[engl] bass player looking like the main character of a surf movie shot in Chernobyl. A guitar player who’ll take french rap or thaï music over the Stooges, anytime. A keyboard player invited at reharsal by mistake who got the job cause he felt asleep on his synth. An australian poet-singer lost in France with no papers, sleeping in a cabin in the backyard of the Villejuif house where the whole band lives, sets up shows and records the most vital, exciting and enthralling records heard in France for a long, long time. PRs & managers would kill for such a story - this one is 100 % accurate and happened just like any great story : by chance. Just like the music of the Villejuif Underground, the result of happy accidents and unholy alliances, something that was never meant to be but became an astonishing fandango of sorts. Think Fat White Family covering Oingo Boingo with Beat Happening’s gear. Think Beck’s One Foot In The Grave remixed by Daniel Johnston and Brian Wilson. Think Ausmuteants, the Spits, the Feeling Of Love or A Frames when they really nailed it. Actually, you shouldn’t think about any of this cause whatever you do, you’ll still be far from reality. Way too far. Especially now with the release of When Will The Flies In Deauville Drop?, their second album and the first one on Born Bad Records. 11 tracks in a bit less than 40 minutes. 11 clumsy love letters to heavy backpacks, haunted castles, sleepy parisian districts and tours in China - which happened by total chance, thanks to some girl found asleep on their couch on new years eve. 11 reasons to think there’s a way out of 2019 - already. Your stormy love story with the Villejuif Underground starts here. Be sure to enjoy it. To the max.

[engl] Hailing from Florida, The Tropics were one of the finest 60s garage bands. Their memorable concerts are still remembered today by the lucky ones who saw them at the time. Between 1965 and 1969, they recorded some explosive and now legendary 45s which are prime examples of garage- rock, teen- beat, folk- rock and proto- psych sounds. Here you?ll find most of those 45 sides along with some rare, previously unreleased on vinyl tracks. Including the classic ?As times gone? (covered by The Fuzztones) and many more. Remastered sound in mono, insert with detailed liner notes by Jeremy Cargill (Ugly Things) and rare photos.

[engl] high gloss cover finish, black flood print inside, poster Mitch Murder's brand new EP "Hardwired" comes on black 180g audiophile vinyl with swirl effect, limited to 400 copies only. The record is housed in a poly-lined innerbag and comes aside its cover printed on heavy 350gsm paper in a PVC overbag and includes poster with album artwork.

[engl] Once the intro to opener “Human” gives way to its fully-realized sonic purpose, it’s obvious that Harlan T. Bobo’s fourth proper album, A History of Violence, is quite different from his previous body of work. The classic historical emotional heft of a songwriter trying to make sense of life’s chaos, think mid-70s Lou Reed, especially Coney Island Baby, is a thread that can be heard running through the album’s mid-tempo tracks like “Human” and the miniature literary tragedy that is “Nadine”. The punchier tracks on the album, like “Spiders”, might conjure very early Green On Red, what X’s mid-80s output could have been, or even the roots-rock tendencies of overlooked genius, Cass McCombs. A History of Violence still highlights Bobo’s whiskey-and-cigarette-informed vocal style, and on the more intimate tracks, it’s a distorted ear candy that warbles into increasingly sunken, uncomfortable places, like that of the songwriter with which comparisons have followed Bobo throughout his career: the late Leonard Cohen. But there is a richer canvas on which to work this time out, not to mention a decidedly heavier and darker one. The album was recorded in Memphis with Doug Easley, who has previously worked with Cat Power, Pavement, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Jon Spencer, and Jeff Buckley. Bobo also brought in Steve Selvidge (The Hold Steady, Bash & Pop) on bass and Jeff “Bunny” Dutton (Action Family) on guitar, along with regular contributors Jeff Bouck (Polyphonic Spree) and Brendan Spangler (Viva l’American Death Ray). The result is a naturally dynamic album that seems equally at home with howling guitars and heavy bass lines as it does with haunting piano and humble pleas. A History of Violence is Bobo’s most complex -- and complete -- album to date.

