"Trying to play catch-up with some very well-deserving titles that for some reason slipped through the cracks over here...L'ocelle Mare is one Thomas Bonvalet, an acoustic guitarist playing solo in various spaces around Europe with a tight seal around the concepts of structured improvisation. What you might think would be dry and stuffy instead comes across with a manner of restlessness, cramming melody and mood into complex and sometimes violent chord structures. There's a little percussion looped in and a stunning control over rhythms that, at 45 RPMs, threatens to jump right off the turntable. Recorded in 2006 and released earlier this year, these untitled works seize opportunities to dazzle, melding Derek Bailey-style improve with touches of flamenco and the sort of dashed-off melodies you remember from Gastr del Sol. Bonvalet, a Frenchman, is one to watch, sharp and dexterous with his instrument, and capable of building fiery moods that rip the strings right out. Incredible, moving, and probably long gone - only 222 copies were pressed. Hit the label up and see if you can still score one; non-thinkers needn't apply."

"Thomas Bonvalet is half of Cheval de Frise, a frantic French math rock duo consisting of acoustic guitar and drums. For his solo work Bonvalet goes by the name of L'ocelle Mare. This brilliant LP finds his classical guitar in a series of deserted French locations. Bats, insects and birds contributes to the atmosphere, or the stony reverbrations of a ruined stable harshen the guitar sound. Bonvalet plays with dynamism, one might say virtuosity, but a few of these 16 brief untitled tracks simply luxuriate in the tiny sounds of his favourite outdoor spaces. The result is a remarkable balancing act between contemplative listening and explosive musical energy, all of it beautifully recorded. If these are improvisations, they are performed with a strong compositional sense. This, plus Bonvalet's acrobatics, recall a very early Fred Frith. Bonvalet stamps his feet in a moment of almost-flamenco, then honks into a harmonica or holds a rattle while plunging into double-handed ecstasies of scraping, like a one man band in a hurry. He switches from one rhythm into another, or from harmonious to atonal with great sense of logical development nad timbral variety. Sometimes he has the earthy flamboyance of Marc Ribbot, though his roots sounds classical and Mediterranean. So the final track leaps from a web of string scrabblings into a kind of tarantella dance, then abruptly stops and we listen to the spider's supper singing in the background."

"Franskmanden Thomas Bonvalet arbejder med en spansk guitar i soloprojektet L'Ocelle Mare. Han er del af gruppen Cheval de Frise, men opererer her helt alene p? en lp, som udkommer p? det tjekkiske pladeselskab Minority Records. Den kraftige vinylplade b?rer en simpel og umiddelbar, men ogs? st?rkt koncentreret lyd. Indspilningerne har fundet sted i l?bet af blot en uge p? forskellige afsidesliggende steder i Frankrig, og man fornemmer hele tiden stilheden under og omkring musikken. Pladens 16 improvisatoriske stykker er nysgerrigt unders?gt frem. Flere steder anvendes ganske lange passager med enten stilhed eller helt d?mpet ber?ring af instrumentet, og disse passager fungerer tilsyneladende som en slags till?b til det mere intense spil, hvor Bonvalet lader sig rive med og ?bner sit spil i korte virrende forl?sninger. P? den m?de virker det meget rigtigt med den isolation, han har sat sig selv i under indspilningerne. Jeg ser for mig en mand, der sidder med sin guitar og lytter og venter. T?lmodighed har helt klart v?ret et essentielt v?rkt?j. Udover guitaren anvendes noget, der lyder som en mundharpe og nogle klokker, men mest interessant er hans brug af genstande, som ikke lader sig identificere. Der bliver sl?et p? noget og rusket med ting omkring guitaren, og det hele balancerer med en rigtig lyd, hvor man fornemmer at han har form?et at holde fast i s?lvtr?den. Det er uforstyrret og behersket lavet."

"L'ocelle Mare is the solo project from Thomas Bonvalet, guitarist from Cheval de Frise." (I just love/hate it when writers quote press releases without attribution). Bonvalet performs a series of essentially unaccompanied acoustic guitar pieces in wildly varying settings: an abandoned church, old rock quarry etc. One assumes he is seeking inspiration as much as the particular acoustic peculiar to each. What results is remarkable music?abstract, expressionistic yet extremely coherent. Bonvalet manages to keep his balance atop that high wire of severe experimentalism where the player eschews recognizable melodies, set meter and overall structure that the majority of musicians topple from immediately leaving naught but a splattered mess. Bonvalet manages to embroider his wild and wooly skein of improvisation and exploration with a subtle but unmistakable sense of identity, passage by passage with each of these cunningly rendered relevant to one another resulting in a viable sense of song per se. More than anything L'ocelle Mare recalls John McLaughlin's pre-Mahavishnu outing My Goals Beyond-perhaps invested with a bracing touch of added spasticity. Very refreshing."

"Hurrah for Minority Records. I never heard of L'Ocelle Mare, the baby project of Thomas Bonvalet, of Cheval de Frise (also never heard of), but hurrah for Minority to release it on a limited piece of vinyl, with a nice printed cover. Bonvalet plays guitar here too, and he spent a week in 'deserted French places' in 2006 to play his guitar in a very improvised manner. Using shakers, slides, the neck of the guitar, in sixteen relatively short pieces. At one point we hear some insects in the background, which adds to the intimate character of the music. Bonvalet lets his guitar sign, weep, sweep, burst and crack but it always sounds like an acoustic guitar. He's not interested in letting his guitar sound like anything else but a guitar, but plays short, skilled pieces of improvised music on the six string thingy. An intimate album by all accounts. A small delight, much against the waves of anything - improvised music, classical music, field recording etc. - a minority record for the minority of fans enjoying this kind of music. Refined."

