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 or so to reach the paperback rack of 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 encompass the paranormal, alchemy, Nazi occultism, Atlantis, Eastern spirituality, and secret societies, all written in a breathless Fortian style. It was all very silly, but apparently 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 seriously into this sort of thing judging by titles such as "What is realitié?", "Gurdjieff", and "Fulcanelli." Listening to the album I have to say that not speaking French could well be a blessing 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 underlying oneness of all things. maaaaan. And it's a pretty good listen, psychedelic without any of the ploddingly 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 of 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 for 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...