Biography
Formed in the late 1970s in Lion sur Mer, France, by visual artists Sylvie Martineau, Jean-Philippe Fee, and Jean-Luc Andre, DDAA emerged alongside Nurse With Wound as an obscure collective devoted to radical experimental noise. The trio channeled improvisation and collage into deconstructed songs and unconventional textures whose fiercely independent character aligns with the Residents and Nurse With Wound. Originally established as Illusion Productions to pursue plastic sculpture and other visual projects, the group positioned DDAA as the sonic extension of that enterprise. Their complete name, Déficits des Années Antérieures, roughly means “last year’s deficit,” yet the initials also form an anagram of Dada, the pre-Surrealist movement born during World War I. Because none of the members possessed formal musical training, the resulting work carries the unfiltered character of outsider art and occupies its own sphere, largely free of recognizable influences.
Releasing material through Illusion Productions, DDAA issued its first recording, the 7-inch single Miss Vandam, in 1979. Subsequent explorations of traditional ethnic musics yielded the 1981 EP Adventures in Africa and the 1982 LP Action & Japanese Demonstration, both featuring hand-painted covers and elaborate inserts. In 1984 Bernard C joined the lineup for Les Ambulants and remained an intermittent collaborator into the early 1990s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the ensemble continued issuing records and cassettes, staging performances, and mounting gallery exhibitions in Paris and Nice.
Beginning with the 1992 CD Nouveaux Bouinages Sonores (Dans la Période), DDAA expanded its sonic investigations by inventing the imaginary culture of the Maracayace, a conceit developed at length on the three-CD set Baggersee and the album La Conference Maracayace as well as in live presentations. The group has sustained its singular artistic trajectory into the new millennium.
Releasing material through Illusion Productions, DDAA issued its first recording, the 7-inch single Miss Vandam, in 1979. Subsequent explorations of traditional ethnic musics yielded the 1981 EP Adventures in Africa and the 1982 LP Action & Japanese Demonstration, both featuring hand-painted covers and elaborate inserts. In 1984 Bernard C joined the lineup for Les Ambulants and remained an intermittent collaborator into the early 1990s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the ensemble continued issuing records and cassettes, staging performances, and mounting gallery exhibitions in Paris and Nice.
Beginning with the 1992 CD Nouveaux Bouinages Sonores (Dans la Période), DDAA expanded its sonic investigations by inventing the imaginary culture of the Maracayace, a conceit developed at length on the three-CD set Baggersee and the album La Conference Maracayace as well as in live presentations. The group has sustained its singular artistic trajectory into the new millennium.