Peak practice
Three early ’70s rural-psych battlecries from French-Portuguese thaumaturge and hairy avant-folk adherents. By
BORN TO Portuguese parents in Lyon, France in 1941, Catherine Ribeiro’s early childhood was spent in bomb shelters, soundtracked by the ghostly howl of air raid sirens and haunted by the death of her younger brother in infancy. “An immense pile of waste and solitude,” is all she says of her pre-Alpes life, in the booklet accompanying these reissues, but there was also a short-lived acting career and a handful of yé-yé-folk EPs. “They were hoping to turn me into a pop [star],” writes Ribeiro. “They clearly didn’t know me at all.” Signed to Radio Luxembourg’s Disques Festival label, Ribeiro formed a backing band, 2 Bis, corralled by free-willed composer Patrice Moullet, the pair having met as actors in 1962, on the set of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers. In a large house in the hippy Paris commune of Nogent-sur-Marne they began experimenting with new sounds and new drugs, giving, in her words, “my brain the right to LIVE FREE”. Inspired by Piaf, Portuguese fado, and Malcolm Lowry’s tequila-soaked modernist death letter Under The Volcano, and informed by a suicide attempt in May ’68 after which she had to relearn how to speak, walk, and write, Ribeiro worked with Moullet on a ferocious new European sound that fused the anarchic political freedom of the era with the spirit of medieval folk ritual. Their selftitled 1969 debut, a startling alchemy of tribal drumming, abstracted medievalist drones and Ribeiro’s ritualistic witch-folk ebullitions, came with a proud “POP FREE” stamp. Rebadged as Alpes, the follow-up No. 2, engineered by Serge Gainsbourg producer Claude Dejacques, is a work of terrifying beauty, Ribeiro crafting violent Léo Ferréesque monologues of power, pain and possession, hissing, growling, crying, and barking against rolling tympani and deep organ pulses. The tragic, plaintive 15 Août 1970, “written two days after I conceived my daughter”, is her suicide note to a deserted Paris, while the 18-minute Poème Non Epique is minimalist Can improv, bare military drumming and wailing electric fuzz summoning up Ribeiro’s seething demon, raging through nightmarish banshee narratives of doomed romance. Recorded for Philips with Gong producer Gille Salles, 1971’s Âme Debout (“soul standing”) finds a (relatively) quieter, more melodic group, Moullet’s exquisite classical guitar, Farfisa and invented instruments of keening portent (cosmophone, percuphone) creating an occultist mood of ascension and unease. Ribeiro sings of love, madness and political uprising, her voice – “this thing I hated” – caught between lamentation and scream. Made at the height of the Vietnam war, Paix (“Peace”) begins with the folk-kosmische of Roc Alpin and swirling love song Jusqu’à Ce Que La Force De T’aimer Me Manque, before the hypnotic 16-minute space-rock title track that grants “Peace to hate”, and side-long shrieking requiem Un Jour… La Mort, where she informs a female Death she will renounce decadence for love. That battle between hate and love went on throughout Ribeiro’s career. After the death of her daughter in 2013 she now lives a quiet life in a German forest, but her world-view remains the same; as she writes in the notes to these essential LPs, “cravings for freedom, incomplete epiphanies, spontaneous careless decisions”.