Philippe Doray & Les Asociaux Associes - Le Composant Compositeur

The future is a flash-back! Having dynamited the end of the 70s, in the next decade, Philippe Doray was still alive and kicking. With Laurence Garcette, he juggled with keyboards and all their simulations to begin the “second period” of the Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates). Labyrinthine programming lead to songs which go crazy: electro, pop, krautrock, no wave…? In a word, French chanson as it was never heard before or since.

“Nobody Move!”, so says Philippe Doray and his Asociaux Associés (the Antisocial Associates)! Having dynamited the end of the 70s with two radical albums – Ramasse-Miettes Nucléaires in 1976 & Nouveaux Modes Industriels in 1978, both reissued by Souffle Continu – Doray still hadn’t finished singing. Throughout the next decade he began his Composant compositeur which would document the “second period”, as he calls it, of his Asociaux Associés.

The record includes new schizo-electro songs which make the most of his association with Laurence Garcette, who also plays any and all sorts of keyboards. A prolongation of the first period of the Asociaux Associés, the duo updates Doray’s poetry: in reaction to the current overcast atmosphere, here are some hallucinatory fantasies to the rhythm of an infernal circle dance (« Le petit géant ») or an ecstatic waltz (“Bombés fluo”) or even coded messages stuffed into bottles and thrown into space (“Secoue le flipeur”, “Choc d’amour”).

On the bonus CD there are further iconoclastic examples: rare recordings (unpublished or even “inaudible”) of the Asociaux Associés but also by Crash, a duo that Doray formed with Thierry Müller (Ilitch, Ruth). At the controls of their experiment-bending machine the musicians multiply the possibilities: peripheral rock, arias in orbit, broken swing, industrial mantras and other joyful falsities. Enough to make you lose your mind ? No… as Philippe Doray promised: it is the “jackpot qui frissonne” (the shivering jackpot) which is there to excite.