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FRANCOIS K

François J. Bonnet & Stephen O'Malley

Cylene II

    Cylene II is the new materialization of the collaboration between François J. Bonnet & Stephen O'Malley, initiated in 2018 and continued without interruption since then, taking form in a myriad of contexts ranging from common practice to recording sessions, concerts and tours.

    Cylene II bears witness to these different contexts, offering a multifaceted sound signature developed on different occasions (artist residencies in La Becque, Switzerland and Modena, Italy, live performance excerpts, a studio session at INA-GRM Studios in Paris).

    The epic opening track "Four Rays (Anti Divide)" welcomes, for the first time, other musicians — in this case a wind quintet — expanding the duo's sonic palette without betraying the fundamental component of their music, namely the driving of sonic energy. Elsewhere, Bonnet and O'Malley propel the energy between themselves, extending the singular climate that has characterized their musical development over the past five years. Among their minimal presentation of tones and resonances, as glacial harmonic intersections slowly elevate with massive physicality to an orchestral degree, new refinements become evident: the music's relationship to silence, and a brightening of the fine metallic edge glowing at its core.

    For the listener, Cylene II is a sound that reaches from the deep and scales up to the far firmament in its careful motion, drawing emotions viscerally from the chest, giving rise to the suggestibility of the soul. A séance of sorts for all who witness it, whether playing or listening.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Four Rays (Anti Divide)
    2. Rainbows
    3. Vulcani Di Fango
    4. Ghosts Of Precognition
    5. Troisième Noire
    6. La Ronde

    Sunshine Sound

    Happy Song - The Francois K & Walter Gibbons Edits

    Sunshine Sound deliver an absolute doozy for their vinyl debut, treating us to 'Happy Song', the original DJ tool from the legendary Francois K.

    This is not just a bonus beat...This is THE bonus beat! This iconic rhythm track has been the source of countless samples, imitations & duplications since it first appeared in 1977. Now for the first time FK's original edit is available as a high quality stereo recording direct from tape. You may now put away your bootlegs.

    Flip it over to find the long lost Walter Gibbons Battle Edit of 'Happy Song'. 
    Walter Gibbons, one of NYs founding DJs, would skilfully experiment with the rhythm live on turntables at his Galaxy 21 club residency, whipping the floor into a frenzy as well as inspiring FK to create his famous edit.
    What you may not know is that Walter also worked on his own version of Happy Song. Pulsing with primordial stereo syncopation, Walter's previously unheard Battle Edit could be considered the Director's Cut.

    This is just the beginning, prepare to amend the history books.

    Package includes hand-stamped sleeve and information inlay.

    TRACK LISTING

    A. Happy Song (Edit By Francois K)
    B. Happy Song (Walter Gibbons Battle Edit)

    Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains

    Banane Bleue

      ‘Banane Bleue’ (French for blue banana), the brand new album from Frànçois & The Atlas Mountains, is a nomadic and truly European record, hailing from rented workspaces in some of the continent’s key cities - Berlin, Athens and Paris - and recorded with instruments that were often borrowed from likeminded musicians.

      Written solely by Frànçois Marry himself, close collaborator and Weird World artist Jaakko Eino Kalevi was enlisted for production duties whilst Renaud Letang (Feist, Gonzales, Connan Mockasin) mixed the album.

      The title of the album is taken from the ‘blue banana’ concept, a geographical theory that groups together a corridor of Europe’s biggest cities, originally conceived in the 1980s. The theory states that the blurring of these cities’ boundaries has resulted in the formation of one massive, interconnected megalopolis.

      Expanding on the theory, Frànçois poetised it, picturing a luminescent blue banana shape that you can see from space with vibrant, ethereal currents that surround and bind us. It explores common cultural and romantic ground, creating an album full of missed meetings and misunderstandings.