[engl] Of all the Cyrils born in the city of Calvin at the dawn of the 80s, these two were bound to find each other. Two Cyrils like two dizygotic souls whose contingencies have brought their meeting forward. Cyril Cyril. A liberated hydra, born in this city of diplomats where Borges duplicated his rejuvenated ego in “The Other”. On the ruins of their worn out bands, they put together an innately cosmopolitan empire. Because these Cyrils have devoured miles, away from their Genovese haven. A muezzin without borders, Cyril Yeterian came to the disheveled world through Mama Rosin, a three-piece that stirred the ghosts of the rogue bayou, the clammy Mardi Gras of some electric Louisiana. Soon, the world fell in love with their flair. The BBC celebrated them, Jon Spencer produced them, records proliferated. And then in 2017, the honeymoon period passed. Cyril was alone. Well, not quite: music kept popping up around him. Inside his Bongo Joe record store, on the label of the same name, in the underground DJ sets he stirred up, Yeterian explored like crazy, in a binge of exiled grooves. Within the same space-time, Cyril Bondi hit the road. Diatribes, La Tène, Insub Meta Orchestra, the most adventurous projects of the Geneva scene all had a bone to pick with this percussionist in search of unheard beats. He, as well, traveled, experienced the ascent, the euphoria of the peaks and then the fall. Plaistow, his mediumistic, hypnotic jazz band, heckled the saturated world of piano-bass-drums trios and won hearts through Europe and the East. Until the breaking point. So Bondi started looking for premises to drop his equipment. He found better: an accomplice for musical prospecting, another Cyril in tune with his rebellious instinct. Enough with leaning upon solid piers like a Colossus of Rhodes. This adventure required new baggage, a new language. Cyril and Cyril were in the same boat, and both took the plunge. A guitarist and an accordionist, Cyril Y. took on the banjo, adding effect pedals to it to turn it into a puny bouzouki, an epic ba?lama or a krar. Cyril B. cobbled some cannibal drum kit together, with massive jingle bells and tropical nut shells embedded in his marching bass drum. You should have seen these two, on a populous festival night, bringing a narrow club to fever pitch by summoning utopian Neguses. Playing new Berbers, provoking unlikely seismic soukous in a trance that has as much to do with the hippie giddiness as with Fraggle Rock. Indeed, for Cyril Cyril, music is a way of the world, a joyful decentration offering new keys to comprehend chaos. The point here has nothing to do with some globalized country excursion nor some gluten-free exoticism. Beneath the beach lie the paving stones. Politics always end up showing on the surface of these exhilarating chants, of these skeletal grooves. Apart from tracing back the family pathway of some belatedly-adopted Lebanese dialect, Cyril Yeterian chants rhapsodies in French, the merciless terms of which say it all about coming insurrections. Thus, “La ville”, a Doorsian declamation in which the epic eloquence of a Goncourt Prizewinner – Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau – meets the Invisible Commitee’s poetic prophecies. Thus, “Ultra moderne solitude 2”, that has more to do with Alain Péters than Alain Souchon, with this question "Where are the souls / to take up arms with”. Nothing yet likely to make Certaines Ruines a wordy lampoon of hoaxers, of neo-post-everything killjoys. Since, let’s face it, “the leviathan is intimidating” (“Sous la mer c’est calme”), Cyril Cyril knows the superior power of suggestion, of temperance, of happy sobriety. A single word, a single cry can say a lot, as long as it is soulful. The sound of a duo reduced to its simplest expression – rhythm, a riff, a voice – can bear within itself an infinitely luxuriant musical organism – the double helix of DNA. Cyril Cyril, so real, so rich.

