If one thing can be said about Lizzy Mercier Descloux, it’s that she moved quickly. The perpetual multi-hyphenate, who passed away from cancer in 2004, is today almost completely unknown, despite her crossing paths with more than a few legendary names, all orbiting the New York art-underground of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Here’s a sample: Patti Smith provided material for “Desiderata,” Descloux’sfirst book of poetry; she was instrumental in the creation of the early France-based punk publication “Rock Magazine,” co-created with her partner Michel Esteban; she counted Richard Hell and Jean-Michel Basquiat as friends and sometimes boyfriends; she acted in experimental films directed by Amos Poe; and she recorded six albums of music over a 10-year period.It’s the final part of her winding resume that is bringing her back into the public eye. “Press Color,” her debut album, was reissued by Light in the Attic on August 14, the first of five planned releases from the label. Originally released on Ze Records (co-founded by Esteban) in 1979, only two years after Descloux arrived in New York from Paris, “Press Color” is a stunningly hip document of the colliding sounds of downtown New York, where punk was overlapping with funk, disco, and noise to create music that remains uncategorizable. (Some call it “no-wave,” but this sounds nothing like James Chance or DNA.) Her image that adorns the cover shows her looking off-camera, soft features, spikey hair, and a resounding, pouty stare, all combining in an effortless cool. “I once saw French punk singer Lizzy Mercier Descloux douse her cigarette in the drink of a boy who was bothering her,” the critic James Wolcott wrote, confirming the promise of the image.The album opens with “Fire,” a cover of a song by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown made better, all forward-leaning pulse like a Giorgio Moroder-produced dance-floor eruption played by Fela Kuti’s Africa ’70 band. Descloux floats on top of the rhythm with swagger and unwavering confidence, her calm singsong occasionally turning to yelps in time with the beat. The song, like the rest of the album, was recorded at Blank Tapes studio, a legendary New York creative hub that saw everybody from Lydia Lunch to Afrika Bambaataa to Chaka Kahn walk through its doors.The rest of “Press Color” gives us a host of different access points. There is the heavy influence of the Compass Point Sound that emanated out of Jamaica (she recorded her next album, “Mambo Nassau,” at the studio there) while others bear the mark of the slick reggae Serge Gainsbourg was dabbling in around the same time. The end of the album gets weirder, and includes songs from a previous EP she recorded under the name Rosa Yemen as well as a track called “Morning High” that features Patti Smith and Descloux reading Arthur Rimbaud, which would be the goofiest thing on “Press Color” if there weren’t two different instrumental covers of the “Mission Impossible” theme song.The recording of her follow-up “Mambo Nassau” saw Descloux dive deeper into a more global sound. In 1983, after reportedly tracing Rimbaud’s fatal path from France to Africa, she recorded her album “Zulu Rock” in South Africa, and later recorded “One for the Soul” in Rio in 1985, which features contributions from Chet Baker. A year later, she recorded her final album, “Suspense,” which brought her back in contact with the scene from which she was born through a collaboration with Mark Cunningham of the band Mars. (One more album was recorded almost a decade later, but never released.)Throughout the 1990s Descloux globe-hopped — she lived in the West Indies for a spell — and eventually wrote a novel, called “Buenaventura,” before transitioning to painting, which she continued after moving back to France around 2000 until her early death four years later. She is typically downplayed, like most women, in the history of underground culture in the New York City of the period. But Descloux is finally being recognized by for her pioneering work expanding Western rock music to incorporate new sounds and new adventures.
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