About This Item
160-gram LP. Gatefold sleeve with new artwork. The elusive allure of Video-Aventures is challenging to capture, and Megaphone/Knock'em Dead's reissue of their second LP, Camera (In Focus) Camera (Al Riparo) (1984, Tago Mago, France), reveals an album with a conviction in paradox that serves only to magnify their mystery. Plunging feverishly where their debut (Musique pour Garcons et Filles, 1979, Recommended Records) traipsed and alighted with informed whimsy, Camera (In Focus) Camera (Al Riparo) retains the duo of Dominique Grimaud and Monique Alba, abetted strikingly (and, often, surprisingly) by Jac Berrocal, Guigou Chenevier (Etron Fou Leloublan), Sophie Jausserand, Gilbert Artman (Lard Free, Catalogue, Urban Sax), Cyril Lefebvre, and Daniel Deshays. The result is a tour de force in several significant respects. Camera (In Focus) Camera (Al Riparo) is not obviously similar to it's beguiling predecessor - indeed, there are moments in which it calls for the listener's intrepidity and insight - but it is at least as captivating. Venturing further from traditional instrumentation, Video-Aventures employ elements of musique concrete, disjointed and enfeebled speech, accelerated percussion, and synthesized physical function (pulse, breathing, etc.). The chronicle of a singular process from a single perspective, it narrates the deterioration of a mind in the aftermath of duress. That mind is the narrator, but only from a sensory standpoint, as if the listener were seated inside the narrator's skull. What the listener hears is what the subject hears - complete with pounding heartbeat, gasping breath, blood rushing through the head - amounting to a devastating treatise against ends justifying means. Regardless of interpretation, Camera (In Focus) Camera (Al Riparo) succeeds on it's own extensive musical merits. This record is borne of the dissonant, microscopic interim bet
