202s confidence and well-honed sound is quite remarkable given the band's short lifespace. Formed in April 2007, they operated originally as a studio outfit, working with producer Stephen Shannon, well known for his work on many of the Irish undergrounds¹ key releases in recent years. They immediately set about crafting their debut album, an eclectic reflection of the bands' influences taking in synth pop, ambient instrumentals, psych folk flavours and more. At various points the influence of artists including Eno, Phil Spector, Can, Primal Scream & Neil Young can be detected but 202s channel these influences into their own unique sound.

New anthology of the visionary artists of electro music history. From the Punk surge to the new wave of Post, at the crossroads of influences, electro stands out. When bruitist chaos of a time eroded by disenchantment and irony follows the electro and cosmic first steps of pioneers like Kraftwerk, Cluster, Harmonia, Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream. This new chapter prolongs the process of the first volume which went back to the time of effervescence and innovation, with its eternal classics (Suicide, OMD, Fad Gadget, The Human League, DAF, Cabaret Voltaire or Front 242), but also its share of rarities (Goûts De Luxe, Crash Course In Science, Jeff and Jane, Unknowmix etc.) and its eternal outsiders now worshipped (Polyphonic Size, Shriekback, Laurie Anderson, Kas Product, Chris & Cosey etc.).

These bands show off modified formulas, their reduced limbs accompanied and fulfilled by these new synthetic sounds. Soon, the machine won’t be just anywhere, because it’ll be everywhere. Technologic and musical all-over with its ability to seduce monopolized by converging media and communication networks. From transmitters to listening devices, the dematerialization operates and modulates the vibration of the microgroove benefiting the almost invisible phonogram. More and more encoded. The fetish is transplanted. Our laptops, ipods and other worshipped iphones. Synthesizers, rhythm boxes, electronic keyboard and sequencers, later computers, have drawn the line of this strange horizon, combined with new textures and upcoming transformations.

Therefore A Man & A Machine II wants to pay tribute to all these musicians, avant-garde and creative, who, more than thirty years ago, were able to detect the unavoidable grip of machine over man. 

No Future ?
- New Future

In 1974, the german Kraftwerk are triping on the « autobahn » leading  and opening the way to électronic music.
The decade we are talking about starts in 1978 and ends in 1988.
The european music is being started and built.

The loop, the riben of techno repeating itself infinitly is the symbol of the invisible circle that will slowly rap the world.
Invented way before digital era, and produced in analogic, its a hint to the birth of the computer to its light form of creation and a process that skirts around studio, instruments, even the bands.
Its a sound that is dipped in steel but still quote Tony Wilson « hot enough to get the white man dancing ».

This compilation « A man And Machine » is a tribute to this constellation of analogical musicians, children of Kraftwerk, that revolutionnized rock and music in general, taking in the latest decades the first steps on the streams of techno, house, rap, électro. 

In this make-belief soundtrack, avant-garde rock and futuristic pop express themselves, sometimes spangled with cabaret reminiscences and veiled with the ghost of Kurt Weill. Extreme and intense music, concocted during those three decades « at the foot of the Wall » and in front of it by creators who love danger and risk taking. Alongside pasionarias such as Nico and Nina Hagen, we can find German bands. Faust, Agitation Free, Harmonia, Can, Die Krupps, Neu !, Einstürzende Neubauten, their Swiss cousins the Young Gods and all the others are aesthetes, pioneers of underground culture which tamed electronics with an acute sense of efficiency. True inhabitants of the city, Berliners by adoption or fascinated by the brilliance of its new look urbanity, they often mix the art of melody to a Bruitist (noise music) approach. Their music flirts with trance and resonant dramatic art which can be found in  the main protagonists of the Bruitist and electro scenes of today.