[engl] The West Indies – a sweet coastline subject to many clichés from another time. That postcard with coconut trees, a glass of rum to sip on, those so exotic madras dresses... Almost as many as in Compagnie Créole’s "doudouist" songs, that say a lot about the misunderstandings from both sides of the ocean. West Indians are still as stuck with this distorted outlook as in the good old days of the colonies. Because, underneath the veneer of moldy images, a completely different reality is woven. ‘They beat drums but were never number one’ – to misquote the chorus by a Martinique-born French singer. This is the subject of this collection – musicians drumming on percussion as a way of asserting their creolized identity. Songs that tell, in veiled terms, a different reality from what mainlanders were fed with. Special cases, with cries of joy and laments accompanied by cadences, as an invitation to trance, all immersed in the Caribbean melting pot of rhythm. “’Antilles’ Méchant Bateau”, a low-tempo number with a bolero feel, indeed a pure case of the blues, and a terrific saxophone solo. What else would you expect to set the tone for this selection, in which beguine regains its original colors, in the darkness of the gwo ka drums. This 45 by André Mahy, released under the Aux Ondes sublabel, was recorded in the 1960s at Célini’s, one of Guadeloupe’s two main houses. Through its drum rolls and harrowing chant, it recalled how, long before the mid-1960s, the Antilles’ history was written in an ocean of teardrops – namely the Black Atlantic, as so rightly put by Martinician philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant in L’Archipel des Grands Chaos. These “cursed boats” – slavers – carried millions of Africans to the American continent for centuries. All this sinister story had begun with the landing of a fleet of caravels steered by Christopher Columbus in 1492. It was the first step towards a colonization that was about to decimate the indigenous peoples of this terra incognita and deport the vital spark from the cradle continent of humankind. A year later, on November 4th, 1493, the same Colombus christened Guadeloupe after the Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe in Extremadura. The cross – a booming symbol – was there to justify the ordeal of peoples to whom even humanness was denied. Soon, once the Caribbean tribes were eradicated, the French would massively import workforce from Ghana, Togo, Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo or Angola, as recalled by the Marches dedicated to the various ethnicities of slaves in 2012, which faced the Memorial of the ka drum on the Grande-Terre island in Guadeloupe. Hundreds of thousands of them would have to survive the nightmare of plantations, comparable to the plantation system in the American South: chains, leg irons, shackles, fetters, garottes, iron collars and branks, dungeons or lynchings set the tempo of everyday life. The sugar aristocracy (the brown gold of the time) set a reign of terror on plantations. The masters had full powers, including life and death, over the slaves who worked from four in the morning to sunset… until April 27th, 1848 – date of the second and definitive abolition of slavery thanks to the struggle of Victor Schœlcher, an MP who was close to Lamartine (the first one had been pronounced in the wake of the French Revolution, but soon repressed in blood by Bonaparte...). However, the path would still be long to see the newly-born Republic’s motto applied: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ... The "post-slavery" society would perpetuate real economic segregation – a distinction that would be reproduced from generation to generation... And even if, a century later, the law of 19th March 1946 granted the four old colonies the status of Overseas Departments, nothing changed in the course of history. This gap would then widen, differently but surely, as the Republic implemented an assimilation policy that would deny identities and make a clean break with the past. In this fool’s game, the ka became, in the 1960s, the voice of identity for Guadeloupeans who couldn’t resolve being purely and solely disintegrated. Made from salting or wine barrels from the colonial era – boats keep coming back in this ebb and flow movement – the "quarter", or "ka" once creolized, was a powerful symbol of resistance since the colonial era. Even if its practice was quickly proscribed by masters, considering it contained the seeds of revolt, this great drum (long known as a ‘bamboula’, which means ‘pagan festival’ in Haiti, and became a popular expression in De Gaulle's France) inexorably wormed its way into the local culture, until becoming the essential melting pot for the movement of ‘root music’ against mainland France’s deaf hear. Or its beating heart, following the seven specific rhythms of gwo ka. More than just a matter of rhythms, this drum carried a speech full of history and stories, a message of memories and hopes. The gwo ka bore the stigmata of a slave society, from which all its associated chants were inherited. A medium of the voiceless, this drum would act like an ointment on mistreated bodies, but also as a stimulant for rebellious souls. Under the drummer’s fingers, the ka drummed up the ancestors’ spirits. Just like words convey the memory of a people that was long demoted to the status of a simple item of personal property – according to article 44 of the 1685 Code Noir draught by Colbert to regulate the status of slaves – before being governed by a system of identification booklets allowing to monitor the movements and work of the workforce in a Guadeloupe admittedly liberated from slavery, but still looking like a "banana" regime. This trauma appears through a repertoire that reflects the pain of cane cutters and the euphoria of pay day, the oppression of racism and the recourse to the myth of a promised land. Songs burst with all the bestiary that populates the countryside and the many fish that feed stews, acid satires on the daily reality and apposite witticisms on international events, chronicles anchored in the local soil as well as biting plays on words. One may sing to keep vigil over a dead person, or launch into long, saucy tirades at a bibulous party. At the turn of the 1960s, while some bars were still for whites only, while speaking Creole was forbidden in schoolyards, while drum music was considered a "mizik vié neg" (“old negro music”), while the church saw a symbol of degeneration in it, the Maroon spirit – from the name of the slaves who fled plantations to live free in the woods – rose from its depths, in another form. In this decade and the one that followed, this movement, that gave its place back to percussion, accompanied more precise claims as English-speaking islands gained independence. By playing the ka (which was banned from official studios), one actually chose their side. From 1963, the freshly-instituted Bumidom (Office for Overseas Migration) organized a strong West-Indian emigration towards low-skilled jobs and a dull suburban life. In response, the Gong (group for Guadeloupe’s National Organization) called for Guadeloupe’s independence, and two years later, the Guadeloupean Front for Autonomy appeared. Those years were punctuated by strikes and repressions, culminating in May 1967 with a real massacre in the public square in Pointe-à-Pitre, the toll of which would not be disclosed until 2012. Many would denounce the bloodbath operated by the Bumidom among Guadeloupe’s lifeblood. Slogans flourished on walls, including the iconic: Jeune, ne quitte pas ton pays ("Young people, do not leave your country”). Part of the youth got the message, choosing to take the drum back in hand as a symbol of the emasculated identity of this "entirely apart" people, to quote Aimé Césaire, the father of Negritude. The ka became the soundtrack of this generation, who sped up the tempo with the 70s and definitely transplanted it to town, while the plantation economy – the original soil of the ka drum – was in crisis. From then on, the old tambouyés (drummers) finally went celebrated as they should be: Anzala, Carnot, Serge Dolor, Ti Seles, Robert Loyson, Arthème Boisban, Esnard Boisdur ... and especially Velo – born Marcel Lollia – who nevertheless died in misery, in the street, in 1984. “Champs de canne, champs de coton !” ("Cane fields, cotton fields!) Guy Konket roared, one of the great champions of the Guadeloupean cause, whose path followed on from this legacy, moving it onto the asphalt of Carénages, Pointe-à-Pitre’s hot district. The poet sure had a good turn of phrase, that hit the spot just like his mouth drum. No doubt, blues and ka fought the same battle – centuries of oppression, of negation, before finding the path to possible redemption. Between them, the same language – the language of the Creole spirits, flooded in the great ocean. This is what this selection is about, and its good, inborn sense of humor shouldn't hide the implicit commentaries. There, jazz instills an emancipating energy from established formats, giving these songs a musicality that rhymes with spirituality. From infernal cadences borrowing from the "latin" rhythms of neighboring islands, to beguines with percussion-spiced tempos, to more laid-back – nonetheless dark – ballads, this compilation takes us back to the early hours of a movement of rebirth synonymous with recognition. A rejuvenation in which all the musics from the Black Atlantic diaspora naturally intertwine. Like a wave of sounds, of sense and blood, reminding us that an original culture emerged from the holds of these ‘wicked boats’, the trace of which remains starkly persistent in 2018.

