Somewhere between the sophisticated songwriting of Leonard Cohen and Jacques Brel, the rugged folk of Bob Dylan and Neil Young, the acoustic pop of Simon & Garfunkel, and the haunting melancholy of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, there is Philippe B, who reminds us of the depth that can be conveyed with nothing more than a guitar and a few words.

TRACK LISTING

1. Ulysse
2. La Jeunesse Est Un Autre Pays
3. Ovni
4. La Chanson De L'été
5. 1999
6. La Ballade De Johnny Crève-cœur
7. Avant/Après
8. La Cadbury
9. Hôtel Tadoussac
10. Futurologie
11. Boule Miroir

Sonar Kollektiv proudly announces the new album by lo-fi veteran Don Philippe, 'Velvet Breaks'. With its textured production, broken rhythms, and a distinctly analog warmth, Velvet Breaks is a slow-burning, introspective work – a meditation on fragility, erosion, and beauty in decay.

Don Philippe, real name Philippe A. Kayser, brings decades of musical experience to the project. A professional drummer in the 1980s and later active as a pianist and guitarist, Kayser has worked since the 1990s as a composer and producer from his own studio. He is also a co-founder of the legendary German hip-hop group Freundeskreis, a pioneering act that helped define the sound and culture of German rap.

Since 2015, Don Philippe has focused on instrumental hip-hop, releasing over ten solo albums across various independent labels and building a global fanbase on streaming platforms. His music bridges the soulful subtleties of jazz with the grit of classic boom- bap, always delivered with a delicate, cinematic touch.

On Velvet Breaks, that mastery is on full display. From the crackle of dusty drum loops to the hazy elegance of Rhodes melodies and tape-saturated fragments, the album builds a fragile world where silence and space are just as important as sound. The track titles read like a poetic deconstruction — 'Fibers Displaced', 'Torn', 'A Rupture', 'Entanglement' — tracing a conceptual journey from tension to release.

The album unfolds like a narrative, with each track title suggesting a step in a process of unraveling: 'Fibers Displaced', 'Edges', 'A Rupture', 'Tension', 'Entanglement' – culminating in the title track, 'Velvet Is Broken'.

There is no need for words here. The beats speak for themselves, telling a story in fragments, textures, and ghostly grooves.

TRACK LISTING

1. Velvet Breaks
2. A Rip
3. Fibers Displaced
4. Displacement
5. Edges
6. Torn
7. Unraveling
8. Exposed
9. Tension
10. At The Seams
11. Stiff
12. A Rupture
13. Of Composition
14. A Clear Thread
15. Entanglement
16. Velvet Is Broken

Louis Philippe and The Night Mail return with a new captivating record where the songs are once again faultless. Carrying on the journey away from the classic towards the unexpected with new synths and hand claps adding a sense of the abrupt and, with voices calling from the wings, a sense of play and a lack of fear.

Beyond the regular tales routinely retold, there's a secret, parallel narrative of pop history. One written by the true enthusiasts and eclectics, in which a perennial favourite like Pet Sounds didn't just inspire endless claims of exceptionality but a long trail of harmonic riches leading all the way to the 21st century. In this alternative universe Philippe Auclair aka Louis Philippe, Anglo-French singer-songwriter extraordinaire, has been an admired fixture for the past four decades, from his beginnings as protagonist and house producer at Mike Alway's fabled él Records label through his forays into the Shibuya sound and collaborations with the likes of Bertrand Burgalat, XTC's Dave Gregory, High Llamas' Sean O'Hagan and Young Marble Giants' Stuart Moxham right up to his more recent adventures with The Night Mail.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Road To Somewhere
2. Pictures Of Anna
3. Where Did We Go Wrong
4. La Maison Sans Toit
5. Those Days Of Summer
6. All At Sea
7. Le Baiser
8. Wine And Roses
9. Watching Your Sun Go Down
10. A Friend
11. Song For Paddy (Wings Of Desire)
12. To The Sea
13. Always
14. Ville Lumière

Sean O’Hagan (Microdisney, High Llamas) compiles this retrospective of a songwriter, arranger and singer who understands the gift of the chord change, the endless intrigue of arrangement and always knows where and when the sun rises and falls. Lose yourself in this record and let me warn you. You’ll be humming the tunes and reliving the chorus’s and key changes for an age, and if you’re a songwriter you will probably be lifting the melodies without realising it.

