Valentin Clastrier – La vielle à roue de l'imaginaire (1984)

Ah, the vielle à roue (sorry, I cannot will myself to refer to it by its silly saxon denomination), that most mysterious of instruments; a miracle of musical engineering. In La vielle à roue de l'imaginaire, his first record – augmented in its reissue on CD, under the title Grands maîtres de la vielle à roue, by the even more experimental suite Migrations, from his second (and most elusive) LP, Esprits de la Nuit (whose master tapes have probably been put to rest on Cathar burial grounds, awaiting being summoned to soundtrack the Day of Reckoning) –, we find Valentin Clastrier, arguably the instrument's most esoteric master (Dominique Regef's improvisational heterodoxies being of a different nature), doing to this so very intricate and delicate contraption all the things conventional wisdom and traditional technique would say you're not supposed to: dismantling it, getting to know it from the inside, putting it back together with extra strings and modified parts, and just experimenting with all its trickery - i.e. trying out a catalogue of extended techniques, plucking strings, striking wood, and apparently going all glossolalic about it. Bref: fascinating stuff. And yet, it was just the beginning. Next, he would run an electric current through it and rebuilt it anew; a sanfona to shake the heavens and earth with. After this one, Horatio, or whatever your name is, go for Hérésie and Le Bûcher des Silences, and find out just how many more things are in them than are dreamt of in your philosophy.