In 1976, a couple of young French dreamers finagled their way into New York’s punk scene under the auspices of their newly minted magazine, Rock News. Lizzy Mercier Descloux and boyfriend Michel Esteban took full advantage of the Lower East Side’s perpetually open door, scooping ad hoc interviews with the likes of Patti Smith and Television, and became vivid regulars (and Descloux a regular heartbreaker) on the CBGBs circuit. Across the English Channel, they met with the Sex Pistols, and brought stories of nihilists and poets back to France. (France shrugged.) Just a year later, having appeared in Amos Poe and Ivan Kral’s Blank Generation, they had the audacity to declare punk dead, and closed the magazine. Sick of their stuffy city, they moved to New York, and roomed with Smith, Descloux’s Rimbaudian comrade, in a loft propped up by white columns.
As Descloux drifted between simultaneous relationships with Richard Hell and various other artists, she and Esteban split but maintained a close personal and creative bond. She acquired a Fender Jazzmaster, and formed Rosa Yemen with Esteban’s brother, Didier, just around the time of the legendary Artists Space noise series immortalized in Brian Eno’s No New York compilation. Following unhinged gigs at the Kitchen and the Mudd Club where Descloux would scream herself silly and wrap the mic cable around her throat, the duo (named in honor of European activists like Rosa Luxembourg and the Baader-Meinhof group) consecrated their fractious musical relationship in a 12-inch, Live in N.Y.C. July 1978. It became the fifth release on the nascent ZE Records, which Esteban had founded earlier that year with the British writer Michael Zilkha.
On that 12-inch, only "Decryptated" has any significant percussion, which sounds like it was slapped out on an empty bucket. The record is a clash between two guitars, the lead needling with the intensity of a polygraph test administered by a fascist regime, the loose rhythm taking its cues from dub. It’s beginners’ stuff, very much in the vein of Rosa Yemen’s destructive no wave peers, though the atmosphere is consummately terrifying, fraught with the danger of illicit negotiations on dark street corners. "Herpes Simplex" starts with the sound of gasping and frantic footsteps, and then Descloux comes in, yelping about the STI in fractured hysterics. She shudders the word "metabolisme!" like Dracula rising from his coffin.
There are probably dozens, or maybe even hundreds of records like Rosa Yemen Live in N.Y.C.—gripping if unexceptional also-rans that may find an audience as reissue culture has to dig deeper. Light In The Attic has appended these songs to the first in their Lizzy Mercier Descloux reissue series, which focuses on Press Color, the first album under her own name, and one that warrants the marquee billing. In February 1979, as Sid Vicious was being sprinkled on Nancy Spungen’s grave, Descloux, Didier Esteban, Erik Eliasson (from Marie et les Garçons) and Jimmy Young headed into the third room of Bob Blank’s Blank Tapes studio at 37 West 20th Street for 10 days of intense recording. It was still under construction at the time, but then so was Descloux. Where Parisian studios would have scoffed at this bunch of amateurs, Blank welcomed their naïve creative impulses.
Press Color was originally intended to be a group release, but ZE decided that Descloux’s name and face was a better selling point. At the time they were pushing their "mutant disco" aesthetic on their less fully formed artists. Cristina, Zilkha’s wife, had released "Disco Clone", which sent up the interchangeability of women within the scene. Descloux was working within the label’s prescribed sound, but she emerges here as a unique, instinctive voice, abandoning the harrowed yelps of Rosa Yemen to trill and jabber with glee. Uninterested in the conventions of rock, she pursued her guitar playing just the same way.
As a New York newcomer, the failed '60s dream didn’t oppress Descloux in the same way as it did her new peers: she rose early to browse the fish market, swam in Central Park’s Lasker Pool, and scaled rooftops for the views. Her peers and boyfriends recall her as the only person who wore bright colors in a monochromatic scene. And so Press Color is full of joy and possibility rather than psychic pain and bankruptcy, opening with a shimmying cover of Arthur Brown’s "Fire" that moves at the pace of an enervated woodpecker. Descloux’s strong French accent just adds to the charm: "You’ve been so blind! You fall be’ind!" she explodes amidst the glittering whirl.
There are more covers: a skeletal take on Lalo Shifrin’s "Mission Impossible" theme and "Jim on the Move", where Descloux seems to vocalize every twitch of her tongue. A strain of no wave malevolence lingers in "Torso Corso", "Wawa" (whose tumbling bassline deserves to be fully iconic), and the dubbed-out "Aya Mood", which show off the band’s nimble, minimalist interplay. Her shuffling, splayed redux of Peggy Lee’s "Fever" as "Tumor" has an obvious morbid humor, though it’s the original "No Golden Throat" where her disposition and tastes come through most strongly.
By all accounts, Descloux wasn’t into slogging away in the studio, and resisted Michel Esteban’s attempts to get her to sing properly. "Right now I’m not at all a writer of words," she told New York Rocker in the summer of 1980. "I’m using the words completely for what they sound like, how they fit with the rhythms… What’s beautiful is that I don’t speak perfect English but I can get lost in the dictionary and just discover the words." "Golden Throat" is her protest at being asked to fit any idiom: she repeats the line "I’ll never have a golden throat" a dozen different ways, seducing it, mocking it, playing her voicebox like a plastic slide whistle. Phonetic chatter litters the relaxed reggae guitar, prefiguring the direction she would pursue later in her career as she recorded in Nassau and apartheid-era Soweto. She never met the Slits, but they shared a love of reggae and silliness. European avant-garde artists are often self-serious, or considered to be, but Descloux and Ari Up (along with Palmolive and the Raincoats' Ana da Silva) brought a welcome playful streak to what could be an austere scene.
Compared to 1979’s major punk releases, it’s not hard to see why Press Color didn’t make much of a dent in the U.S., UK, or even France. Next to the likes of Fear of Music, Entertainment!, The B-52s, Tom Verlaine, The Raincoats, This Heat, Broken English, Metal Box, London Calling, Cut, and Y, it’s a vivid curio and cool personality splatter rather than a cultural landmark. Descloux would make those later (even if their recognition remains overdue). What Press Color does is distill our collective excitement and unceasing wonder at a scene that’s almost four decades old. New York's no wave and punk’s protagonists were down in the squalor, waging a brutal, draining fight against their city, their country, the commoditization of their sound. As an outsider, Descloux was able to soak up their energy and revolution and use it to fuel the discovery of her own cultural identity and purpose. Press Color isn’t wildly original, but it’s the making of one.