"I have never done a record quite like this before, with a live band in the studio, though I had always wanted to do it," says Louis Philippe. Coming from this golden-voiced born French- and renaissance man, a Londoner by choice for the last 34 years, this seems quite astonishing. After all, this key figure of the baroque pop/chamber pop genre spent a good part of his life making his own as well as producing, writing, arranging, playing and singing on countless other people's records, be it as house producer and songwriter for Mike Alway's legendary él Records or as a collaborator with kindred spirits such as The High Llamas, Towa Tei, Martin Newell, Big Big Train, Testbild!, The Clientele and Bertrand Burgalat.

Juggling a day job as one of Europe's most high profile and fearsomely erudite football writers (under his birth name Philippe Auclair), in the past decade Louis Philippe kept his global community of reverential fans waiting in vain for new music. But we all know what they say about London buses, and these days Louis Philippe's musical output seems to follow a similarly spasmodic timetable.

This year has already seen the release of The Devil Laughs, his critically acclaimed second collaboration with Young Marble Giant Stuart Moxham, now followed by Thunderclouds, on which he is joined by The Night Mail, a three-man band made up of fellow EU-citizen around town/musician/journalist Robert Rotifer on guitar, former Acid Jazz artiste and Weller band member, DJ, producer and walking pop encyclopedia Andy Lewis on bass and Papernut Cambridge supremo, ex-member of Thrashing Doves and Death in Vegas Ian Button on drums.

The Night Mail first appeared together in 2015 on Hamburg's Tapete Records with glamorous cult singer-songwriter John Howard (check out the album John Howard & The Night Mail if you missed it). Last year they formed the core line-up of the high-charting comeback by Viennese artist/poet/chansonnier André Heller, feted by the German-speaking press as an instant classic. In 2017, at Tapete Records' sold-out two-night 15-year-anniversary bash at London's Lexington, The Night Mail performed with Louis Philippe, having backed Robert Forster the night before. "When I played with The Night Mail at The Lexington, I instantly knew that I could make a record with them," says Louis Philippe, "because these guys were good, and they were fast."

Ironically, it has taken another three years for the album they agreed to make that night to finally materialise. Louis Philippe and Rotifer have been close friends for many years, and more recently their shared experience as democratically disenfranchised onlookers to the upheaval around Britain's extraction from the EU has brought them even closer together. In the end it was the confluence of this escalating crisis with the current pandemic that finally brought the message home: If this record was ever going to happen, it had to happen now. At the end of the first lockdown period, Rotifer went to see Louis Philippe at his flat to go through the endless pile of musical sketches the latter had amassed during his prolonged hiatus. In early September the whole band finally got together for two rehearsals before decamping to Rimshot Studios in rural Kent to record the backing tracks for all thirteen song on the album as well as overdubbing strings (played by violinist Rachel Hall from Big Big Train) and trumpet parts (by Shanti Jayasinha), followed by another session overdubbing vocals, keyboards, percussion and some more guitars, expertly engineered by Andy Lewis at Rotifer's home studio in Canterbury. The result is an album that evokes that city's fabled brand of whimsical prog just as much as Philippe's deep roots in French song-craft and a shared love for the autumnal side of sunshine pop.

Side A opens with "Living on Borrowed Time", a catchy, bass-driven, sounding like the theme tune to a lost Lemmy Caution movie. While the album's title track cloaks the anticipation of a coming storm in heavily jazz-tinged Wyattesque chords magically rising out of the singing noise emanating from a building site next to Louis Philippe's Shepherd's Bush home, light-footed waltzes like "Fall in a Daydream" and "Once in a Lifetime of Lies" manage to make London feel like Paris, before the closing track "When London Burns" invites the listener onto an imaginary dance-floor where an anglophone Michel Polnareff meets disco boffin Biddu. In between all that, we traverse the eerie aural cityscapes of "Alphaville", the wide dynamic range of two song suites ("The Man Who Had It All" and "Rio Grande"), the Tropicalia/folk-flavoured subtlety of "The Mighty Owl", the surprising gospel grooves of "Love is the Only Light", the arresting stop-and-start dramatics of "No Sound", the unexpected Celtic tones of "Do I" and the equally loony and beautiful semi-instrumental "Willow".