As it was said as early as the end of 1961, the sixties were, in West Germany, the main home for this different rock in which suddenly all was allowed, as if the hideous concrete snake was the metaphor of an ultimate musical border and the theatre of unprecedented experiments, based on new sensations as mind-blowing as they are machine like. The movement accelerated during the seventies: still wounded, Germany was getting back on its feet, and its cosmic music was starting to sound like a sublime alternative to an English or American rock which had become too obvious. Sometimes mundanely nicknamed krautrock, kosmische Musik gave way to the eighties and the technoid and neue Deutsche Welle new pop trends, often envied by their counterparts throughout the world as it foreshadowed the electro music of the year 2000. Even though all the bands and musicians were not originally from Berlin, all were plugged into Berlin electricity and benefited from this fabulous energy and its unique way of life, between claimed Bohemia and constant uprising.
 

Boy & the Echo Choir, is first Boy – aka Caroline Gabard – who registered some other beautiful pieces of music in duo Tazio & Boy, and two of her own solo projects out of stock right now. The brand new band coming from Saint Nazaire releases in August 2010 And Night Arrives In One Gigantic Step, truly first album revealing a authentic emotion, a voice and a piano who reminds the moments where 90’s alternative pop offers us its most beautiful spleens, victorian but intimist, languorous and disturbing. A melancholic, fragile and audacious world where glides some atmosphere... Cat Power, Erik Satie, Jessica Bailiff, Low, The Cranes etc.
The band performed on several French and European stages : Olympic in Nantes,VIP in St Nazaire or other Ancienne Belgique in Brussels and is now chosen for the programm 78 Tours of Fédurok, and will tour in France first and then in Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Spain and Portugual). On stage as on the album, their music becomes infatuated with a carved, discreet and engaging battery, with a scintillating metallophone, and with an accordion at the same time serious and comforting.

Tracklist :

1 Into The Light
2 Paris
3 Flower Walk
4 Naphtalene
5 Nina Jane
6 A Great Sorrow
7 Silent Is Your Song
8 Last Days
9 Take Me Home
10 In The Garden
11 It Might Be The Wrong Place

Rock&Folk les caractérisa comme étant le chaînon manquant entre Television et Sonic Youth alors que Libération les élèva au statut de groupe culte.

Dix ans après Closer to the sun, les new yorkais proposent un album classique, mélodique, honnête, conçu du début à la fin par ses trois membres, prouvant qu’ils étaient bien maîtres de cet album qui n’est pas volé !

This double CD wants to resurrect  the spirit of Mai 68, makes live again this collective and libertarian wildfire by the magic of a sonic Molotov cocktail. From Jefferson Airplane to Pierre Henry, from Brigitte Fontaine to Country Joe, from Jacques Dutronc to Albert Ayler, from Gong to Claude Nougaro, from Sly & The Family Stone to The Yardbirds, from Can to Quicksilver Messenger Service, we can find commited hits, enraged tracks, cult, poetic and avant-garde songs of the French and international musical scene from that period. The whole thing is interrupted with noises from the streets, sounds from the demonstrations and the general assemblies, and with politic speeches extracts and news reports. Two CDs, a historical and detailed booklet : a vintage and very topical collector item to listen Mai 68 live !

Release date : 24th April 2008

A strange and provocative name for a soundtrack to an imaginery trip to the famous beach in Ingmar Bergman’s film “The Seventh Seal

This desperacy is translated into popmusic composed by three multi-musicians and sounds engineers.
“Hey Space” is a road movie, a premeditated crime, a post modern reflection bringing abstract poetry and humouristic narrative to clublike popmusic.

The well produced album slides softly with a heartbreak as our three specialists Kyrre Bjorkas, Hilmar Bergendahl and Jakob Langvik delivers electro pop with glamour and elegance.

Some influences emerge: Nick Cave, Radiohead/ Thom Yorke and Blixa Bargeld of the famous band Einstürzende Neubauten, bands who forms their own ideas of sounf; elegant, yet explosive.

Two tracks are defently going to strike the radio programmes “And Silence” and “ I was made for lovin’you”, a total remake of the famous hit by  KISS. Soon you will see; This combo does not represent death, but the rebirth of a new style.

