Los Pélieu Lovers - Bruits De L'Ombre
(OMNISON10 / May 2025)


27€ - 200 copies (SOLD OUT)

"Rouen, 2024. Under the influence of reading aloud some poems by french beat poet Claude Pélieu while music was playing in the room, and despite finding much tributes to his work online, Tom Val, Maximilien Douche and Magali Genuite decided to do a record in praise of him. Rather than a usual music & poetry reading, that could have been an obvious choice, the trio decided to apply Pélieu’s techniques and style into the form of an album. Automatic writing, cut-up, degradation, collages… You can see where it goes. Result is completely freeform, landscape is changing everytime. Bird singings below a detuned piano, destroyed voice loops, flutes comes in and out, bait and switch… As every single Tom Val’s project rule : expect the unexpected. What could go wrong ?"

Music by Tom Val
Readings by Maximilien Douche & Magali Genuite
Texts by Maximilien Douche & Claude Pélieu
Recorded and mixed at Bâtiment 8 between 2024 and 2025
Mastered by Alan Briand at Studio 121



"Los Pélieu Lovers : towards a minor music. What entrance should one take to delve into Los Pélieu Lovers, the latest iteration of Orion Music Workshop, or, to be more precise, another triangular emanation from Tom Val’s label, Les Disques Omnison, in the wake of recent Krakatoa and HWYUIOD projects? None matters more than another: they all lead to a burrow - both a refuge and a trap - a system of galleries, some intricately connected, others designless dead-ends. It does not mean that the music released as Bruits de l’Ombre is due to merge with the aforementioned projects into a larger, undifferentiated block (the “omnison” of Les Disques Omnison), on the contrary. As a scrupulous witness, I ought to point out what seems to me Bruits de l’Ombre’s specificity: it doesn’t deviate as much as it strongly asserts a principle, that also emanates from former LP’s on the label but in a cryptogrammic state: that of accumulations and cut-ups, quotations and pastiches as techniques of collective creation. In the case of  Los Pélieu Lovers, the quotation is clear, direct and eminently literary: the election of French poet Claude Pélieu as a tutelary figure works both as a saint-like poetic model, and a gateway to the Beat Generation.
Claude Pélieu, and via Pélieu, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, leading yet again to another tunnel: Ramuntcho Matta, Dashiell Hedayat, Sub Rosa and a cohort of industrial magi and tape manipulating iconoclasts… There’s another literary figure worth convoking, Kafka, and moreover Deleuze & Guattari via their 1975 essay Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, that I have been crudely borrowing from in the present text. Not only the images used by Deleuze & Guattari fits Los Pélieu Lovers just as well as Kafka (burrows and proliferation, deterritorialization, music swelling up out of nothingness, a cry that escaped signification), the concept of “minor literature” also applies to a minor music I believe Bruits de l’Ombre offers. According to the French theorists, a) everything in minor literature is political: “[minor literature’s] cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” and b) everything takes on a collective value: “precisely because talent isn't abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that "master" and that could be separated from a collective enunciation”. These “Bruits de l’Ombre” literally obey these principles. The enunciation emanates from a triangle formed by Tom Val, Maximilien Douche & Magali Genuite, on which other triangles plugged themselves, in an infinite aggregate. Bits of scrambled texts, from Claude Pélieu and Maximilien Douche (aka ‘Oedipe Purple’), agglomerated like strips of newspapers, are cut up and pasted onto a digital patchwork. Furthermore, Los Pélieu Lovers not only recalls a theoretical moment, but also a scent of the time, that during which Deleuze and Guattari wrote their seminal essays, a very French kind of artistic tumult at the end of the Trentes Glorieuses, echoing Raymond Hains’s décollages and Ghédalia Tazartès’s grunts and mumbles. May this reminiscence be prophetic." (PAM / Office PSR)