      TRACK LISTING

      The Foreigner
      Coucou
      Julie
      Par Le Passé
      Holly Golightly
      Lee-Ann & Lucie
      Tourne Autour
      Revu
      Gold & Lips
      Dans Un Taxi

      François Tusques

      Alors Nosferatu Combina Un Plan Ingénieux

        “After ‘Le Nouveau Jazz’ was released in early 1967, I worked for two years with Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and a few other friends on a happening loosely based on Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting Of The Snark’. There was a strong element of theater to it and we presented it in playhouses, museums, public places, institutions... It never made it to wax and I gave up on the idea soon after when Sunny Murray and Alan Silva showed up in Paris in late 1968. I had meant to upend the conventions of performance with this happening: now I was fully part of a similar revolution, the ‘New Music’, with its very originators.

        “Nevertheless, the ‘Snark’ adventure was never over, and the bands I co-directed still used the musical themes (and methods) we had developed for the project. The headlines for the performances and the name of the band itself were still lifted from ‘fantastique fiction’ works: for instance we performed as the ‘Boojum Consort’ and used the title of the present LP was used several times at festivals. The music enclosed here is heavily indebted to Free Jazz but also retains various elements of the former happening (for instance I also play saw, marimba and organ and stray away from jazz references). My famous Shandar and ‘Dazibao’ albums are partially made up of the same material and were recorded at the same period/momentum which lasted roughly from the Spring of 1969 to late 1971 when I started to distance myself from free music. The final macabre incarnation of this work was the show ‘Who Killed Albert Ayler?’ whose political content stirred controversy. Gérard Terronès considered recording it, he even advertized it, but again nothing materialized.

        “We found these recordings in my basement. The old reels and cassettes were unmarked or the cases (and sadly some of the music) damaged by time, water and rats! To the best of my recollections, and from posters and advertising of the events, the artists who took part in the 1969-1971 concerts who make up this record are Ronnie Beer, Joseph Déjean, Claude Delcloo, Earl Freeman, Beckie Friend, Eddy Gaumont, Beb Guérin, Noel McGhie, Jouck Minor, Barre Phillips, Aldo Romano, Alan Silva, Kenneth Terroade, Jacques Thollot and Bernard Vitet. Who, when, where (American Center quite often), exactly, I can’t say. Some of them are probably not even featured here. But maybe that’s for the best, as we can now focus on the spirit of the times.” - François Tusques

        TRACK LISTING

        Le Fumet Du Jubjub
        La Voûte D’Un Caveau
        Tout Le Pouvoir Au Peuple!

        NYC dance music demigod Francois K's 1995 EP for his own Wave Music imprint has stood out as one of the most seminal and concise EPs in deep house history. Four tracks that tweak melodic, rhythmic, cerebral and physical stimuli into a record purpose built for late night abandon.

        Freddie Turner's heavily styled NYC vox ride elegantly against FK's keyboards and immaculate drum programming on opener "Hypnodelic" while "Mindspeak" mixes jarring rhythms, ravey bleeps and funky grooves with a reckless confidence and unparalleled inventiveness. "Edge Of Darkness" should be regarded as the high watermark all house producers look to when composing up percussion-led slices of dancefloor voodoo - not many can touch this track for primal energy and the real roots of house. Finally, "Moov" allows a plethora of cosmically aligned synthesizers and keyboard to converge on a rock solid jack pattern for a historic piece of intergalactic dance music few will rarely come close to.

        A true musical god who's influences and legacy can be felt right now across all aspects of dance music; this is a brilliant opportunity to own one of his most pure and quite frankly inspired moments of genius. 


        STAFF COMMENTS

        Matt says: I once had a proper battered copy of this from Vox Pop (RIP). Even through the crackles it became one of my most treasured deep house records. Absolutely buzzed to be able to replace my copy with a much more playable fresh version! Up there with Instant House's un-beatable 1988 - 1993 output, it took the baton of deep house into the mid 90s with a flair and sophistication few have matched. Essential!

        TRACK LISTING

        A1. Hypnodelic
        A2. Mindspeak
        B1. Edge Of Time
        B2. Moov 

        François Tusques

        Free Jazz

          As Finders Keepers’ disobedient little sister label reaches her 20th (release) anniversary, Cacophonic Records present a record that will not only leave rare record collectors salivating but will open ambitious ears to a truly pioneering album from the seldom celebrated and individualistic micro-genre that is French free jazz.

