A GLIMPSE OF SPRING?
LET US TAKE YOU ON MUSICAL JOURNEYS WITH
Lula Pena, Aquaserge & Le Ton Mité!
— LULA PENA —
Archivo Pittoresco
(CD / Digital - buy here)
Lula Pena's music is a living organism. It sails on a strange ocean, bordered by continents called folk blues, flamenco, French chanson, phado (that's how she likes to spell it), bossa nova and others, grazing them all and leaving none intact.
Archivo Pittoresco wonderfully reflects Lula Pena's inspired wandering: the album's thirteen tracks often flow seamlessly into one another, as she sings (in Portuguese, French, English, Spanish, Greek, Italian) lyrics and poems by writers ranging from Manos Hadjidakis, Violeta Parra and herself to Belgian surrealist Scutenaire to the composers of the original Twilight Zone soundtrack and to many lesser-known names or anonymous authors.
Armed with nothing but her guitar and her smoky alto, Lula Pena was utterly transfixing. Salting a blend of Portuguese fado and Cape Verdean morna with some French cabaret, Brazilian bossa nova and other elements, this artist took her music to elemental roots.
[NPR]
Pena packs a fado-like intensity into her work, marrying her voice to acoustic guitar backings and favouring allusive, poetical songs, intended “to reach a collective unconscious open source”. A fluid, multilingual trance that is truly singular.
[The Guardian]
Lula will be on tour throughout Europe in the coming weeks.
CLICK HERE FOR THE DATES
— AQUASERGE —
Laisse ça être
(CD / LP / Digital - buy here)
Coded messages, anadiplosis and automatic writing, dance music grooves peppered with rhythmical & metrical twists, shades of Italian or French film music, a dense political & poetic subtext: such are the ingredients of "Laisse ça être", the new album by brilliant experimental pop band Aquaserge.
Aquaserge has been a subterranean driving force in the international music scene, inspiring and influencing countless musicians & fans. After operating for years like a a kind of nebula, a shifting aggregate drawing over 60 musicians in its orbit, while knitting an extended web of connections by collaborating with the likes of Tame Impala, Stereolab, Melody's Echo Chamber, Acid Mothers Temple and Aksak Maboul, the band has now distilled down to a strong 5-piece core, which is wildly creative in the studio, powerful and exciting on the stage.
Aquaserge's sound is global, cosmic and genuinely kaleidoscopic… their music is densely packed with ideas, mathematically precise, boldly anarchic about ignoring borders and boundaries of every kind, and dazzling with joyful weirdness
[The Wire]
Like a cratedigger’s fantasy band, Aquaserge mine a colourful seam of psych-rock, jazz and Afrobeat… recalls the sophisticated middle ground where Tortoise and Stereolab once met. If David Axelrod were French…
[Uncut]
The record bridges the long history of psych, sitting atop a prism where Stereolab, Os Mutantes, and Hot Rats intersect. But beyond any such forebears, Laisse has its own thing going on, both tight and fussy, layered with smooth horns and complicated grooves, sorta jetset and sorta space age and still totally contemporary.
[Tiny Mix Tapes]
The band will soon embark on a tour in France, European dates tba soon
CLICK HERE FOR THE DATES
— Le Ton Mité —
Passé Composé Futur Conditionnel
(CD / LP / Digital - buy here)
Le Ton Mité is a musical cooperative that revolves around the compositions of itinerant musician, instrument maker and fine artist McCloud Zicmuse, an American expatriate in permanent residence in Brussels.
Having left the United States in the mid-noughties on a European sojourn that never ended, McCloud wound up in the Belgian capital in the fall of 2008. Half a decade on, a time in which he has embedded himself in European life via puppet shows, archery guilds, folkloric events, theatre projects and a catalogue of idiosyncratic solo and group works (perhaps most recognisably the 2011 Hoquets album on Crammed Discs called 'Belgotronics'), McCloud returned to the States, to revisit places he had not seen, in some cases, for 15 years.
Passé Composé Futur Conditionnel is the stunningly realised soundtrack to this voyage. A finely woven double album patchwork of 50 songs, in its 67 minutes it absorbs a lifetime's worth of landscapes, reflections, encounters, anecdotes and movements. In addition to a core group of Belgian master musicians, a number of songs feature the fruitful intervention of Deerhoof's John Dieterich as well as a keyboard cameo from Heather Trost (A Hawk and A Hacksaw), with the resolutely pop sound of the LTM group rendered dynamic by infusions of jazz, baroque, folk & R'n'B. Thus the album takes endless playful musical diversions in its bittersweet stride, including deep-fried protest soul ('Class War'), Seattle-homaging alt.rock joy ('Space Needle'), spectral synth balladry ('Mystery Trail') and micro-bursts of tumbling free jazz ('Gaspillage'). McCloud is your navigator throughout: showman, troubadour, puppeteer, sage...sometimes everything at once.
The Residents' Commercial Album remade at Muscle Shoals...[with] Moondog-influenced stompers
[MOJO]
a sprawling record that refracts the American experience through layers of re-interpretation.... with pieces of jazz, country, roots rock, exotica, R&B and tejano...
[Tiny Mix Tapes]
Make sure to catch Le Ton Mité live
CLICK HERE FOR THE DATES