"French guitar improvisationist/dynamo Thomas Bonvalet is the sole noisemaker in L'Ocelle Mare. He hails from the John Fahey school of anti-songwriting, beating his instrument with complete focus and purpose and in a manner not resembling in the least how it was intended to be played. There are no verses, no choruses, no refrains, no repetition, just a flurry of fingers hitting frets and strings plucked with abandon. The careening atmospherics he creates shine brightly in the shadowy pall of silence that hangs over all of this album's tracks -- he even includes a couple short tracks of complete silence as a palate cleanser. With 16 tracks and just barely flirting with the half-hour mark, Bonvalet's compositions are wholly fleeting. They exist in short bursts of emotion and confusion and quickly sink back into the natural darkness of the rural areas (farms, old churches, caves) in which they were recorded. Given its environment and immediacy, in a sense this is one of the purest of folk albums to surface in recent years. It won't have the same cultural resonance as Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie -- and people needing a human face on their folk music will likely be completely turned off -- but its nameless odes to the chaos of nature are equally as timeless."

"This album, by the guitarist from French post-rock duo Cheval de Frise, is comprised only of acoustic guitar. However, it's nearly impossible to tell that he's not playing multiple instruments on some of the songs, as his acoustic produces other-worldly and beautiful notes. This won't be an album you'll play a lot on air, but it's undeniably gorgeous and intriguing."

"Maybe more than any other cognitive aspect of life, balancing your mindset into a comfortable manner of reasoning between the instinctual and the over-thinking is key to a healthy sanity. Music is no different. The mid-point between the sheer urgency of impulsive, emotional release and obsessed-over, highly composed musicianship is where the most effective music can be found. The minimal guitar explorations of Frenchman Thomas Bonvalet circle this median constantly. He plays with knee-jerk veracity, but the warm chordal products have to be the result of some serious premeditation. It?s music lined with curiousness, played with gut feeling and looking to balance the polar sides of music creation. Though now recording and performing under the solo moniker L'ocelle Mare, Bonvalet is best known as one-half of Cheval de Frise. With drummer Vincent Beysselance, they purveyed a sound similar in concept: a balancing of refined experimentalism and primitive noise rock. Bonvalet's first solo outing, this self-titled exploration into the melodious immediacy of the acoustic guitar released on RuminanCe in Europe and Chicago's Sick Room Records in the States, stays the defined course. Sixteen tracks in under twenty-five minutes recorded in secluded spots throughout France, and each one more curious than the next. Bonvalet almost approaches the guitar in the same manner Cecil Taylor did the piano. A heavy inhalation of the immediate surroundings, a concentration of thoughts, ideas, momentary inspirations, and finally a shove of the culminating feelings originating in the deepest auricle of the artist's inner-creativity traveling near-instantaneously into the fingertips and immediately on to the instrument in a flurry of awkward rhythms and chords. The rush is typically over in less than a minute and the result somewhat unnerving and confusing on the cursory listen. But with each concurrent study, the odd tunings begin to make sense, the hiccupping rhythms take an understandable shape and the music comes together into a sort of awe-inspiring rumination of individualism. To texturize and diversify the sound, Bonvalet not only utilizes the individual reverberation of his particular settings ? a different one for each track ? but occasionally takes a small piece of hand percussion into his strumming hand or attaches a harmonica stand to his neck. So while "Untitled Track 12" is simply a study of upper harmonics on his acoustic, the following song adds a faint rattlesnake hand-shaker rhythm for eeriness? or is that crickets chirping in the background? Where "Untitled Track 14" initially sounds akin to the soft guitar experiments of Gastr del Sol, the atonal harmonica swell and unnerving rattle that offset the warm acoustics bring Jandek to mind. On one side of the album you'll find skittering, full-fret board workouts not unlike Hella's Spencer Seim, and on the other side the pieces echo John Fahey during his introspective best. L'ocelle Mare is not for those looking for a pleasantly humming acoustic guitar album, nor is it for those hoping for an aural onslaught of guitar experimentation. It is somewhere in between, galloping and bucking one second, teetering and nodding the next. Bonvalet doesn't sound as if he is completely improvising on spot, but utilizing his many years of exploring the sonic possibilities of the guitar to conceptualize instinctive urges. It's a balance. An evening of the cognitive seesaw so that his mind neither runs amuck at each drop of a thought, nor spends hours on end deconstructing the situation. Our ears - and his sanity - are the beneficiaries.

"L'Ocelle Mare is the solo project from Thomas Bonvalet, guitarist from Cheval de Frise. Energy, technicity and sincerity characterize this new recording. Think about an original soundtrack from a French movie produced in a quarry or in a neglected old church, and you are listening to L'Ocelle Mare. Thomas toured with bands such as Deerhoof (Kill Rock Stars), Gorge Trio (Skin Graft), RadiKal Satan (Potagers Natures) and Chevreuil (RuminanCe) and his musical language wants to tell us something beautiful: playing guitar only, he's looking for new tones and acoustics. His musical approach reminds us of John Fahey and David Grubbs. Recorded in different deserted French places in July 2006 (one week), you can heard silence in a ruined stable and bats in obscurity. Thomas already had the passion for those places and give us for the first time -- on recording -- the real sensation to be set down with him in those dark places. Sounds of guitar and percussion throw us in an obscurity where each musical note is a light."