Patrick Vian was seventeen when his father died. That father was Boris Vian, the novelist, trumpeter and professional provocateur who nicknamed his son "Bisonnot," and by 1968 Patrick had inherited a version of that same restlessness. He was twenty-six, playing guitar at the Sorbonne, when students occupied the university and Red Noise gave some of their first shows inside the barricades.
The band didn't survive long. Gigs reportedly ran until police broke them up. A drug arrest in the Netherlands finished the lineup off, and the group's more politically committed members split away to form Komintern, leaving Vian to reconstitute Red Noise with guitarist and drummer Philip Barry, bassist Daniel Geoffroy, organist John Livengood, percussionist Austin Blue and saxophonist and flautist Jean-Claude Cenci.
What was left of the band went into Studio Europasonor on 28 November 1970 and recorded an entire album in a day, with Gérard Terronès producing for his own Futura label.
The results don't sound rushed so much as unwilling to slow down.
Song titles read like fragments torn from a manifesto and a joke book at once: "Galactic Sewer-Song," "Obsession Sexuelle N°1," "20 Mirror Mozarts Composing On Tea Bag And 1/2 Cup Bra." Most tracks barely clear a minute, free jazz saxophone colliding with garage-rock riffing and lyrics that swing between political satire and outright nonsense, before the record hands the whole second side to a single sprawling piece pushing nineteen minutes. It's still, by all accounts, tamer than what Red Noise did on stage.
That's the record's real value now: not polish, but the sound of a band treating a recording studio as another occupied building, to be used up before someone kicks them out. It sits closer to the confrontational noise of early industrial acts than to the prog bands it gets filed alongside, and its refusal to resolve into a single style is the point.
Vian didn't stay in that lane. In 1975 he scored the film Hu-Man, starring Jeanne Moreau and Terence Stamp, then recorded the largely electronic, unexpectedly melodic solo album Bruits et Temps Analogues the following year for the Egg label, home at the time to Vangelis and Tim Blake. After that he mostly disappeared from public life, resurfacing only occasionally, until his death in Apt in February 2023.
Sarcelles - Lochères remains the only full document of the noisier version of him, and it hasn't dated into safety the way most 1970 curios eventually do.
