PITCH FORK / January 2015 Lizzy Mercier Descloux
"Fire" b/w "Morning High" 7 by Jenn Pelly
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was an unheralded pioneer of 1970s and '80s art-rock in her too-short lifetime. While her albums were reissued in 2006 by ZE, the quintessential downtown label she helped anchor, Light in the Attic will press them again this year in the wake of late-blooming interest in her work.
Descloux was a poet, painter, and actor who helped found the French magazine Rock News. Born in Paris, she moved to New York in the late 70s and became immersed in the downtown art/punk scene. An apparent dreamer, she released strange, incredibly alive-sounding albums on ZE alongside no wave's leading lights like Lydia Lunch, Kid Congo and the Contortions. Her book of art and poems, Desiderata, included work by her friend Patti Smith and boyfriend Richard Hell, and she appeared in Ivan Kral and Amos Poe's legendary film Blank Generation.
Descloux's music was deeply rhythmic, influenced by funk, soul, jazz, and the sounds she discovered traveling in Africa, South America, and the West Indies. Though she had a hit in France with "Mais où Sont Passées les Gazelles"—off 1984's Zulu Rock, which ZE's Michael Esteban once described as "South African music [recalling] the Velvet Underground"—she remains criminally obscure. Light in the Attic pressed this 7" last year, collecting her 1979 dance single "Fire" (an Arthur Brown cover that appeared on her debut Press Color) as well as a wonderfully entrancing B-side: It's Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Patti Smith, giving an impassioned, ritualistic recitation of the Arthur Rimbaud poem "Matinée d’ivresse/Morning High". Over Descloux's hypnotic French whispers and crying distortion, Smith chants, "Pure love/ Pure love/ Pure love."
In 2015 and 2016 Light in the Attic in partnership with ZE Records will release a detailed series showcasing the work of impassioned poet, painter, actor, and prolific, self-taught musician Lizzy Mercier Descloux. Instrumental in the late 70s New York underground yet of Parisian origin, Mercier Descloux, with partner Michel Esteban, established the magazine Rock News and ran in the same circles as Patti Smith and Richard Hell. Lizzy became a genre defying artist and pioneer of worldbeat and avant garde rock, and supreme minimalist of the no wave genre in her own right. A glimpse of what’s in store for this upcoming archival series, this 7" presents two key tracks from the Mercier Descloux catalog: the epitomic, 1979 disco-punk classic “Fire” backed with a rare session featuring Lizzy and “Godmother of Punk” Patti Smith reciting a bilingual version of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “Matinée d’ivresse/Morning High,” set to music by experimental contemporary Bill Laswell.
In 1978, legendary label ZE Records released a mini-album by Mercier Descloux’s performance art duo, Rosa Yemen, and went on to release several of Lizzy’s solo albums. Her debut solo album, Press Color, consists of eight songs owing more to disco, funk, and film scores than punk rock, all recorded within a two week span. Fire was the first single out of Press Color, Morning High was recorded latter with Patti Smith and produced by Bill Laswell.
She was a spectacle: carnivore and prey in one, like a walking wildlife film, with that riveting amoral charisma of nature. A complete mystery.
- Richard Hell
She was shy, yet willful. She was quiet, yet ready to strike, like a small poisonous snake. She was her own invention- stubborn, secretive, open, impossible to pin down, and impossible not to love.
- Patti Smith
