La Belle Brute's fourth release dedicated to "Art Brut" French artist Jean-Marie Massou, which delves his "novels", a series of sound fictions, created over the last two decades of his life, intertwining striking narratives via spoken text accompanied by collages of sound effects, music, and ambient sounds.
From 1973 until his death, Jean-Marie Massou lived isolated in the heart of the forest in the Lot, a territory he traversed and redrew in his own way, digging countless underground galleries, unearthing gigantic stones that he shifted, erected, aligned, piled up, engraved. When he was not moving heaven and earth, he drew and recorded on hundreds of cassettes his laments, his stories, his dreams, his speeches about the end of the world, ecological disaster, or the arrival of extraterrestrials. Jean-Marie died on May 28, 2020, at the age of 70.
During his lifetime, in early 2015, the label and collective La Belle Brute was created to publish Jean-Marie Massou's first musical opus: Sodorome Volume I (2016), which presented an overview of his various sound practices. In 2018, the second volume of the collection followed:
La Citerne de Coulanges, containing the contents of a cassette from the 1970s where Jean-Marie Massou sings while accompanying himself with stone strikes on the wall of a cistern inside which he records himself. This third opus: Les Romans de Massou, was the last sound project initiated in 2019 by Jean-Marie Massou and La Belle Brute. This album presents what Jean-Marie called his Novels. It was around the 2000s that he embarked on this series of sound fictions, where he tells a story and accompanies it with sound effects, music, and ambient sounds. He makes use of soundtracks he gathers from the radio but also uses his environment like a sound designer. To create his montages, he sometimes works simultaneously on three tape recorders, some playing, others recording.
Jean-Marie had played for us Le Repenti des Prostituées that we had agreed to publish; we later discovered, in the recordings found since then, the two other novels published here. The hundreds of hours of tapes still awaiting listening may reveal new ones to us. Like his galleries, Jean-Marie's creations are fathomless.
The entire words of the three novels have been transcribed in a 32-page booklet, in English and French.
Jean-Marie Massou (1950-2020) was a figure of "
art brut", defined in its strictest sense, who lived for 45 years in the forest of Marminiac in the Lot (France). In the 1970s, a mother refused to allow her son, a psychotic, illiterate and lonely young man, to be institutionalized. She offered him a forest of chestnut trees. There, Jean-Marie Massou will create, alone, a staggering world-work: hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of engraved stones, tons of rubble moved to dig kilometers of underground galleries, wells, an abyss, a pyramid, as traces of his universal mission. Massou, found lifeless on the ground in his house in the middle of the woods on May 28, 2020, at the age of 70, had been the subject of a remarkable documentary directed by the artist Antoine Boutet in 2009.
