What Pray-Pax were doing in 1980s France wasn’t avant-garde, not really. It was instinctual, a kind of sonic play that made “genre” feel like a language they’d never learned to speak. The French duo of Thierry Azam and Alain Michon, belong firmly in the latter camp. Their music—recently exhumed and compiled as The Lolita Years via Istanbul/London label and NTS Radio mainstay Zel Zele—doesn’t posture as “experimental” the way we shorthand it now, as a polite term for something vaguely noisy or off-kilter. No, this is experimental in the naked, primordial sense: curious, impulsive, deliriously free.

Formed as part of the 1980s art collective Lolita Danse, Pray-Pax weren’t making “albums.” They were scoring performance art: creating sonic playgrounds for dancers, painters, and general beautiful weirdos across Europe. Think no wave without the hangover, post-punk that’s never met a metronome, jazz as a fever dream. The music on The Lolita Years feels like a broadcast from another dimension—one where Tuxedomoon jams with Lizzy Mercier Descloux in a cathedral filled with reverb, while Jac Berrocal scribbles notes in the corner.

Tracks like “Domani non c’e sarà più” are all concrete collage and psychic disarray, opening the record like a séance conducted via tape loop. “Can’t” slides between avant-jazz and downtown clatter, an unhinged traffic jam that feels weirdly romantic. Elsewhere, “Disparus” drifts through alien requiems, “T’sannah” sounds like a traveling circus run by surrealists, and “Gabriel pleut” closes it all out in a drizzle of haunted melancholy.

Alongside the album, the design studio Mestiza Estudio will release À dix, on n’est pas fous – The Lolita Years, a companion book assembling more than 10,000 archival images, sketches, and mementos from the Lolita Danse collective. Together, they paint a portrait of an era that’s as unruly as it is inspiring—a reminder that not everything needs to make sense to matter.

The Lolita Years is out October 24 via Zel Zele. The book follows in December.

It’s rare that a reissue feels alive, but The Lolita Years doesn’t just resurface old sounds—it resurrects a spirit of fearless play, unfiltered collaboration, and the beautiful disorder of people who never thought to ask for permission.

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