"The latest improvised scramble to be transmitted from the Les Disques Ominson stable comes from Los Pélieu Lovers, a trio headed up by label boss Tom Val alongside Maximilien Douche and Magali Genuite, and directly conceived as a response to the work of French beat poet, Claude Pélieu. The influence is more conceptual and process-driven than literal, turning away from what would have been a more obvious reframing of the words and towards a sonic rejoinder that utilises associated practices of collage, cut-ups and automatic writing. The results feel suitably on-brand for Val, whose work elsewhere often feels similarly free-form and intellectually-driven but still uniquely engaging. It's not easy to fully assess what it is that makes Val's work - whether here with two new collaborators or elsewhere -  so appealing. Perhaps it's that implaccable quality? Bruits De L'Ombre is unconventional and unpredictable by anyone's standards, but like, say, with Nurse With Wound (who are likely the best point of comparison here and for Les Disques Omnison as a whole) and multiple entrances to their famed List, it feels as if it's channeling its own language of sorts, something which begins to make more sense (if sense is the thing to seek) over repeated plays and new emerging contexts. Bruits De L'Ombre is at once drone, improv, minimal composition, experimental folk and sound art collage, yet not somehow specifically any of those things, which in the end likely just means you're listening to the sound of a collective sharing its own personalised sonic lexicon. As with most that is good, the meaning stands in the shadow of the idea and the feeling. That Los Pélieu Lovers should be a perplexing bunch is secondary - Bruits De L'Ombre is the Pure Expression." (World of Echo)

"Expertly cracked, strained and broken musical mélange from French wunderkind Tom Val’s flourishing Les Disques Omnison private press, delivering its most established transmission to date following a suite of now feverishly in demand releases from Shelter, Orion Music Workshop, Turner Williams JR +++. Inexplicably and exponentially better with each release, underground Parisian outpost Les Disques Omnison continues to grow into its stride whilst stalking the very fringe of the city’s fertile DIY underbelly.  Los Pélieu Lovers is the trio of Magali Genuite, Maximilien Douche and Tom Val, taking influence and namesake from French beat poet Claude Pélieu and applying the same cutup, assemblage, hodgepodge approach to their own music making.  The result is an effortlessly freehand yet delicately arranged montage of fractured upright piano notes, garbled tape manipulation, diffused field recordings and smothered poetry readings that gives the feel of being catapulted into another era entirely.  It reaches that fabled zone of being impossible to place in time, in place or in scene - music that could quite easily have been made yesterday, in the late 70s or anywhere in-between.  No doubt these young musicians are well-schooled in the finest French underground music - Ghedalia Tazartes, Anne Gillis, Dashiell Hedayat, Wakhevich, Luc Ferrari, but most importantly is that they’re advancing that somewhere new, today.  A truly remarkable and advanced insight into a scene that can’t be ignored." (All Night Flight)

"A second expulsion from the French underground, this one of a poetic rather than cinematic bent, from the label/family that gave us the excellent Turner Williams Jr record a couple of years ago (and who calls on Flaming Tunes for his write up of this release). Los Pélieu Lovers are a sort-of iteration of Les Disques Omnison label head Tom Val‘s Orion Music Workshop, with Maximilien Douche (writer for Double magazine and the blog Oedipe Purple), and Magali Genuite (also of Double magazine), making a record inspired by French beat poet and artist Claude Pélieu. A line from Pélieu: “the grammatical teats/of nostalgia were pissing sulfur”. Yes! Pélieu worked in tandem with partner Mary Beach, and together they were prolific translators of beat poetry into French, translating Burroughs, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and others. Here, there are bits of piano and drone; some kind of organ; whispered spoken word through a delay; recorders looped and layered; some birdsong better suited to a giallo than a sunrise. You know the score – a bit of this and bit of that all coagulating into space-holding atmospheres and/or soundtracks. Excellent." (Jennifer Lucy Allan, The Quietus)

"The latest nocturnal transmission from Tom Val’s cult Les Disques Omnison imprint. There’s a dreamlike surrealism to this music, but of a delicate, domestic sort—more Cornell box than melting clock. Like Gothenburg, this outer-fringe Parisian scene seems to be operating in defiance of the 21st century and its tedious advances, finding 20th-century aesthetics altogether more human, alien, and inexhaustible. A time capsule from an alternate present." (Seasonal Work)