Spaces Oddities: 1975-1979

Jean-Pierre Decerf was born in the Paris suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1948, lived in Paris until 2003, and now lives as a hermit in a remote village in the Touraine. From the early '70s to the mid '80s, this self-taught musician composed about 20 albums of production and library music with generic cover art and titles (Out of the Way, Keys of Future, Pulsations, etc.) that evoke interstellar travel. These experimental discs, made with love, humility, and rudimentary means, had no ambition other than to accompany other peoples' images. By exhuming these obscurities from the dustbin of history, Born Bad Records have decided otherwise. Archaeologists with an agenda, they seek to give Decerf the renown he deserves: that of an innovator whose rhythmic, synthetic compositions inspired the harbingers of the French touch (Air comes to mind), and were sampled by many East Coast rappers, including the Wu-Tang Clan.