These French avant-gardists play both classical music and jazz, eschewing drums for a primary reliance on strings, horns and piano. Art Zoyd have released a number of albums on European labels. Phase IV is generally acknowledged to be one of their best, a two-disc set of excellently recorded, unstructured blurts of evocative instrumental sound that ebb and flow in meter and volume and never stop resembling the unpleasant soundtrack to an unpleasant art film. Les Espaces Inquiets takes a more experimental tack but is essentially the same sort of affair, with polyrhythmic threads of various instruments weaving in and out of each other in seemingly formless hunks, all cut from one endless ramble.
Prométhée, a far simpler solo album from one of Zoyd’s two string players, contains music from a theatrical production; it varies crazily from quietly soothing to ear-splittingly tense.