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.
 

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.

-Daniel Darc-

Release date : 22 February 2008

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.

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

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.

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.