Ten years of resistance, ten years of independence, ten years of imprudence

On the occasion of its tenth birthday, Le son du Maquis will edit a CD & LP Boxes of four albums introducing an exhaustive anthology of original and international productions . These discs will be accompanied by a booklet of an hundred pages covering history and artistic choices of the label across a biographical text and a selection of its nicest covers.
Most of the Le son du Maquis catalogue will be included in these boxes, whom majority of these artists will be edited for the first time in vinyl. This box will count around thirty artists: Alan Vega, Big Arm (ex Happy Monday), A Certain Ratio, Trisomie 21, James Chance, Paul Haig, The Blow Monkeys, The Neon Judgement, Hifiklub, Boy and The Echo Choir, The Mondrians, Film Noir, Marc Hurtado, Cosmophonics, Cluster, Faust, Certain General, Dajsad, 202s, Cercueil, Stuart Moxham (ex Young Marble Giants), Steel and Glass, Bettina Koester (ex Malaria !), Jake Ziah, Mist, …

Official release: November 2010

Subscripion price untill October 31st 2010:
- CD Box: 22 euros (post included) instead of 28 euros (store price).
- Vinyl box: 38 euros (post included) instead of 50 euros (store price).

As gift for the "happy maquis few" subscribers: a limited lithograph edition representing the cover of the box, as well as a free album of your choice.

-Daniel Darc-

Release date : 22 February 2008

Son nouvel album, Prédature, explore les contrées obscures de la pop synthétique intemporelle (de Kraftwerk à DMX Krew), conjuguant une approche intimiste et un sens du gimmick guidé par une guitare basse incisive, véritable moteur de l’album. Une basse mélodique digne d’un Peter Hook ou d’un Jah Wobble, qui, loin de cantonner l’album à un genre défini (l’electropop), l’ouvre sur des territoires inattendus : les accents hip hop de Ramble, le noisy rock de Relativities, le funk absurde de Nothing to Kill... Le second nerf du disque est incontestablement la voix. EDH la distille en nappes fantomatiques, la découpe en séquences ânonnées, en logorrhée possédée, lui fait chanter des cantiques médiévaux pour mieux lui tordre le cou la mesure suivante, comme un Aphex Twin qui matraquerait les Cocteau Twins. A la fois minimal et complexe, drôle et mélancolique, abstrait et efficace, Prédature révèle toute l’ampleur d’une artiste incontournable et atypique de la scène indépendante française.

The artist evolves within numerous plans, influences the world of music actively jazz Norwegian contemporary and developed the philharmonic orchestra of Oslo in a active manner.

Having crossed album " 52 :29 " is a personal, private, mysterious plan, tainted with humour and rich in originality.

Some tracks remind of famous "Roc Bottom" of Robert Wyatt, its scratchy voice transports us in ambiences to Tom Waits. An album full of surprises.

This box contains the nicest music of the four corners of Africa (Nigeria, Congo, Cameroon, Mali, Benin, Senegal, Togo, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Gambia). This selection stretches in the Portuguese-speaking countries (Angola, Cape Verde islands) become independent in 1975, as well as in Ethiopia, country in atypical history. These countries were inserted into this box owing to the quality of their artists and their music (Césaria Evora, Bonga, Mulatu Astatké, Mahmoud Ahmed).

50 tracks presenting the african history and culture since independence. From rumba to the mandingue music, from the afro beat to the goumbé, withtout missing blues, jazz and rock, "Free Africa" goes around skyline of music from the sixties to nowadays. With a complete booklet containing notes on every artist, as well as a review on accession of the independence of these countries, this project has the ambition to tell the most important period of Africain history. Between traditional and contemporary music, Africa offers us all its musical talent and makes us discover or rediscover a selection of these biggest artists.

Even though they dislike playing along with a game of “what’s your favorite record,” under duress, they will admit to owning a volume of Desert Sessions hidden in the closet, or Mike Watt’s Ball-Hog or Tugboat? under the dresser, a picture of Charles Peterson on the refrigerator, and Three Days, by Jane’s Addiction, in the cassette deck. You have been warned.
There you go, you have now learned four new words. Now it is time to make some friends!

