Los Pélieu Lovers – Bruits De L'Ombre

In Rouen, 2024, inspired by reading Claude Pélieu’s poems aloud while music played, Tom Val, Maximilien Douche, and Magali Genuite created an album in homage to the French Beat poet. Instead of a conventional music-and-poetry format, they applied Pélieu’s own experimental methods—automatic writing, cut-up, collage, sonic degradation—resulting in a freeform, ever-shifting soundscape: detuned pianos under birdsong, fragmented voices, sudden flutes, abrupt shifts. True to Tom Val’s ethos, unpredictability reigns.

The project, Los Pélieu Lovers—released under Bruits de l’Ombre and part of Val’s Les Disques Omnison label—embraces a collective creative process rooted in literary and experimental traditions. The work channels not just Pélieu, but also William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, and other avant-garde figures, alongside influences from Kafka and Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of “minor literature.”

In this “minor music,” everything is political and collective, resisting singular authorship. Scrambled text fragments from Pélieu and Douche intermingle like décollage, forming digital patchworks. The result recalls the late-20th-century French artistic ferment—part Raymond Hains, part Ghédalia Tazartès—while suggesting a prophetic revival of that spirit.