NMCP Studio HHV Records 2 Items

The 6th installment of the world-renowned classic scratch tool series, Zarecord 3 7” takes the vocals from it's 12” parent-project and remixes them with portable turntable users in mind. Nmcp's avant-garde instrumental beats have long been a driving force behind the worldwide scratch scene, with their chest-rattling Polyvox basslines, stripped down elemental funk, and infectious drum patterns providing the framework for battles, performances and friendly meet-ups since the first Zalooper dropped back in 2013. The link between Nmcp and Cut & Paste Records was established through the shared passion for cutting records to disc on mastering lathes, and cutting sounds up on turntables. Since then, we've toured and performed together in the UK, Germany, Belarus and their native Russia, constantly researching ways to develop the vinyl record as a musical performance tool. Zarecord 1 and 2 brought raw attitude and fresh sound palettes with their skipless vocal samples, and re-imagined what a scratch record could offer by including full-length instrumentals instead of the more “traditional” sparse beat loops lifted from other records. With Zarecord 3, the concept is flipped once more with the Nmcp crew delving into their archives and supplying original parts of some of their classic beats in a pioneering format. Both sides of Zarecord 3 7” are packed with vocal samples, arranged in a way to make it easy to find the right sound, with longer sounds on the outside, and the loops packing more syllables as you progress to the center of the record. On the end of both sides there are 2 lock grooves – an infinite drum loop which can be used to cut with or simply as a break to practice to, and an infinite Shepherd Tone that seems to endlessly drop or rise in pitch. This record is dedicated to the memory of the artist who created the iconic imagery for the Zarecord series: 8D. The cover for Zarecord 3 was originally a painting by 8D, and we worked closely with him to adapt the piece into a record sleeve design carrying all the mystery and magic of the original. The Spot-Gloss finish makes the cover art jump right out and appears to change with the light.

To write these few lines, we spoke to saxophonist François Jeanneau, an old friend of Jacques Thollot who also played on several of his albums, including the “Watch Devil Go” which interests us here. He told us a story which, according to him, sums up the personality of Thollot. A noted studio had reserved three days for a Thollot recording session. The first morning was devoted to sound checks and putting some order in the score sheets which Jacques would hand out in a somewhat anarchic manner. Then everyone went for lunch. When the musicians returned to the studio, Thollot had disappeared. He wasn’t seen again for the three days. When he reappeared, he had already forgotten why he had left, The music of Jacques Thollot is in the image of its’ author: it takes you somewhere, suddenly escapes and disappears, returning in an unexpected place as if nothing had happened.

Four years after a first album on the Futura label in 1971, Jacques Thollot returned, this time on the Palm label of Jef Gilson, still with just as much surrealist poetry in his jazz. In thirty-five minutes and a few seconds, the French composer and drummer, who had been on the scene since he was thirteen, established himself as a link between Arnold Schoenberg and Don Cherry. Resistant to any imposed framework and always excessive, Thollot allows himself to do anything and everything: suspended time of an extraordinary delicacy, a stealthy explosion of the brass section, hallucinatory improvisation of the synthesisers, tight writing, teetering on the classical, and in the middle of all that, a hit; the title-track - that Madlib would one day end up hearing and sampling.

“Watch Devil Go” was in the right place in the Palm catalogue, which welcomed the cream of the French avant-garde in the 70s. But it is also the story of a long friendship between two men. Jacques Thollot and Jef Gilson had known and respected one another for a long time. Though barely sixteen years old, Thollot was already on drums on the first albums by Gilson starting in 1963 and would play in his big band (alongside François Jeanneau once again), ‘Europamerica’, until the end of the 70s.

In a career lasting half a century and centred on freedom Jacques Thollot played with the most important experimental musicians (Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock, Michel Roques, Barney Wilen, Steve Lacy, François Tusques, Michel Portal, Jac Berrocal, Noël Akchoté...) and they all heard in him a pulsation coming from another world.'

Jérôme "Kalcha" Simonneau