Delired Cameleon Family

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Delired Cameleon Family
DeliredCameleonFamily.jpg
Studio album by Delired Cameleon Family
Released 1975 (1975)
Recorded Pathé Marconi studios, Boulogne, Paris, France
March 1975 (1975-03)
Genre progressive rock
Length44:30 (or 48:30)
Label EMI

Delired Cameleon Family is a progressive rock album by the group of the same name, released in 1975 on EMI Records in France. It features musicians associated with the Clearlight project, most notably its leader, pianist Cyrille Verdeaux, and Musica Elettronica Viva member Ivan Coaquette, who joined forces to compose the soundtrack for the film Visa de Censure No. X by French actor Pierre Clementi.

Progressive rock is a broad genre of rock music that developed in the United Kingdom and United States throughout the mid to late 1960s. Initially termed "progressive pop", the style was an outgrowth of psychedelic bands who abandoned standard pop traditions in favour of instrumentation and compositional techniques more frequently associated with jazz, folk, or classical music. Additional elements contributed to its "progressive" label: lyrics were more poetic, technology was harnessed for new sounds, music approached the condition of "art", and the studio, rather than the stage, became the focus of musical activity, which often involved creating music for listening, not dancing.

EMI Records record label founded by the EMI company

EMI Records Limited was a British record label founded by the music company of the same name in 1972 as its flagship label, and launched in January 1973 as the successor to its Columbia and Parlophone record labels. The label was later launched worldwide. It has a branch in India called "EMI Records India", run by director Mohit Suri.

France Republic with mainland in Europe and numerous oversea territories

France, officially the French Republic, is a country whose territory consists of metropolitan France in Western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The metropolitan area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is bordered by Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany to the northeast, Switzerland and Italy to the east, and Andorra and Spain to the south. The overseas territories include French Guiana in South America and several islands in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The country's 18 integral regions span a combined area of 643,801 square kilometres (248,573 sq mi) and a total population of 67.3 million. France, a sovereign state, is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. Other major urban areas include Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lille and Nice.

Contents

Recording details

For the recording of the soundtrack in March 1975, Verdeaux and Coaquette each asked musician friends to join them at the Pathé Marconi studios in Boulogne, Paris. The results were released under the name Delired Cameleon Family by EMI Records who owned the film soundtrack rights. "Musique du film Visa de Censure No. X de Pierre Clementi" appears in small font at the top of the front cover, printed light blue on dark blue to reduce its prominence, and the film title is not mentioned at all on the label. The credits (in French) state: "produit par Pathé et Virgin" (Pathé Marconi was EMI's imprint name in France).

Boulogne-Billancourt Subprefecture and commune in Île-de-France, France

Boulogne-Billancourt is a commune in the western suburbs of Paris, France. It is located 8.2 km (5.1 mi) from the centre of Paris. Boulogne-Billancourt is a subprefecture of the Hauts-de-Seine department and the seat of the Arrondissement of Boulogne-Billancourt.

Paris Capital of France

Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts.

Pathé Records French record label

Pathé Records was a France-based international record company and label and producer of phonographs, active from the 1890s through the 1930s.

While the participation of a number of musicians associated with the Clearlight project, including several who went on to play on the "Forever Blowing Bubbles" album, the music is logically quite different from that of Clearlight - looser in production and less symphonic, evoking psychedelic and new-age music with a strong emphasis on rock and jazz fusion jamming. The album is mostly instrumental, but with a few vocal pieces: two in French and one in English. "Raganesh" is in the form of an Indian raga, while other songs include jazz elements.

Clearlight is a French progressive rock band from the 1970s, although their best known work was produced in England, and released by a major British record company. While progressive rock is an appropriate overall genre for the band, much of their work delves into other genres including psychedelic music, jam band music, symphonic rock, space rock, jazz fusion, and new-age music.

Psychedelic music is a wide range of popular music styles and genres influenced by 1960s psychedelia, a subculture of people who used psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and DMT to experience visual and auditory hallucinations, synesthesia and altered states of consciousness. Psychedelic music may also aim to enhance the experience of using these drugs.

New-age music is a genre of music intended to create artistic inspiration, relaxation, and optimism. It is used by listeners for yoga, massage, meditation, reading as a method of stress management to bring about a state of ecstasy rather than trance, or to create a peaceful atmosphere in their home or other environments, and is associated with environmentalism and New Age spirituality.

The name Delired Cameleon Family was taken from a humorous "franglo" pun, "delire raide camé Léon". This being an English language name for a French project, it contains, perhaps unintentionally, two words that do not exist in the English language: delired as the adjective form of delirium ("delirious" would have been correct), and cameleon is a misspelling of the lizard species chameleon (probably confused with the French spelling, caméléon).

