Adventurous releases from France (2015)
The lauded, Paris-based Bromance Records has carved out a reputation for darkly charged subversion, making it the perfect home for new signing Ateph Elidja. While the slow-burning R&B-inflected sound of the French artist is less beat-heavy than label mates Gesaffelstein and DJ Brodinski, Elidja’s creations are layered with all the same reverberating noise expected of the techno renegades.
Bruno Duplant – Field By Memory Inhabited III-IV
Improv musician and composer, Bruno Duplant has released on Impusive Habitat, Triple Bath, Audiotalaia and Unfathomless amongst others. Field by Memory Inhabited III-IV out on Rhizomes is played by eva-maria houben & bileam kümper.
Les Septs Salons is the name of Alice Dourlen new EP, who performs has Chicaloyoh. ?Following her 2013 debut LP Folie Sacré (Shelter Press), this EP stands has a condensed document of a 18 months non-stop globetrotting tour. Melting experimental and oriental sounds with a strong theatrical aesthetics, Les Sept Salons is also the recording of a smooth transition between 2 languages, Alice Dourlen’s coming back to her—French—native tongue on half of the record. Contemporary bridges are getting built here, between psychedelic sounds and horror movie soundtracks, between some modern incarnations of Nico and Catherine Ribeiro.
Colleen is French multi-instrumentalist Cecile Schott, who uses her voice and the treble viola da gamba (a baroque instrument with gut strings), to weave intricate stories about the human mind and heart. Captain of None is the most melodic album in her repertoire, with fast-paced tracks rooted down by prominent bass lines and assorted percussive effects. It is also an album that breaks new ground for Colleen in terms of production. While previous works centered around sample-based or looped, minimal compositions, on Captain of None Schott significantly changed her approach, setting her viola and her voice as focal points. Captain of None is inhabited by delicately crafted, other-worldly pop songs incorporating dub-inspired techniques.
Delphine Dora + Sophie Cooper – Distance Future
This is edited together from the highlights of a very creative session that Sophie Cooper and Delphine Dora had in the perfect setting of Todmorden Unitarian Church. Sophie and Delphine are caught here carrying out primal improvisations utilising the profound acoustics of this historic chapel. Their tools are a trombone, percussion, electronics, organ and their wordless voices.
Alga Marghen presents “Opus 17”, a major turning-point in the sonic oeuvre of Eliane Radigue. Finished in 1970 it was the last work composed with feedback materials. From that experimental period “Opus 17” preserves the plastic character: a music made of rough sonic phenomena, at once harsh and granular, possessing a quality of materiality and tactility. 2015 repress.
Felicia Atkinson – A Readymade Ceremony
Relocated in the French Alps following a 5 years exile in Belgium, Felicia Atkinson returns on Shelter Press with A Readymade Ceremony, a concrete / post-digital oratorio in 5 parts. Composed and recorded at home and on the Oregon coast, the opus documents a full range of bridges happening in Atkinson’s work. It documents the gather of her early-musical studies with her actual musical practice, the reunion of her two main projects — under her own name and Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier — and finally affirms the obvious link between her visual and sonic body of work.
Jac Berrocal + David Fenech + Vincent Epplay – Antigravity
Antigravity is a trio album from legendary trumpeter Jac Berrocal and two fellow travelers in the French avant-garde, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. A lugubrious mise-en-scène in which ice-cold outlaw jazz meets musique concrète, DIY whimsy and dubwise studio science, all watched over by the lost souls and hungry ghosts of rock ‘n roll.
Jacques Lejeune – Early Works 1969 – 1970
This LP of early compositions by Jacques Lejeune features three seminal works: D’une Multitude En Fête and Petite Suite, originally released on the Perspective Musicales series in 1970, and a previously unpublished composition, Géodes, from the same period. Lejeune’s early approach was heavily steeped in sonic narratives, combining unusual and ambiguous events to create a sound world uniquely his own. Early Works 1969-1970 explores the first precision splices by one of the true visionaries in musique concrète.
Jean-Claude Vannier – L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches
To mark its 2015 ten-year anniversary, the Finders Keepers label presents an improved, remastered repress, with updated liner notes in a gatefold sleeve, of its first release, a reissue of Jean-Claude Vannier’s 1972 album L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches. At the time of the 2005 reissue the resurgence of ’60s Gallic pop, once known as yé-yé music, had escalated beyond an interstellar height. Without a shadow of doubt, the flagship LP with the best odds on becoming a discerning household object was Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) by one Serge Gainsbourg, an inimitable 45-minute concept LP handcrafted by a bass-driven psychedelic rock group and a heaven-sent 1001-piece orchestral and choral symphony.
Kabutogani is Jerome Berthelot from Villeurbanne / France. Cymma is an additional release to his album bektop, which was released 2010 in cooperation with mille-plateaux. five remixing artists – sogar, absent, incite/, dust engineering ltd and weiss, transforming kabutogani`s tracks into their own musical universe.
Cory Arcane found her comfort zone in a constant state of crisis, and her liberation through love, sensuality, and high-speed internet access. As some might recall, she used to struggle with her own decay, navigating an intricate web of bureaucracy, endless social-media scrolling, 24-hour news channel feeds and marketed strategies of seduction. Her intense and continuous obsession for surf, breakdancing and cat videos might have saved her from a silent decline, but it would be her first attempts at integrating a professional ballet company that provided the initial spark. Her unorthodox dance movements were often considered shocking, transgressive, and barely legal; and even though some recognised her genuine talent, it was clear she would never make it into this structure. This is when she started her slow drift towards the outer limits of society, in search of the way to achieve the conditions for absolute freedom. Her emancipation was surely marked by different forms of excess: the inappropriate use of fireworks, the consumption of large quantities of alcohol and controlled substances, as well as the occasional blasts of kitchen appliances. She bypassed the gender war and became an expert in advertising sabotage. Soon Cory would give academic courses on the true liberation of the mind, or, in her own words, the apotheosis of senses. Lately, she could be seen squatting in the outskirts of different giant metropolises, embracing the mayhem, contemplating the crumbling of a system. The sound of the city, mixed with the music on her headphones, would weave complex rhythms and futuristic textures into a beautifully coloured, pixellated surface. Looking out onto this fabulous chaos, she smiled.