Quite how Louis Philippe managed to keep all these ideas pent-up inside him for all these years remains a mystery, but once they start pouring out, he is truly unstoppable. And as he rightly predicted back in 2017, at full steam ahead The Night Mail proved able to keep up with him. Undoubtedly though, this new-found urgency is testament to the challenging times we are all going through.

"Thunderclouds over the mountain, roll on by heavy with rain."

TRACK LISTING

1) Living On Borrowed Time
2) Once In A Lifetime Of Lies
3) Rio Grande
4) Willow
5) Fall In A Daydream
6) Thunderclouds
7) Love Is The Only Light
8) Alphaville
9) No Sound
10) The Man Who Had It All
11) The Mighty Owl
12) Do I
13) When London Burns

The unique pairing of Oxbow’s feisty vocalist with self-proclaimed “musical tour guide” Philippe Petit return to pick over the carcass of a dying relationship

Vinyl on heavyweight 180 gram black vinyl in gatefold sleeve with die cut inner pocket and printed inner dust cover.
CD in gatefold sleeve with lyric insert.
Released following Eugene’s appearance with the Oxbow Orchestra at Supersonic festival

Introducing vocalist Kaisa Meow The second release in a trilogy from Robinson-Petit following The Crying of Lot 69 LAST OF THE DEAD HOT LOVERS, a secondary installment in the tryptic of modern and highly specialized anomie brought to life by vocal lyricist EUGENE S. ROBINSON and musical tour guide PHILLIPPE PETIT, covers an unspecified disaster at the centre of a failed and failing relationship. Equal parts "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?" and the last 16 hours of a love affair, LAST OF THE DEAD HOT LOVERS also features the estimable KASIA MEOW in a duet with Robinson that radiates all the best parts of homicidal suicides.

File Under: Experimental / Spoken Word For Fans of: Oxbow, Tom Waits, Swans, The Enablers, William Burroughs.

Don Philippe - alias Philippe Kayser and Laura López Castro state; 'Our albums are influenced by South American music, naturally: Victor Jara, Atahualpa Yupanqui and the music that burst forth in Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s, in reaction to American Jazz. But what you can hear now is that we have set the music of the Latin American uplands into an urban space. We’re talking about a composition completely after our own fashion.'

Kayser, in addition to the musical compositions has recorded the hum of the city streets in Berlin and used them as a soundscape for "Lo Que Tú Ves", and describes the music of Brazilian legend Jobim as 'music for the neighbourhood'. So distant and yet so near, it’s all about enrichment at the margins.

Laura López Castro and Don Philippe have been gathering all things to their breast. But distinctiveness is also an art and, as the songs show, part of that art is knowing what to leave out. Arabesques and Capriole have been cast aside. Kayser’s guitar speaks a beguilingly simple language, López Castro’s voice appeals enormously and there are moments when it becomes utterly her own, like a diamond fallen from its setting, sparkling free before us.

This album is a collage, yet always coherent. From where else has inspiration come? ' Andrés Segovia and African Dogon music', says Kayser, 'Nick Cave and Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth)', adds López Castro. The duo are loyal to classical and Jazz forms, but by liberating them from much of their complexity, and adding a bit of abstraction, they have moved closer to independent music. This album carries listeners away on a new style. Two Sudanese musicians living in New York and San Francisco, Alsarah and Nahid, make guest appearances on three songs.

Philippe Kayser enriches the album not only with his guitar, but also with drums, ukulele, synthesizer, tambourine and triangle. Paul Kleber joins on the bass guitar and the double bass, Jo Ambros on mandolin & pedal steel guitar.

TRACK LISTING

1. Prólogo
2. Noche Eterna Feat. Hauschka
3. Has De Saber Feat. Sebastian Studnitzki
4. Lo Que Tú Ves
Feat. Jo Ambros
5. Sin Miedo Feat. Nahid
6. Farawla Feat. Alsarah
7. Ki Chororo
8. Mi Cansado Corazón Despierto Feat. Hauschka
9. Viejo Océano Feat. Ulla
10. Leviatán Feat. Paul Kleber