**Small 2018 repress available** First time reissue on vinyl of this much sought after release by Jean Hoyoux on the brand new label Cortizona. Jean Hoyoux remains a mysterious figure. He was Belgian psychologist, astrologer, and musician who released two albums during the early 80’s, and seems to have died shortly after. Little information is available, beyond the fact that he was dedicated to the study of the healing properties of music - the guiding theme of the album we have before us. Healing Music has a well documented history. The idea at its root - the quest for arrangements of sounds and structures, which might better the well being of the listener, is one of the primary themes of the New Age movement - beginning during the late 1960’s, stretched across the 70’s, and flowered during the early 80’s. It left an immense catalog of efforts in electronics, synthesis, field recording, ambience, and previously unexplored arrangements of instrumentation in its wake. Long cast as self-indulgent tangents of the hippie movement, Healing Music and the larger body of New Age, have been among of the great benefactors of the cultural reappraisals taking place in our own time. Free from the stigmas of their day, we can see them for what they were - logical successors of musical Minimalism, and extensions of efforts begun at studios like Groupe de Recherches Musicales and The San Fransisco Tape Music Centre.
Planètes previously gained broader recognition as a member of the Creel Pone’s iconic series of avant-garde electronic masterpieces. This offers a clue into the album’s singularity. Though firmly entrenched in the ideas of New Age, it largely steps free of that movement’s sonic signifiers - so much so, that when heard without context and as a whole, connections are hard fought. It is its own alternate reality. One so strange and incongruous that it forces questions about the true motives of the psychologist at its helm. The album is an immersion within seven sonic worlds. A series of synthesizer experiments - at movements explicitly avant-garde, at others forging equally strong connections to the German movement of Kosmische. Shifting from one to the next, it’s marked by ambience, drone, total abstraction, quirky meandering melody, and flirtations with rhythm. Despite the ease of available reference, any connection to larger cultural movements feels accidental - the result of overlapping technology, rather than shared conceit. It’s a strange artifact of a musical outsider, looking beyond the sounds themselves. Absolutely essential for any fan of ambient, experimental, or avant-garde music, and especially those of NewAge and synthesizer based Krautrock. Available on vinyl for the first time since its original issue, an album which is at once an exploration of a singular and visionary mind, and equally a document of a lost moment which forms history anew.
If our era has taught us anything - one defined as much by the repositioning of legacies of the past, as it is by contemporary efforts, it is that there are in infinite number of versions of history. Some remain primary, others fade - replaced by previously forgotten artifacts emerging from the fog of time. Over the course of the last decade, the reissue, particularly those of lost gems, has become a cultural phenomena - increasingly playing a role in the contemporary musical landscape. They have helped sculpt better understandings of past creative movements, and pointed us toward singular visionaries who were neglected my their own time. Jean Hoyoux’s Planètes operates on both planes.
This 1982 Belgian ‘Kosmisch’ stunner was originally issued by ‘Crets’ or Centre de Recherche et d’Etudes. The seven extended pieces form a course of ‘sound therapy’ similar in tone to Angel Rada’s ‘hand played’ explorations in rubato-rooted forms. The largely tonal pieces – recorded using string and choir synthesizers, vocoders, drum machines, etc. along with a heavy battery of phasing and time-based effects-lands somewhere between a ‘library music’-styled mood excursion and a genuinely transformative mind melter that ranks as one of the more obscure entrants into the...obscure electronic music canon.
(Keith Fullerton Whitman)
2LP reissue from the original 1982 master tapes. Original artwork with 8 inserts including 1 new insert with new liner notes by John Olson and Edward Ka-Spel. Tape transfer Pascal Deweze Remastered by Gert Van Hoof Cut by Dubplates & Mastering. 300 copies only on 180 gram vinyl, get it while you can...
