Pour Pauwels - Guy Skornik (1970)

Back in the early 70s, when I was a gullible pup with a taste for the goofy and cosmic, I read a book called The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels. It came out in France in 1960, but I guess it took a decade to reach the paperback rack at my local newsagent. It was gloriously bonkers as I recall, the precursor of Erich von Daniken and the like, but went beyond ancient astronauts to cover the paranormal, alchemy, Nazi occultism (always a favorite), Atlantis, Eastern spirituality, and secret societies, written in a breathless Fortian style. It was all very silly, but it became a key text for the more New Agey side of the 60s/70s counterculture in France and elsewhere. It went through a lot of printings and editions under various titles, but I think it's out of print now.

Ten years after publication, an album called Pour Pauwels by Guy Skornik appeared. Even without speaking French, it's clear that Skornik was into this sort of thing from titles such as "What is realitié?", "Gurdjieff", and "Fulcanelli." Not speaking French could well be an advantage seeing how poorly this kind of cosmic hippy malarky has weathered. Portenous songs about alchemists, mystics, and Easter Island statues have never been my cup of tea so my monoglot ignorance means I can appreciate and enjoy this record completely out of context, without flinching in anticipation of the next reference to higher levels of consciousness, ancient preachings and the underelying oneness of all things. And it's a great record, psychedelic without any of the usual dull white blues that even the weirdest stuff of this era (even my beloved Krautrock) sometimes lapsed into. Psychedelic chanson rather than rock, you might say, where a mournful piano-driven song might get turned inside out at any point by a wayward electric guitar and crashing timpani. And who doesn't like that sort of thing?

Take the opening track, "What is realitié?" which flips back and forth between sparse, almost wimpy ballad to freaky guitar, heavenly chorus, and orchestration, only to end (like a lot of French avant-whatever of that period) in a chorus female orgasmic sighs.

Side two starts with the epic "l'ile de Paques", a track which might remind listeners of Gainsbourg's Melody Nelson, except this came about a year earlier. Make of that what you will.

There's not a lot about Skornik online (or there wasn't last time I looked). His French Wikipedia entry is terse. He's still making music, mostly library music with his wife, under the name Skornik and Skornik. There's a lot of it on Spotify, and some of it is pretty effective but not really what I'm onto these days.

His first release, I think, was this, from 1967, back when he was fresh-faced and fairly straightforward if you overlook the backward introduction and processed vocals.

Like Gainsbourg, he wrote pretty songs for actresses - sometimes the same actresses. (Later: Turns out this was the B-side of her only record, the A-side of which was written by - surprise, surprise - Serge Gainsbourg.)

The same year as he released Pour Pauwels, he did the soundtrack to a film called Les amours particulières, released in the US as The Room of Chains, of which IMdB succinctly says "For fun, two men kidnap and torment women in bondage" which doesn't sound very Gurdjieffian to me. You can find the title song, sung by Lana Grey, on YouTube, but it's nothing like you'd expect from that description...

Getting the tricky first post out of the way

 And a happy new year to one and all. As is usual today is the day for resisting big thoughts, mad ideas, and outlandish schemes like starting a blog again. Every year or so I think about it and sometimes even get around to creating a logo out of some old clip art and dredging up an obscure title... and then the inspiration evaporates and another year passes and...

But this year, maybe I'll get around to finishing a tentative, opening post, and who knows where it will go from there?

 It used to be so easy. I was one of the first bloggers, you know, back when they were called online diaries or web journals and you had to hand-carve them out of raw HTML. But that was in another country and long ago and I'll save all that nerdy nostalgia about dial-up modems for another day. 

I'm surprised to find blogger.com is still around. It's way down the list of Google tools and I missed it the first time I tried to find it this morning. It's still the same as the last time I tried to blog, back before WordPress and the like tried to lure me away with fancy, flashy things that only made sense if I was a sexy young lifestyle coach with a sideline in wellness candles. No, Blogger is all I need in its most basic, barebones form. Words and the occasional picture.

So let us begin...