Orion Music Workshop - Territoires Fluences

Become ungovernable' appears to be the central tenet of Tom Val's Orion Music Workshop on Territoires Fluences, the fourth record in as many years to be issued via Val's own Les Disques Omnison imprint. When you're at the wheel alone and fully in charge of where you're headed, you can pretty much do as you please, a situation Val is more than aware of on an album defined by its open sense of experimentation and defiant freeness. And freeness was certainly something that characterised previous OMW outings, leaning much more purposefully into a kind of outsider jazz than is demonstrated on this latest long-player. The freeness remains but is channeled in new directions, Val instead choosing to unite post-industrial trance-like drift with a Cramps Records-styled approach to sound and improvisation that doesn't exactly square directly with anyone else but has me thinking at various points of that latest Valentina Magaletti collaboration with Jeugdbrand, the usually uncharacterisible Pygmy Unit, the broken down haunted folk improvisations of Jim Strong/Eyes of the Amaryllis, or perhaps even some long lost Korm Plastics transmission. That should give you some picture of where we're at here, though it certainly doesn't fully capture the uniqueness of what Val is magic(k)ing into the ether either, mysterious sounds that seem passed through ancient portals or summoned from some haunted charm purloined from a shadowy mystic in the ports of Marseille. The kind of record that'll alienate many while the rest of us spend a very long time trying to make sense of its mysterious wonder - not too different a response when you add it all up, it just depends which way you're willing to let your head bend.