Shelter & Orion with Turner Williams Jr. - Krakatoa
(OMNISON09, PRPO6105 / January 2025)


27€ - 200 copies (SOLD OUT)

"Recorded during two sessions at Shelter's Studio 121, the trio carved out this heavily psyched post-ancient LP which they later decided to call Krakatoa. The title was not choose for a hint of any kind of orientalism, but to evoke a total freeness, a deep dive into the furnace of a volcano that comes to mind when listening to the record. Even if it also reveals elements of pan-traditionalism, with a mixture of electronic tablas, dub delays, deep flutes, bagpipes organ (?!), and of course Turner's electric shahi baaja; these elements are much more twisted into an alien-eerie to the core than use to evoke a "West meets East" connotation. With common inspiration taken from Jon Hassell, Don Cherry (especially his late work with Latif Khan), Leven Signs, Pierre-Jean Croset, Terry Riley, John Fahey, the trio managed to produce music that is of its time and quite incomparable. Far from being a tribute to their masters, they continue the legacy of plugged-in weirdo fourth dimension dreamy jams."

A co-production with Protopost
Music and production by Shelter (Alan Briand) and Orion (Tom Val), with Turner Williams Jr.
Drawing by Turner Williams Jr. / Design by Shelter
Recorded and mixed at Studio 121

"Freshly harvested psychotropic musical seances from the fertile Parisian underbelly on recent Tabi Tapes alumni Tom Val’s Les Disques Omnison outpost. Cooked up across two in Shelter’s 121 Studio, the duo ditch the krautish Europe-Endless space rock of 2024’s hit ‘Here’s Where You Understand It’s Only Dreaming’ and invite label mate Turner Williams Jr in for something altogether amorphous and exotic.  Undoubtably this is either music conceived and recorded in the presence of drugs or intended to be enjoyed around the same.  It’s a cross-cultural collision of pagan sound rites and the oriental gaze.  Electrified tablas, distant nose flutes, soaring bagpipes, doomed-out guitar chords and innumerate other unidentified musical titbits are buried deep within the hallucinogenic mulch.  Anyone who managed to catch Tom Val’s mixtape last week will know that this crew is well-schooled in the creme de la creme of underground avantgarde - Hassell’s 4th world trips, Don Cherry, those killer Lori Vambe records, Terry Riley’s Shri Carmel, NWW, Kosugi + co, French Demi-god Pierre Jean Croset or current-days Tanz Mein Herz crew.  They all feel very relevant and at the root of all this, but this is also the sound of 3 hardcore weirdos letting loose and having fun." (All Night Flight)

"Another excellent dive into a psychogeographic Paris of electronic marshes and radiant shahi baaja notes, courtesy of Les Disques Omnison & Protopost. Tom Val aka Orion joined label affiliates Shelter & Turner Williams Jr in the studio to offer their own take on contemporary improvisation, taking cues from patrimonial treasures by Vox Populi, Muslimgauze and Don Cherry's Codona & Organic Music Society projects as well as more recent household names Ulla, Civilistjävel and Konrad Sprenger. The past 12 months have been exceptionally good for Tom Val's label Les Disques Omnison, as the label released three of the most enjoyable and idiosyncratic LP's of French experimental music in 2024. Starting the year with sun-drenched electric shahi baaja's variations by Turner Williams Jr., and Shelter & Orion's kraut jams Here's where you understand it's only dreaming, these two cripplingly limited releases were quickly followed by Orion's solo LP Territoires Fluences. A turn of event brought the 3 aforementioned musicians in Shelter's studio where they eventually recorded 5 tracks as a circumstantial trio over the course of 2 recording sessions, thus fully embodying the free improv ethos so strongly championed by the label since day 1. Each song explores a different facet of fourth world music improvisation, from the murkiest to the gauziest. Mostly clocking at over 8 min, each of them ultimately blossoms into a micro-world of its own, brushed by barely recognizable electronic instruments. Whether it is a Burroughsian opiated scenery or a pared-down but highly evocative 1999 video game's level ("Le Sacre des Lucioles" gave me innervisions of Rayman 2's Marshes of Awakening location), these visions are all vivid and  cerebrally stimulating. it doesn't feel necessary to go into the usual bland psychedelic bullshit keywords writing: Krakatoa is some top drawer stuff." (PAM / Office PSR)

"French outpost Les Disques Omnison opens its 2025 in some fashion with this three-way collaboration between some of the label's key players. Still a young imprint with a modest catalogue, there's nonetheless a clear sensibility being worked at, one that comes into focus with a record with its controls set for somewhere between the heart of the sun and inner-est of zones. Recorded in Shelter's own Studio 121, where one imagines the mushroom oil doth floweth and the smoke thick enough to climb like a ladder, the trio lock into some kind of trance-induced polarity, uniting Eastern and Western idioms and going all the way out to come all the way back in. In a cyclical universe, if you journey far enough to one side you'll inevitably end up on the other. Describing Krakatoa as a trip feels somewhat inadequate, for this is a deeply psychedelic record, cerebral in parts (as the stated influences of Pierre-Jean Croset and Latif Khan attest) and instinctive in others, with the overall sense of a set of musicians well attuned to the impulses of one another. Combining a range of electronic tablas, dub delays, flutes, bagpipes organ (even the label doesn't seem to know what this is), and shahi baaja, its players are obviously well versed, but never do they present as virtuoso, instead seemingly in search of some psychick (dare i say spiritual? I dare not) understanding that could sit anywhere amongst the Organic Music Society, the Taj Mahal Travellers, Charlemagne Palestine or Smegma. If Nurse With Wound were to put their list together now, don't be surprised to find Krakatoa somewhere amongst it." (World Of Echo)

"It is possible that these are the legendary lost field recordings of a disappeared Norwegian ethnologist who, in the early 1960s, recorded the ritual customs of a still unknown tribe in the headwaters of the Orinoco with a portable tape recorder under the influence of a mind-expanding potion derived from the bark of a marsh plant. Or perhaps this are extraterrestrial audio messages, recorded in September 1993 with a military parabolic antenna system installed about 30 km south of Cerro Campanario on the eastern flank of the Andes at 3895 m and smuggled out of the restricted zone of the installation by a Brazilian UFO hunter. Or it really is the latest release from the underground label Les Disques Omnison. A record that amalgamates harmonium-like drones, fragile ethereal guitar sounds, weird cosmic noise, electronic layered collages and exotic folk elements that are so different, otherworldly and fantastic that the listener can't be quick enough to turn the record over so that the journey to distant worlds can just continue. After 12 times A-side and 11 times B-side, I am willing and able to write about it. You could also say: "This is mercilessly good stuff“. Tomorrow I'll buy myself a T-shirt with the words: TOM VAL ENCHANTS" (Haussmuller Und Das Jazz)