Delirium, also known as acute confusional state, is an organically-caused decline from a previously baseline level of mental function that develops over a short period of time. Delirium is not a disease itself but a syndrome encompassing disturbances in attention, consciousness, and cognition. It may also involve other neurological deficits, like psychomotor disturbances, impaired sleep-wake cycle, emotional disturbances, and perceptual disturbances, although these features are not required for diagnosis.

Chameleon family of reptiles

Chameleons or chamaeleons are a distinctive and highly specialized clade of Old World lizards with 203 species described as of June 2015. These species come in a range of colors, and many species have the ability to change color.

The controversial cover art shows a chameleon breaking out of a cube which could represent either a building or an LSD sugar cube, and foliage on the back cover composed of marijuana leaves. A whimsical attitude toward narcotics is also expressed in one of the song lyrics.

Lysergic acid diethylamide A hallucinogenic drug

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known as acid, is a hallucinogenic drug. Effects typically include altered thoughts, feelings, and awareness of one's surroundings. Many users see or hear things that do not exist. Dilated pupils, increased blood pressure, and increased body temperature are typical. Effects typically begin within half an hour and can last for up to 12 hours. It is used mainly as a recreational drug and for spiritual reasons.

Cannabis (drug) preparation of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug and medicine

Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the Cannabis plant used for medical or recreational purposes. The main psychoactive part of cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of 483 known compounds in the plant, including at least 65 other cannabinoids. Cannabis can be used by smoking, vaporizing, within food, or as an extract.

Narcotic chemical substance with psycho-active properties

The term narcotic originally referred medically to any psychoactive compound with sleep-inducing properties. In the United States, it has since become associated with opiates and opioids, commonly morphine and heroin, as well as derivatives of many of the compounds found within raw opium latex. The primary three are morphine, codeine, and thebaine.

Track listing

Timings printed on the label are quite different from what the cover says. Timings from the cover are shown first, followed by the label's timing in brackets (not shown in one instance where they are the same).

Side one

  1. "Raganesh" (Cyrille Verdeaux) – 6:00 (6:50)
  2. "Weird Ceremony" (Verdeaux) – 4:30
  3. "La Fin du Début" (Verdeaux / Valérie Lagrange) – 4:00 (5:10)
  4. "Le Boeuf" (Yvan Coaquette) – 7:30 (8:50)

"Le Boeuf" is credited to Yvan Coaquette on the cover, but to Cyrille Verdeaux on the label.

Side two

  1. "Novavana" (Coaquette) – 7:30 (13:10)
  2. "Anantà" (Coaquette) – 14:00 (10:00)

Side two appears to have three songs, banded separately with gaps of silence, and nothing musically to indicate which two pieces belong together. The label suggests the first two are one song, while the cover suggests the latter two go together.

Personnel

Piano musical instrument

The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings.

Organ (music) musical keyboard instrument

In music, the organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more pipe divisions or other means for producing tones, each played with its own keyboard, played either with the hands on a keyboard or with the feet using pedals. The organ is a relatively old musical instrument, dating from the time of Ctesibius of Alexandria, who invented the water organ. It was played throughout the Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman world, particularly during races and games. During the early medieval period it spread from the Byzantine Empire, where it continued to be used in secular (non-religious) and imperial court music, to Western Europe, where it gradually assumed a prominent place in the liturgy of the Catholic Church. Subsequently it re-emerged as a secular and recital instrument in the Classical music tradition.

Electric piano musical instrument used by many of the great musicians such as Mozart

An electric piano is an electric musical instrument which produces sounds when a performer presses the keys of the piano-style musical keyboard. Pressing keys causes mechanical hammers to strike metal strings, metal reeds or wire tines, leading to vibrations which are converted into electrical signals by magnetic pickups, which are then connected to an instrument amplifier and loudspeaker to make a sound loud enough for the performer and audience to hear. Unlike a synthesizer, the electric piano is not an electronic instrument. Instead, it is an electro-mechanical instrument. Some early electric pianos used lengths of wire to produce the tone, like a traditional piano. Smaller electric pianos used short slivers of steel to produce the tone. The earliest electric pianos were invented in the late 1920s; the 1929 Neo-Bechstein electric grand piano was among the first. Probably the earliest stringless model was Lloyd Loar's Vivi-Tone Clavier. A few other noteworthy producers of electric pianos include Baldwin Piano and Organ Company and the Wurlitzer Company.

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References

  1. ↑ Personnel list from Fish Rising album (1975) by Steve Hillage
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