Pierre Mikaïloff, author

Nicknamed the white James Brown, James Chance is the spirit of no wave music style which took over New York artistic and hype of the eighties. Renamed James White for some funk productions, the "sax maniac" shakes in 1977 the punk scene of that period to transfigure the ambiguous charm of crooners and the initial rage of the rhythm’n’ blues.

Distancing himself from the musical codes, this saxophonist and iconoclast singer is quickly pointed out and put in honour by Brian Eno at the end of his numerous musical and stage prowess with his famous Contortions. At the head of numerous bands, with Lydia Lunch and their Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, The Blacks, or one other  plan which notably counts in his ropes the gifted Flea from  Red Hot Chile Peppers, we remind several discs and a handle of emblematic pieces, whom famous funky Contort Yourself , Sex And Drugs And Rock' not roll of Ian Dury from the other side of Atlantic.

With this new project, James reappropriates with elegance the origins of blues and jazz from the 40’s and 50’s, between Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Jac Berrocal, Archie Shepp, or even Chet Baker. Never really far from the early rock’n’roll and therefore from the rhythm’n’blues and soul, James Chance’s music of 2010 is hypnotic, decadent and distinguished, rhyming for our pleasure with glamour, sex, humour and daily transcendence.

Release date : 22th February 2008

Sortie d'un digipack avec livret où l'on pourra admirer le travail de Bachelot Caron qui participe à la création d'un univers taciturne, une ontologie amoureuse. Une relecture des années 80 à la pulse lancinante, le tempo médium d'un cœur qui bat. Luc Vertige signe les musiques et les textes de la plupart des morceaux, il convoque aussi les poèmes de Verlaine, De Nerval, Rimbaud et Desbordes-Valmore. Romantisme émoussé d'un homme confronté au quotidien des amours qui dégueulent, qui vivent, qui disparaissent. Quand le réel se brise sur le mur du réalisme. Un disque en forme de soucoupe sonique et violente, un ovni suicidaire puisque le disque crève. Juste un disque ? Un disque juste !

Release date : 27th March 2008

Release date : 27th March 2008

Terje Isungset, percussionist, has a passion for some years for the defence of culture sami. They call him the shaman of the north. With the participation of an American sculptor, he creates amazing instruments of ice, harp, guitar, hoots, which are perfomance.

Every year, on the first moon, such a ritual, he records to min 15 degrees in the middle of Norway, in an igloo, an album devoted to his element of predilection, the ice. During three days and three nights, in extreme conditions, the engineers sound, the musicians, orchestrated by Terje Isungset, work to create an original album, all sounds appearing from ephemeral instruments.

With his favourite instrument, the horn (ice horn), sculpted in a block of ice dated of-2500 years, he imposes with humility and feelings its albums of serious, imposing sounds to see apocalyptic.

"Hibernation" is the concentrated solution of this passion which lives in an artist for whom fire and ice merge.

"A 4000 year old rock band" W. S. Burroughs
"One of the most musically inspiring groups still left on the planet"

Recognised internationally, Jajouka goes back up to the late Rolling Stone Brian Jones, across his collaboration of 1968, but also to Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, and William S.Burroughs which had already established their residences for some years together with these musicians of the mountains of Rif. "The Source" is the new record of The "true" Master Musicians of Jajouka and it goes back to the origins of their sacred music.

The Master Musicians of JAJOUKA Led by Bachir Attar - The Source
Digifile / Booklet 20 pages

Bachir Attar, last descendant of the Masters Musicians of Jajouka, is directly connected to the highest muslim tradition. Recognised internationally, Jajouka goes back up to the late Rolling Stone Brian Jones, across his collaboration of 1968 (having introduced on his disc " Brian Jones presents: the pan pipes of Jajouka "), but also to Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, and William S.Burroughs which had already established their residences for some years together with these musicians of the mountains of Rif. Their name comes from a small village in the north of Morocco, located about 150 Kms in the south of Tangier, where is perpetuated for more than 2000 years a musical and magical tradition based on the Rituals of Section. Their art, in which they allocate virtues of healing, is ancestral, and takes its source in the traditions of the ancient Persian. Nagging and mysterious, the music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka is based on repetitive, inspiring and intriguing modulations.

