Before Visitors, there was Maledictus Sound, among the many other projects Jean-Pierre Massiera came up with, but while they are all nominally different, so far I have found them all to be frustratingly the same, starting with a template of more or less novelty stock music and then piling on some hired instrumental guns, extraneous tapes, and all sound effects available in the studio (so maybe John Zorn owed him a little something during his Tex Avery moods...). The most frustrating part of it though, is when he would occasionally leave a small gem behind, suggesting he could actually bring it should he want to; but he didn't feel like it, so screw you.
In this case, it's a bonus track from 1973 which, for some aggravating reason, only got to see the light of day in a reissue of this album, and whose title, "L'étrange Monsieur Whinster", would double as the album title for another project, Horrific Child, but where that track or any other with that name is nowhere to be found, much less any one better than this one (or even close to it).
Nominal mindf#$%ery aside, it really is a remarkable collage, always changing gears but with a sense of flow, that's unexpected, exciting and, for once, a bit creepy (unlike the cartoon monsters on the original cover of the album); and the fact that something like that remained locked away as if it were a dirty secret, while all the throwaway stuff he could muster got sent to the stores is just grrrrr. Sure, it can also spur some hope that there might be a lost project still to unearth, where Massiera took his music a tad more seriously and consistently delivered the goods; but at this point I assume that, just like those weathered comedians, whose whole mental make-up gets conditioned by years of appearing in talk-shows, there was simply no way no one could ever get him to stop doing shtick for much more than 5 minutes.
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