LISTENING SESSION #03 :

ROMÉO POIRIER - OFF THE RECORD (FAITICHE, 2025)

RESERVE

DECEMBER. 3, 2025 @ 19.30h (BOOKED)

Doors open half an hour before listening.

We´re happy to welcome back Roméo Poirier for a listening session of his new album Off The Record (Faitiche, 2025). Roméo will be present for a Q&A and record signing session, and we also welcome people without reservation to stop by after the listening session for a drink on this December evening.

Off The Record is the highly anticipated follow-up to his 2022 album Living Room (also on Jan Jelinek´s Faitiche label). The album is basically meant for a listening session with its detailed, almost radio-theatre-like, journey through recorded history. Accidental recordings of studio talks, talks between musicians, microphone adjustments and more is mixed in a collage with musical interludes of ambient music, loops and all kinds of background sounds. The result is a truly strange and amusing musical trip. For the ones who saw Roméo perform at mi - so back in 2023, you have a bit of a clue what this is about, as he was basically trying out early material that ended up on this record. Come join us and Roméo the day before his performance at Silent Green, where he will share the stage with Andrew Pekler at the Temple of Faitiche evening.

Listen to the album here (though if you want to come, maybe wait..)

  • This event is FREE & limited to 10 seats. RSVP here

  • We listen together in silence for the duration of the record on our unique, Japanese handmade Listude speakers.

  • We welcome you to browse records before & after listening.

  • Please arrive on time to avoid disturbing the listening experience.

  • Drinks will be available on donation.

Off The Record (faitiche 39), the new album by French collagist Roméo Poirier, is an amusing romp through the discarded history of recording studios. It contains fourteen miniatures based on accidental recordings of studio talk, revealing things that were never meant for the public: we hear instructions from studio staff, scraps of talk between musicians, or just microphones being adjusted, as well as false notes, false starts: everyone stops. Start again: 1, 2, 3, 4!

Poirier’s approach recalls Accumulation, an artform practiced by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri that involved piling up everyday items into assemblages. The objects themselves often remained unaltered, the artistic gesture consisting in the careful curating of a distinctive selection. Poirier’s audio collages explore similar terrain. The fourteen pieces on Off the Record combine more than a thousand found sounds from studio archives into complex miniatures. The audio content of these outtakes is twisted, stretched, cut, reassembled, slowed down and accelerated. Voices cut into a microgroove, from a very old recording, intertwine with digital voices gleaned from YouTube. All of them in dialogue, engaging the listener with the impression of being part of a new music group.

Poirier uses the mundane routine of setting up before the actual recording gets underway to tell a universal story about working in a recording studio. And he manages something few achieve, transforming specialist knowledge into a narrative whose beauty goes far beyond its immediate subject. It speaks to everyone, because the story is told in a musical language that is open and accessible, evoking magical images reminiscent of Oz – a world consisting less of events than of camp hallucinations, captured in grainy black-and-white photographs. En passant, Poirier shows us how the notion of material accumulation can produce great art. - Faitiche