end, with the guitar crying pain on the high pitches. The last minutes are a return to the ambient of the first track.

A step back respect to the debut but still a good album for who likes spending some time in the hell.

One of the strangest musical forces to emerge from the 80s French underground was the horrific sounding SHUB-NIGGURATH which derived its name from the Cthulhu Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft and delivered a morbid darkened world of avant-garde musical soundtracks to the apocalypse to match. The character referred to the Outer Goddess in the pantheon who was a perverse fertility deity and was said to appear only as a "hellish cloud-like entity." Taking a cue from this fictitious nebulously formed goddess of the underworld, SHUB-NIGGURATH continued to craft bizarrely twisted musical forms that emulated the darkened cloud goddess with freaky abstract and oft formless scores that progressively got weirder and more thematically occult as the band continued.

The band started in 1982 and captured the world of avant-prog's attention with its 1986 debut "Les Morts Vont Vie" which deftly blended the zeuhl rhythmic forces of Magma with the creepy darkened avant-prog chamber prog antics of Univers Zero's "Heresie" era. Infused with an equal dose of 20th century experimental classical elements in the vein of Stockhausen, Ligeti, Cage and Varèse, SHUB-NIGGURATH constructed a totally new world of musical freakery with in a magnitude hitherto unknown in the world of avant-prog with some of the darkest and most sophisticated the genre had to offer. After this debut the band would lose both vocalist Ann Stewart and guitarist Frank Fromy leaving keyboardist Jean-Luc Hervé to take on the secondary duty of guitars. Newbie drummer Michel Kervinio also jumped on board.

The band followed with an even stranger musical specimen than what debuted even though that sounds very difficult to fathom. The band's second album C'ETAIENT DE TRES GRANDE VENTS (There Were Of Three Big Winds) seems to refer to the formless nature of the Lovecraftian deity for which the band was named and likewise this sophomore album reflects a more abstract ethereal noisy trip into the world of avant-garde infused 20th century classical music rather than anything in the world of progressive rock. Despite this stripping down of the prog elements and the inclusion of the new vocalist Sylvette Claudet for only a sole track, the album while more enthralled with minimalism and slinking processions of ambient sounds rather than zeuhl inspired rhythmic drives still exhibits scant relations to its predecessor from time to time with a few zeuhl moments as well as outbursts of heavy dissonant avant-prog.

The seven tracks on board seem to accent the art of contrast with eerie atmospheres finding freeform guitar dissonance and bizarre drumming sequences that ratchet up the tension until they reach a climactic meltdown of heavily distorted discordant guitar turbulence along with raucous percussive explosiveness sounding like a mix of the death industrial world of SPK in cahoots with Karlheinz Stockhausen's pointillistic surreality along with the remaining touches of Univers Zero or Art Zoyd. From the very first track "Glaciations," SHUB-NIGGURATH delivers a labyrinthine procession of tones and timbres courtesy of guitar feedback and droning with subtle percussive accents that culminate in a cacophonous uproar reminding of John Zorn's most spazzed out moments only in the context of a 20th century classical ensemble run amok. "Océan" is the closest remnant of the band's debut with the bleating of bass trombone sounds and a more rhythmic groove reminiscent of the zeuhl tendencies of album #1.

As the album continues it just gets more free form and more abstruse with irregular drum beats accompanied by impressionist guitar and bass arrhythmia. While the creepy piano spectral contributions still find their way into the mix, they are sparse and more scattered throughout the album's run. This is a noisy affair with seemingly little to latch onto as the debut at least offered the lifeline of zeuhl logic to forge rhythmic processions and the familiarity of Univers Zero avant-prog comparisons. C'ETAIENT DE TRES GRANDE VENTS on the other hand removes all training wheels and forces the listener to either run in terror or grasp to find the elusive underpinning of it all buried deep beneath the scattered sounds of the electroacoustic dark ambient sound effects that bath themselves in the nebulous nature of musique concrète or the recondite structuralism of Stockhausen, Schoenberg or Xenakis.

Definitely a harder pill to swallow, C'ETAIENT DE TRES GRANDE VENTS was the perfect way to alienate fans of the debut by taking them into a bizarre modern classical realm that they probably preferred not to be dragged into. Many bands that found a respected debuts have suffered this same fate whether it be Italy's Dedalus or Picchio dal Pozzo's bizarre sophomore release however SHUB-NUGGURATH took things even further with a sonic jungle so thick and so impenetrable that only the most dedicated intrepid musical explorers could find their way through the labyrinthine chaotic processions that navigated the 45 minute run. Personally i can totally understand why many did not warm up to this one as it is ridiculously tense and purposefully complex with the seeming intent to alien as many listeners as is possible but the music is actually beautifully designed behind its mirage of cacophonous clutter and will appeal to those who seek out the noisy shenanigans of Nurse With Wound, Controlled Bleeding or early Zoviet France. Personally i find this sort of mind [%*!#] music exhilarating and can totally hop on board this bizarre ride into doomsday. Not for everyone but rewarding for those who love these jittery rides into musical oblivion. This one will only appeal to those who have the patience and persistence to detect subtle musical developments in the midst of minimalism and chaos.