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 supposedly from 1973, "L'étrange Monsieur Whinster", which would open the album of the same name (but where it was titled "Frayeur") released in 1976 under yet another distinct project identity, Horrific Child, and where it was also the only thing really worth keeping, as despite the album's cranked up weirdness, a good measure of associated goofiness could still not be avoided.
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 could remain locked away as if it were a dirty secret, while all the throwaway stuff he could muster got sent to the stores is what's really bizarre. 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 anyone could ever get him to stop doing shtick for much more than 5 minutes.
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