There are so many ways I wish I could have come across La famille des saltimbanques, like discovering it tucked away in the dusty closet of a library, laying dormant in some neglected confiscation bin. “Too many kids trying to re-enact some whacko rituals with this one,” the librarian would reason. Or, better yet: students covertly trading tapes during class, and this silhouette, these D. D. A. A. shadows: La famille des saltimbanques is the mysterious tape that nobody can figure out. Maybe someone took it from the storage closet of the French classroom? Maybe someone wants to start a cult.
Not sure why La famille des saltimbanques reminds me of school. Perhaps it’s the cover art, with its drab backing color and shapes lifted from Pablo Picasso’s painting of the same name — who hasn’t marked up their schoolbooks at one point or another? Or maybe it’s because this tape sounds aged by time, and I have such little context for it. A cassette released overseas before I was even born? How the hell did I even hear this? Like Marcos Hassan wrote of Poem Rocket earlier this month, these recordings were given new life on the Internet, and I wouldn’t have heard them — or even of them — if someone hadn’t decided, “I think I’ll share this weird tape of French noises on the Internet today.” (Thanks!)
I hear creeping erosion throughout La famille des saltimbanques; on “Ne plus rien voir,” it’s as if buzzing frequencies physically seeped into the tape over decades of neglect. The track’s cyclical bassline reminds me of 90s post-rock, yet the synthesizer haze is all chewed apart and left gauzy, creating an airy and surprisingly pleasant effect. Elsewhere, “Loin dans le froid” is a more horror-wrought mixture: rhythmically blinking like a VCR timer display, dated tics of clinking electronics become enveloped within a crawling murk of guitar and horror film synth, occasionally clearing with the brief letting of strangled feedback.
Des saltimbanques, however: this tape is hardly acrobatic, but it is a performance of bad-trip psych unease, feedback squall and basement electronics. Furthermore, like the figures of Picasso’s painting, the music of La famille des saltimbanques is cohesive, yet also subtly distant and detached. Blacking out the details of Picasso’s circus figures, this French trio leaves only shapes with an unknown sense of direction — no longer is the family of entertainers made of distinct members; here they have become an oddly shaped mystery, expressionless and blank. Is it artistic co-option, or perhaps some deeper symbolic meaning? I’m just going to use it as an excuse to fictionalize and mythologize:
“What have I told you about this tape?”
“It’s off-limits?”
“It’s dangerous! You kids and your curiosity—you’d better not try to initiate others into ‘Baltique’ again!”