Eternal Rhythm: Lizzy Mercier Descloux's Press Color
When Press Color hit the shelves in 1979, few realised they were glimpsing the beginnings of an avant-pop legend. Grounded in New York’s no-wave chaos and ZE Records’ mutant disco ethos, Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s debut captured a restless, uncompromising vision that would only be fully appreciated decades later. Born in Paris and transplanted to the Lower East Side in the late ’70s, she immersed herself in the gritty world of CBGB, performance art, and punk poetry, crossing paths with the likes of Patti Smith and Richard Hell. Recorded at Blank Tapes Studio by Bob Blank, Press Color was originally meant to be a group effort, but ZE chose to foreground Lizzy’s name and persona instead, setting the tone for a solo career that would be defined by risk, reinvention, and a total disregard for genre boundaries.
The original pressing runs just under 23 minutes, but every second of it feels urgent and fully alive. It’s a record made from jagged contrasts - no-wave’s anti-style energy colliding with funk, dub, disco and snatches of African rhythm. On “Wawa,” the bassline throbs while the guitars veer off into scratchy, atonal territory. There’s an amateurish charm to the whole thing - intentional, free and fearless. Lizzy wasn’t chasing polish; she was chasing expression. Her vocals aren’t concerned with melody in any traditional sense. Instead, they stretch, yelp and play with phrasing, often leaning into language as rhythm. “No Golden Throat” spells it out plainly: “I’ll never have a golden throat,” she sings, but she doesn’t need one. The voice is just another tool to shape feeling.
There are covers here, but they barely resemble their sources. “Fire,” a mutated disco take on Arthur Brown’s hit, opens the record with theatrical swagger. “Mission Impossible” strips the Lalo Schifrin theme down to its bones and rebuilds it into something minimal and twitchy. On “Tumor,” Lizzy takes Peggy Lee’s “Fever” and rewires it into a twisted anti-ballad, dark and funny and completely her own. Elsewhere, tracks like “Torso Corso,” “Aya Mood” and “Jim on the Move” blur genre lines even further - tight bursts of funk and noise, tinged with playfulness and tension.
When it was released, Press Color didn’t make much impact commercially - no chart presence in the US, France or the UK - but over time it’s grown into a cult classic. The Light in the Attic reissues from the 2000s, expanded with tracks from her earlier Rosa Yemen EP and other rarities, helped reframe the record not just as a curious debut, but as the first statement from an artist who would keep evolving, often well ahead of her time. Looking back, producer Michel Esteban described the sessions as honest and spontaneous - “no marketing plans, just what we wanted to do at that time.” That spirit runs through the whole record.
Press Color still matters because it feels like a beginning. It’s raw, impulsive, and defiantly fun - an origin story that touches disco, punk, performance art and early experiments in global pop. Lizzy’s voice, choppy, bold, sometimes absurd, doesn’t guide the music so much as ride along with it, turning each track into something rhythmic and unpredictable. It’s the sound of someone figuring it out in real time, before anything had to make sense. A debut that pointed in every direction at once, it still sounds exciting, awkward, and completely alive.
Pick up a first pressing of Press Color here
