ODG198 : The Wrong Object / In and Outflown Takes

Cover art by Marc Atkins

The Wrong Object was born from various short-lived Liège-based groups formed in the late 1990s, including a duet involving Michel Delville and Andrew Norris (featured here on several tracks as a slide guitarist and a lyricist alongside singer Isabelle Doyen). Its infancy was marked by an effort to create musical objects and mobiles inspired by their current heroes, who, as the band’s first home-made flyers claimed, included Bartok, Mingus and Amon Tobin alongside Zappa and the Canterbury Scene. This release has no other ambition but to document ten previously unreleased or unavailable compositions, most of them rescued from antique flash drives, minidisc recordings and reel-to-reel tapes. These are pieces of original material recorded both in the studio and live (sometimes by the band themselves, sometimes by someone in the audience) in the prototypical phases of the development of the band’s music and aesthetics. This was largely before the band began to stabilize into durable, semi-permanent units around the personalities of band founder Michel Delville and tenured drummer Laurent Delchambre (the Stories from the Shed and the After the Exhibition line-ups lasted for ca. five and eight years, respectively), which is when Delville and his cohorts went on to explore more complex and intricate post-modal chamber jazz rock territories, recording and touring extensively across Europe in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. At that time The Wrong Object was still basically a musical collective rather than a band in the traditional sense (for a non-exhaustive list of musicians having contributed to the band’s development over the last twenty-five years click here), one whose goal was, as critic Jim Allen fittingly puts it, to “arrive at an amalgam of jazz, rock and prog with a wicked sense of humor … gleefully pulling the rug out from under you whenever the spirit moves them”.