          Comprising some of the earliest uninhibited performances from key musicians behind records by Serge Gainsbourg, Jef Gilson, Triangle, Don Cherry, Barbara and countless other groundbreaking European jazz records and freakish films, this album captures the birth of an exciting movement that would soon earn its Parisian birthplace as the go-to European spiritual home of improvised and avant-garde music.

          Spearheaded by polymath pianist and composer François Tusques this 1965 French album coined the phrase ‘free jazz’ before the American genre of the same name had fully taken shape and packed its suitcase; laying the foundations (alongside Jef Gilson’s ‘Enfin!’) for a unique satellite brand of jazz that would later provide visiting afro American avant-gardeners with a vibrant Parisian platform. Having recorded a very rare single in celebration of the architect Le Corbusier in late 1964, Tusques was lucky enough to play live with Don Cherry (a key player on Ornette Coleman’s 1961 Free Jazz LP) thus planting a pedigreed seed for this vibrant cultivar.

          With this record we not only hear the unique differences within the Gallic approach to the art form (combining masterful sombre cinematic changes with aerated freeform percussion and erratic reed and brass) but we also get to witness the early lesser savoured secret ingredients that would carry France’s mainstream pop culture into truly uncharted and unrivalled territories throughout the following decades.

          Best known to faithful Finders Keepers fans as the soundtrack composer to the horrortica films of Jean Rollin, Tusques is joined here by sax and flute player Francois Jeanneau, whose electronic jazz album ‘Such A Weird Plane’ would later lead to his own band Triangle gaining recognition as France’s leading French language prog jazz rock act.

          This glimpse into a seldom documented underground of a domestic, revolutionary, uncompromised spiritual art form successfully reveals the other side of abstracted French music which alongside musique concrète, protest pop, symphonic rock and Zeuhl-skool electronic prog created a homegrown, self-contained music industry that went on to influence a universe of Gallic magnetic inspiration.

          Presented here on vinyl for the first time since its original, ultra rare micro press (original copies now fetching upwards of 1000 euros), this Cacophonic release is taken directly from François Tusques’ very own mastertape archive.

          Features two rare original outtakes which did not appear on the original LP.

          Presented in authentic packaging complete with external seams and a facsimile of the original Tusques-penned booklet, which, after 52 years, still evades the most fastidious collectors trying to unite mint copies with this oft estranged pictorial pamphlet.

          François & The Atlas Mountains

          Solide Mirage

          ‘Solide Mirage’, the follow up to the 2014 album, ‘Piano Ombre’, offers a glimpse of coherence in a distorted world. The album was recorded in the chaotic-yet-calm environment of Brussels - the capital of Europe - a city where the future of a million ‘others’ is being decided.

          Fránçois Marry and his shape-shifting band The Atlas Mountains recorded with Ash Workman (Christine & The Queens, Metronomy) before Owen Pallett added violins from his home in LA.

          ‘Solide Mirage’ - like an imperceptible dream, a fantasy where reality shifts as one approaches it - is a perfect definition for this protean, changeable-yet-direct album which reveals new facets and new territories in every listen. Sometimes soft (on ‘1982’, ‘Apocalypse à Ipsos’, ‘Pepétuel été’, ‘100.000.000’), sometimes tough (‘Bête Morcelée’ and its rush of pure grunge, ‘Grand Dérèglement’ and the roughness and splinters of ‘Jamais Deux Pareils’), sometimes crazy (the digitized trance of ‘Âpres Après’) but always highly political, whether direct or reading between the lines.

          TRACK LISTING

          Grande Dérèglement
          Tendre Est L'Âme
          Apocalypse à Lpsos
          1982
          100.000.000
          Âpres Après
          Bête Morcelée
          Jamais Deux Pareils
          Perpétuel Été
          Rentes Écloses


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