Erick Legrand - Voodoo Music

The fifth release in Nina Walsh’s ongoing liberation of her late partner Erick Legrand’s tumultuously unfettered archive comes with a mission to illustrate his towering presence in the cosmic sounds she later created with Andrew Weatherall in the Woodleigh Research Facility.

To make that point from the off, Voodoo Music kicks off with ‘Voodoo People’, possibly a familiar glimmer in the W.R.F. universe but here in startling original form as unearthed by Nina in Erick’s colossal vault. Laid down around 2007 before her super-productive studio sessions with Mr Weatherall flamed on after Erick passed in November 2011, the track shimmers like some uncanny portent of W.R.F.’s futuristic groove excursions, followed by ten audacious manifestations bathed in the arcane luminescence of unearthed sonic blueprints predicting things to come.

French-Algerian Erick hailed from the Camden noise scene when Nina clicked with him working at London hotspot the Fortress. “Erick was a complete lunatic! He was absolute trouble, but I fell for the guy. I knew he only had a certain amount of time left but we didn’t know how much. He lived his life to the absolute max. We had a lot of fun and learnt a hell of a lot together.”

Before he departed, Erick asked Nina to make sure she did something with his music, bequeathing the impossibly dense archive of loops and sound blasts her and Andrew called the Akashic Library of Sound (“twenty years of him writing and making all these loops”). Of all the people in the world I could trust to work with Erick’s hard-drive it was Andrew. They never even met but Erick had the utmost respect for him, not least for how he'd helped form me over the years. With my own twenty-odd years of amassing multi-track tapes in messy file corridors, W.R.F was born.

“Erick became the invisible third member when we began delving into his hard drive and in the studio with us on quite a few levels. We just ended up picking up his energy. His filing was so atrocious you’d just keep finding more and more folders.”

Foraged from Erick’s Song library, Voodoo Music traverses the fractured satellites of Erick’s impulsive muse as he splatters alien sounds and dismembered guitars over cavernously melodic bass and his own deftly programmed drums.

The juddering electro ritual of ‘Voodoo People’ may already be recognisable thanks to “London calling” and “voodoo music” vocal hooks, quite possibly from Erick’s photographer wife, Claudine Schafer-legrand, who passed in 1996. “There is quite a cacophony of noise coming through the headphone spill on the raw vocal file and I’m pretty sure that’s Claudine and it was some kind of club they were promoting. I’m not 100 per cent sure about that. The song was lost in his world forever then I stumble across it 20 years later. All its parts appeared in one folder in the Akashic Library, which is why it’s difficult to date this mix. There are about five different versions on Erick’s computer. I chose this one because it’s mixed better than the others. Erick would change the name of songs a lot so there’s ‘Voodoo People’, ‘Welcome Voodoo People’, ‘Voodoo Music’; the same song but different versions. It’s actually just as bad as mine and Andrew’s Yadicks and Yaknobs.”

The ensuing ten tracks straddle a gamut of deliciously atmospheric altered state starbursts from between 2004 and recordings made in Folkestone the year Erick passed, plus some moved to the Songs folder (“It’s almost like he was preparing his legacy”). These include the dissonant hiphop shiver of ‘Ace21’, ‘Doing It’’s slo-mo Link Wray twangscape and ‘La’’s bell-lathered fuzz spurt displaying “the swampy guitar, spy movie kind of vibes going on near the end. There was some dark shit during this period. I think he knew things were drawing to a close so it was his way of processing all the shit he’d discovered.”

Erick’s wicked humour rears blackly on 2010’s ‘Train To Fuckville’, it’s ominous slug-fart bass mauling Washington gogo drum lollop sprayed with B-52s-style sci-fi keyboards. “Erick was such an amazing drum programmer because technically he didn’t really know what he was doing. He was doing it by ear and sounds like a real drummer. There’s a lot of subtle double kicks and stuff going on.”

Erick’s library found itself well-fondled on tracks recorded by Nina and Andrew during the extraordinarily prolific stretch that produced records including Qualia and Fort Beulah twelves. The unholy resonance that coated the latter’s sonorous hoodoo twinkles in the celestial strings, keening melodica and poignant keyboard melodies of ‘Resistance’. 2009’s ‘Amor’ lumbers into life like Juju-era Siouxsie and the Banshees, all spidery guitars and sonorous bass rumbling like a water buffalo’s Serengeti bidet. Spaghetti western twang – another Erick fixation - garnishes the earth-shaking ‘Meteor’ (“When I hear how sometimes he pushes certain resonances or detunes the guitar that’s a real reflection of his personality.”)

The curtain closes with the barrelling rumpus of ‘Bad Girl’, its naughty sample lurching into charging chaos as the drunken trumpet player and drummer collapse against a free jazz skronk attack. As ever, reaching into her late partner’s bottomless vault to unleash such top tackle invoked memories and familiar spirits for Nina.

“Erick had already passed when Andrew and I started working together but I could definitely feel him every day. It really did feel like the three of us were working together and still does now when I’m working on my own. I could feel them pissing themselves as I was going through these badly named files trying to find this stuff the other day. There were loads I hadn’t heard and Andrew had missed too. I could feel their excitement with me as I was getting excited.”

“It was lovely to have that energy again all those years later. It’s a great outlet for grief too. Creativity always is. To be able to feel the energy of the people you’re grieving, create something lovely and have a laugh is quite a unique thing, I guess.”

Nina stresses there will still be a very special release to mark Erick’s birth and ascension day in November, perhaps the ultimate consummation of this sacred triangle.
There are also plans for a limited run of W.R.F’s remix of Voodoo People, ‘Vous Du’ on vinyl next year.

Kris Needs & Val Bonnacon