zoviet:france

Ghost Rider

About time for an appreciation thread on zoviet:france, I think. Is anyone else a fan?

They started in Newcastle in the 80s and released a slew of extraordinary works throughout the 90s and the early 2000s. One of them has gone on to release music under the name Rapoon; not sure about the other guy.

A term often used to describe zoviet:france at the time was "dark ambient", a generic term which seriously understated the experimentalism at work in their music. They made extraordinary use of samples and showed a wonderful feel for the texture and grain of recordings - something which must have seriously influenced contemporary (to us) electronic experimentalists like Christian Fennesz or Tim Hecker, and even the likes of Philip Jeck. For all zoviet:france's avant-garde credentials, though, their music was often staggeringly beautiful and you could almost describe some of the tracks as "hook-y", albeit in an abstract way. I think this makes their stuff much more accessible, and now that pretty much everybody - even U2! - has embraced the idea that noise like radio static can be "musical", it surprises me that it is still quite hard to find a lot of zoviet:france's CDs.

Their best stuff (to my mind) has a collage-like quality; the sounds seem to come from other sources. But, oddly, the fact that they're so hard to place seems only to make them more evocative, even plaintive - like recordings from a bygone era that have degraded over time. Washes of noise occasionally interrupted by crackling signals, shimmering drones, warbling peals from middle-eastern -sounding instruments, transient fragments of voices as if snatched from the airwaves of exotic radio stations - these are just some of the recurring tropes in what was a unique musical rhetoric.

I heartily recommend these:

"A Flock of Rotations"
"Assault & Mirage"
"Shadow, Thief of the Sun"
"The Decriminalisation of Country Music"

Ghost Rider

Scubadevils

Sounds like someone I need to check out from your description - never heard of them before.

Tumbleweed

Ghost Rider

A response! Wha-hey!

Check them out for sure. A lot of their stuff was put out by Mille Plateaux in the 90s. I think they released quite a bit on their own label too.

Scubadevils wrote: »

Sounds like someone I need to check out from your description - never heard of them before.

Tumbleweed

John

I have a Reformed Faction album and saw a gig by them a couple of years ago but I haven't gone back to the original albums at all. I keep meaning to as from all reports, the old stuff is awesome.