*** official release: Oct 10th 2025 - shipping starts early Oct 2025 ***
 

Off The Record (faitiche 39), the new album by French collagist Roméo Poirier, is an amusing romp through the discarded history of recording studios. It contains fourteen miniatures based on accidental recordings of studio talk, revealing things that were never meant for the public: we hear instructions from studio staff, scraps of talk between musicians, or just microphones being adjusted, as well as false notes, false starts: everyone stops. Start again: 1, 2, 3, 4!

Poirier’s approach recalls Accumulation, an artform practiced by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri that involved piling up everyday items into assemblages. The objects themselves often remained unaltered, the artistic gesture consisting in the careful curating of a distinctive selection. Poirier’s audio collages explore similar terrain. The fourteen pieces on Off the Record combine more than a thousand found sounds from studio archives into complex miniatures. The audio content of these outtakes is twisted, stretched, cut, reassembled, slowed down and accelerated. Voices cut into a microgroove, from a very old recording, intertwine with digital voices gleaned from YouTube. All of them in dialogue, engaging the listener with the impression of being part of a new music group.

Poirier uses the mundane routine of setting up before the actual recording gets underway to tell a universal story about working in a recording studio. And he manages something few achieve, transforming specialist knowledge into a narrative whose beauty goes far beyond its immediate subject. It speaks to everyone, because the story is told in a musical language that is open and accessible, evoking magical images reminiscent of Oz – a world consisting less of events than of camp hallucinations, captured in grainy black-and-white photographs. En passant, Poirier shows us how the notion of material accumulation can produce great art.

Roméo Poirier at Studio Klein Leberau, 2025


Recorded and produced by Roméo Poirier
Mixed by Léo Spiritof at Studio Klein Leberau
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung
Design by Tim Tetzner
Photographs by Roméo Poirier
Voices on The List: Rodolphe Burger, Casper Clausen, Brian Foote, Richard Greenan, Josh Inyang, Lisa Lerkenfeldt, Nick Malkin, Michael Marshall, Marc Melia, Jake Muir, Andrew Pekler, Andrew PM Hunt, Philippe Poirier, Sylviane Poirier, Jack Sheen, Rafael Vogel, Patricia Wolf.
Special thanks to Simon Burger, Rutger De Brabander, Anne De Smet, Jan Jelinek, Tim Tetzner, Anton Vanderhasselt.
À mon père, toute ma musique.