Jajouka, its village, its musicians and consequently its festival, was and remains a source of inspirations, so seeing marching the main protagonists Beat Generation, and music jazz and rock, of Timothy Leary (the theoretician of the LSD and the prophet of the psychedelism) to the creator of the free jazz Ornette Coleman, by way of Archie Shepp, Billy Corgan or else Mick Jagger who in 1989, goes to Morocco to record a title with Master Musicians for the good of Rolling Stones’ album Steel Wheels. At the end of the nineties, Bachir Attar settle down in New York where he meets and collaborates with so different artists as Sonic Youth, the guitarist Arto Lindsay, and the famous bass player Bill Laswell. So many prestigious artists who will also come to visit the musicians in the mountains of Rif. In June, 2009, the group plays with Patti Smith and Flea in Royal Festival Foyer of London. The same year, their album live " Jajouka Live Vol. 1 " is elected better album of year 2009 by the magazine Wire in the category “world music”.

The album "The Source" from Jajouka’s was recorded in Bachir Attar’s home. This album, in which they find all essence of the directory of the musicians, includes several music styles interpreted by the traditional instruments which are the Gaitas (oboe), Gimbris (small guitar), Will Read (flute), Kamanjas (violin), Bendirs and Djarbougas (drums). Between Hadra (ritual music invoking mental healing to the Holy founder of the village Sidi Ahmed Sheikh), Boujeloudia (music accompanying the rituals of fecundity of Boudjeloud, comparable to the Pan God), Hamza oua Hamzine (traditional reminding music the time or the musicians of Jajouka plays in front of the King or the lessons of the Sultans before European colonization) and Jibli (inseparable music of holidays of the village), music of " The Souce " manifests the musical and ritual force of a local, influential and endless art.

Tracklist :

1 Habibi Tsitini
2 Talaha L'Badro Alaina
3 Hanging Out In Jajouka
4 Night Dance Under The Moon
5 Habibi Analik Wuntalia
6 Hadra Of Sidi Ahmed Sheik (music for healing sick people on friday at the tomb of the Saint)
7 Dancing In Your Body And Head
8 Dance In The Cave Of Bou Jeloud

Techno and electro artists such as DAVE CLARKE, THE HACKER, BLACK STROBE, TIGA and JUNIOR JACK recognize The Neon Judgement as one of their main influences and some of them have even remixed some of The Neon Judgement classic tunes (David Carretta, Lifelike, Terence Fixmer, Tiga, Vive la fête, Implant, Headman).

Light up a legend!

Tusitala is the name given by the inhabitants of the Samoa’s Islands to the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, which could be translated as the “ story teller”.
The greatest asset of the band is its capacity to tell story, not through books as Stevenson did, but through their music.

With a wide array of references going from New Orlean classics to brazilian Bossa , adding a bit of swagger that might remind you of Boris Vian or Tom Waits.

Between nostalgic melodies, and enthousiastic ballads, Tusitala stories never fail to impress and smoothly impose their style and elegance.

Unni composed the lyricks and the music on the album « rite ».
This album is a marriage of acoustic minimalistic tones. The atmosphere is floating and driftng through spiritual and mystical keys its a dreamlike journey straight and deep in the north lands.

Avec « Evolution » (Top 10 des Albums Charts en Suisse), le Barbadien, résidant en Suisse, donne à son premier opus très réussi «Undone» (15 000 exemplaires vendus) un successeur qui parle autant au cœur qu'à l'âme. Les chansons ont un accent soul encore plus marqué. On y retrouve la touche rétro et les arrangements enjôleurs qu'on a envie de réentendre sans cesse et qui font du bien à l'âme.

Parmi les temps forts de la carrière de White, citons sa présence en première partie des concerts de Ben Harper, Xavier Rudd , Gabriel Rios, Archive, John Butler Trio et Shivaree.