Paris based artist Nautil is a bioengineer interested in acoustics, signal processing, and informatics. His debut single, Canopée, utilises analog synths, sampling and personal recordings to emphasize the geometrics of nature and music.
Philip Corner – Through More Than The Mysterious Barricade
Philip Corner is a multi-instrumentalist and visual artist most famous for his experimental compositions and recordings whose work spans 7 decades and includes titles such as Satie Slowly, Metal Meditations and Gong! A student of Olivier Messiean and associated with the fluxus movement of the 1960s, Philip has a penchant for Improvisation as can be seen here on ‘More than the mysterious barricade’. This release is another stage in the series of releases and recordings in which Corner improvises around the core inspiration of François Couperin’s ‘Les Barricades Mystérieuses’ each taking on a new variation on the title. For ‘More than the mysterious barricade’, recorded in 1995 at the school voor Nieuwe Dansontwikkeling, Corner performed with a groups of dancers led by Ria Higler. Corner has also created an insert for inclusion with the cassette.
Pierre Bastien – Blue as an Orange
Pierre Bastien (born Paris, 1953) post-graduated in eighteenth-century French literature at University Paris-Sorbonne. In 1977 he built his first musical machinery. For the next ten years he has been composing for dance companies and playing with Pascal Comelade. In the meantime he was constantly developing his mechanical orchestra. Since 1987 he concentrates on it through solo performances, sound installations, recordings and collaborations with such artists as Pierrick Sorin, Karel Doing, Jean Weinfeld, Robert Wyatt or Issey Miyake.
Rémy Charrier is a French audiovisual artist based in México City. With a classic formation made sporadic due to frequent changes of residence, his approach to music was for a while basically made of improvisation exercises with a piano. After a couple of previous releases in the shape of a duo-project in France, Cowries is his first solo work. Once settled in Mexico, Rémy continues his practice with a Moog Little Phatty and a collection of objects used for rhythms and percussion, plus samplers and virtual / analog tools. Although he builds his music based on a random principle close to the practices of experimental improvisation, his goal —often achieved— is always the composition of songs based on the strengths of melody, plus repetition and a constant sense of reconstruction throughout the duration of the piece. Yet, in the end, one can say that Remy’s work is just an unconventional way to approach pop music. Additionally, you will find some hip-hop bass, sharp breakbeats, some soundscapes with a clear influence of Techno Animal, and even a section mixing a kind of ambient techno with heavy industrial elements.
Ütopia not only continues their first album, but it extends it. The travels move this time to Istanbul and Sicily providing the food for its urgent energy and indomitable drive. While the structures still hint at moments of post-rock, they go further now, almost into the area of free-jazz yet without loosing a directness rooted in punk (highlighted perhaps by the presence of G.W.Sok from The Ex). In addition, the bass clarinet of Gareth Davis references both the roughest of experiments of Akosh Szelevényi and of The Stooges Fun House.
Paskine – Progression Performance
This series of performances is a work on the texture of sound, aiming to explore the possibilities of its development as a mass evolving throughout a specific temporality. The mass transforms into noisy walls, deconstructed melodies, ambient ranges and varied textures. Nothing here is improvised.
Stéphane Marin – Matins D’Ariège
Notes from the artist Matins D’Ariège is an intimate, elementary and ecological auscultation of the place I used to live in Ariège (Pyrénnées – France). A kind of non-nostalgic “souvenir” which invites the listeners to experience the specific vibrations and the deep energy wich overfows from these simple rural sonic spaces. I’m trying here to share another angle of listening, another “regard”, on an intimate countryside world. This landscape that seems familiar at first glance but only before the phonographic framework offers us the vision of a less generic rurality, more dramatic, more fantasmatic, more powerful ! This binaural work is balanced between abstract and concrete sonic propositions and between “raw” and recomposed field recordings. All the tracks are linked with one (or more) of our (western) 4 elements. Ariège is the place to be (in France) for decreasing… Would you take the time to decrease with us all the way to the end? Really… to the end?.
Matins d’Ariège is carbon-free… No plane and no car have been used to record it ! All recordings were made between 2013 and 2014 in the village of Fabas (Parc Régional des Pyrénnées Ariégeoises, France) mostly with binaural or contact microphones : please experience it (only) on your (best) headphones ! “Matins d’Ariège” was composed between October 2014 and February 2015.
Tristan Murail: Le partages des eaux
With this second monograph in the catalogue, æon confirms its attachment to one of the principal representatives of spectral music in France and abroad. Tristan Murail, a major composer and former student of Messiaen’s who early on freed himself from serialism, explores the whole sound spectrum, which he recomposes using the new technologies. Blending both Nature as a source of inspiration and the tools of computer analysis as compositional means, the composer lies within the great French tradition of naturalist music going back to the 18th century. A way of returning to the natural model. The works for large orchestra brought together in this recording present an extensive panorama of the composer’s output between 1985 and 2007, haunted by his futuristic visions and dreamlike elsewhere.