[engl] Strong Limited All Analog Direct Cut Recording & Acetat

[engl] The legendary 1967–68 recordings by UK mod band THE ACTION, registered when they were in transition from mod–beat to full–blown psychedelia, just prior to becoming MIGHTY BABY. Originally recorded as a set of demos with the intention of obtaining an album deal which inexplicably never materialized, "Rolled Gold" is a collection of brilliant songs, melancholic yet powerful. The Action’s classic line–up of Reg King, Alan ’Bam’ King, Michael Evans and Roger Powell is augmented with the inclusion of new members Martin Stone on guitar and Ian Whiteman on flute / organ. All of them are playing their hearts out: superb harmonies, great guitar work and clever arrangements which show the influence of bands like The Byrds and the psychedelic sounds that were coming from the West Coast and UK as well as jazz giants like Coltrane. Always the stuff of legend, The "Rolled Gold" tapes were shelved at the time, not released until 1997 when the Dig The Fuzz label discovered them and did a limited LP/CD run. Out of print on vinyl for many years, we present a new vinyl edition. If you dig the psychedelic era of SMALL FACES, PRETTY THINGS, THE WHO, plus THE CREATION, NAZZ, TOMORROW, BLOSSOM TOES, THE END or TRAFFIC...look no further.

[engl] A wild, esoteric mix of psychedelic funk, afro–latin grooves, jazz and Italian / French styled library sounds courtesy of CUASARES, an enigmatic studio project created by pianist / arranger / visionary Waldo Belloso. Acid fuzz guitar, cosmic synth splashes, distorted organ, flute, vibraphone, trippy studio effects... Originally released in Argentine in 1973 as a micro–edition, here’s the first ever reissue. Includes insert with photos and detailed liner notes by Eduardo A. Elizalde Pietruczyk (a.k.a. Bubbling Minds) and Mike Wallace.

[engl] 33 minutes of pure, unadulterated, psychedelic Krautrock courtesy of PYRAMID: an obscure studio project produced by Toby Robinson aka The Mad Twiddler. These sessions were recorded circa 1975–76 in Cologne for the underground Pyramid label, which was operated by Toby and his friend Robin Page (the Fluxus artist). During that time, Toby worked as engineer and assistan at varios studios in Cologne, including the famous Dieter Dierks studios, where most of the albums from the Ohr/Pilz/Cosmic Courier catalogue were registered. Having access to the studios during dead hours, Toby recorded lot of sessions just for fun without any commercial interest, featuring friends and musicians who frequented the studios and the underground art/music scene of Cologne. Some of these sessions were later relesed as hand–made vinyl micro pressings on his Pyramid label with help from artist Robin Page.

[engl] One of the best Jazz–Funk–Fusion albums from the 70s Euro scene, featuring such giants as Charly Antolini (famous for his MPS recordings) on drums, Max Greger jr. on electric piano, Moog, Hammond, Mellotron and Milan Pilar on electric bass. Top notch jamming & soulful funky–jazz sound with some kraut–prog touches, recorded at the legendary Studio 70 in Munich and originally released in 1975 on the Calig label.