Orion Music Workshop - Territoires Fluences
(OMNISON08 / September 2024)


25€ - 200 copies (SOLD OUT)

"Previously in Orion Music Workshop : the second adventure of our stellar hero, beautifully named Mâlemort, took off and cemented a cycle in three acts. This second step was a tour de force, with the compositions gaining in thickness and the subject matter becoming more refined, while retaining its industrial and bucolic DNA. Today, acknowledgements, here he go again. Orion’s really reaching for the stars as the albums come out, completely independent of an industry that wouldn't know where to put our protagonist, once again. At the start of a simple formula, this arte-povera concept which saw an ancestral flute player locked in at night in the IRCAM studios hacking the system, swapping keys, ignoring other ways than towards paranormal electronic music, primitive at heart but rising like hallucinogenic shrooms, while transcending the listener, tickling the senses and putting in a trance. Today, this third act is meant to be definitive, like a condensed version of the best of itself. Territoires Fluences, where previous attempts are perfected in your ears, where everything fits together enchantingly, where everything seems obvious. The Facteur Cheval has become the director of the magic cave, the typical Tom Val elements are present but more beautiful, more embodied. If you've enjoyed the atmospherics created by the man who creates moods with three bits of string, you'll fall in love for his latest mutation. It's warbling, it's scratchy, it sounds right. Above all, it's a moving album, with something soul-warming lurking behind the sonic squiggles. It's good to see the goblin grow up, leaving the lo-fi skirts behind and move into the league of the big… spirits who meet in Brocéliande at night to dance like Saint Guy. Special mention must go to La Théorie des événements, where the art of collaboration shines through, Jeanne Gorisse's double bass joyfully copulating with the raw maelstrom of this unique Workshop. This music, open to the other, to musicians and to the craziest or most radical poets, promises to be fascinating for a long time to come. The endless spiral?!" (Maximilien Douche / Oedipe Purple)

Electronic, flutes, synthesizers, voice, percussions and other by Tom Val
Recorded and mixed at Bâtiment 8 between 2023 and 2024
Mastered by Alan Briand at Studio 121
Jeanne Gorisse plays double bass on La Théorie Des Événements

"Still very much operating on his own frequency, Tom Val continues to traverse the fringe of the European avant-garde with perhaps the deepest decent yet.  Tapping to a healthy influence derived from the rich French legacy of fearless free jazz (I.E Jean Guérin Tacit, Bernard Vitet, Berrocal ++), this alarmingly young artist creates a deep trance-inducing tapestry of diverse, tangent-taking music that avoids easy categorisation.  It’s densely layered, wild unshackled percussion buried deep amidst remnants of disguised voices, occasional off-centre electronic rhythms and scraps of odd wind instruments.  But there seems to be a strong-focus that binds the whole work into a dense, vivid dream where you never know what’s around the next corner.  There’s introspective acoustic pieces that feel indebted to the North-African Sufi music of Areski, disjointed electronics that recall early 80s oddballs Ptôse, whilst ‘Le Secret Des Âmes Complices’ is just a beautiful moment of calm contemplation that really grounds the preceding madness back to the human realm.  Finding a unique voice in experimental music these days has to be one of the hardest things, how to be new whilst reconfiguring, reconstituting and recontextualising the heavy weight of history.  Orion’s commitment to this uncompromising spirit of non-conformity keeps us asking for more." (All Night Flight)

"Third installment in Orion Music Workshop's mutant jazz series, true to the French tradition of Hector Zazou, Joseph Racaille or Philippe Doray's Associaux Associés! Tom Val, the one-man-band behind Orion Music Workshop, takes his music to new standards by incorporating elements from exotica, 4th world music, Muslimgauze or Civilistjävel's contemporary electronic dub into his lo-fi improvisation formula. Pure DIY magic. Tom Val has been releasing music - other people's as well as his own - for the next past 6 years on his label Les Disques Omnison (formerly Tom Val Records) in the truest DIY fashion: hand drawn artworks, small runs of CDR's and tapes. Last year, both his music and his label took a relative "professional" turn with the release of Orion Music Workshop's second LP, Mâlemort. Sonically, it began to leave the extreme lo-fi territories from where the project ignited; for the first time also, Tom Val dared (and probably financially could) press 200 copies of his record, which quickly sold out. Two other surprised hit records followed: Turner Williams Jr.'s sundreched Shahi Baaja improvisations and Shelter and Orion's kraut jams. Territoires Fluences marks another step for the musician and the label as its sound is much less bare and lushier than his previous production's sound, for the better, in my opinion. Indeed, such a mutation expresses a form of musical maturity, a broader understanding of arrangements and music production or, even better, Tom Val's new ability to seamlessly blend his (very) broad influences into an album that turns to be much greater than the sum of its parts. As its name suggests, Territoires Fluences is all about the exploration of musical territories and the underground connections between them. Oscillating freely between musique concrete, field recordings, ambient, soft-guitar led instrumentals, ethno jazz etc., etc. etc. it summons, in no particular order, the ghosts of Muslimgauze, a cohort of French jazz mavericks (Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Joëlle Léandre etc.) and the members of deterritorialized contemporary electronics (from Discreet Music to Thomas Bush and The Sprigs). True French hauntology." (PAM / Office PSR)

"Become ungovernable' appears to be the central tenet of Tom Val's Orion Music Workshop on Territoires Fluences, the fourth record in as many years to be issued via Val's own Les Disques Omnison imprint. When you're at the wheel alone and fully in charge of where you're headed, you can pretty much do as you please, a situation Val is more than aware of on an album defined by its open sense of experimentation and defiant freeness. And freeness was certainly something that characterised previous OMW outings, leaning much more purposefully into a kind of outsider jazz than is demonstrated on this latest long-player. The freeness remains but is channeled in new directions, Val instead choosing to unite post-industrial trance-like drift with a Cramps Records-styled approach to sound and improvisation that doesn't exactly square directly with anyone else but has me thinking at various points of that latest Valentina Magaletti collaboration with Jeugdbrand, the usually uncharacterisible Pygmy Unit, the broken down haunted folk improvisations of Jim Strong/Eyes of the Amaryllis, or perhaps even some long lost Korm Plastics transmission. That should give you some picture of where we're at here, though it certainly doesn't fully capture the uniqueness of what Val is magic(k)ing into the ether either, mysterious sounds that seem passed through ancient portals or summoned from some haunted charm purloined from a shadowy mystic in the ports of Marseille. The kind of record that'll alienate many while the rest of us spend a very long time trying to make sense of its mysterious wonder - not too different a response when you add it all up, it just depends which way you're willing to let your head bend." (World Of Echo)