Horrific Child - L’Étrange Monsieur Whinster (Album Cover Art) - Framed Print - 16"H x 16"W

A 16"H x 16"W" framed print of L’Étrange Monsieur Whinster Album Cover Art 

It was described as perhaps the most frightening album ever released, Horrific Child‘s “L’Étrange Monsieur Whinster” was by Frenchman Jean-Pierre Massiera.

Massiera had previously been behind Les Maledictus Sound, a 1968 project that offered more than the odd suggestion that the culminations of his experimentations with sound would lead somewhere suitably disturbing. Massiera was influenced by the music of both Native Indians and gauchos in Argentina, their rhythmic chanting and primal tones easy to detect within his work

The early sixties saw Massiera experimenting with the psychedelic sounds of the period, playing guitar in the Milords and later The Monegasque, who used influences from horror films in their tunes.

By the release of Les Maledictus Sound, Massiera was experimenting with soundscapes, using screams, abstract beats and more straightforward instrumentation to create undefinable tracts of sound and volume to entrance the listener and on to “L’Étrange Monsieur Whinster”. The surrealistic cover does not come close to the sound. The album opens with initially barely perceptible heavy breathing, before launching into a fanfare of trumpets and what appears to be someone repeatedly falling on a piano. Breathing progresses to screaming, ranting and slamming doors, blasts of a choir being chased through a church and ultimately the reassuring sound of a deathly pipe organ; that’s the first five minutes. Over the course of three suites, a couple of cheery poems  and repeated attempts make you burst into tears, the album is utterly uncompromising and makes no attempts to be commercial nor offers any reasoning for why we have just experienced such disturbing sounds.