Music from France

When glancing over the history of indigenous French free improvised music, there tends to be two observable categories of musicians - those who worked and collaborated with their counterparts from abroad, and those who worked independently. The former is generally more celebrated, and among those the drummer Jacques Thollot, who worked with Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Sonny Sharrock, Sam Rivers, Joachim Kühn, and numerous others, as well as with French pioneers like Barney Wilen and Jef Gilson, rank…

This outstanding LP (originally published in 1969 for the US market) together a selection of music recorded at GRM, mostly during early 60s. Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales (The Group of Musical Research) of the O.R.T.F. (Office of the French Radio-Television) is known in the world principally as the promoter of an original technique of realization as well as reflection : Musique concrète. For more than fifteen years, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales has thus founded its experience, its meth…

Chulki Hong, turntables, guitar, electronics. Will Guthrie, drums, percussion, electronics. Recorded by Taku Unami, Mullae Arts Village, Seoul, South Korea, 20-22 October 2016. Mixed and edited by Taku Unami.Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer/percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics. Born in 1976, Hong Chulki …

The first 10 years of Magma were celebrated on three memorable evenings in June 1980 at the Olympia theatre in Paris. This retrospective, reuniting most of the musicians who had performed in the group, was issued as two albums, Retrospektïẁ 1 / 2 (double) and Retrospektïẁ 3 (single). Issued first, Retrospektïẁ 3 comprises 3 titles Retrovision, a long piece in the style of the album Attahk, in which the vocalists Stella Vander, Guy Khalifa and Maria Popkiewicz turn in a blazing performance…

Another unique document of Kink Gong's, aka Laurent Jeanneau, collection of surreal soundscapes of augmented field recordings, this time turning into his love/hate relationship with China into a mesmerizing soundscape of unclassifiable music. Jeanneau on Dian L: "Before becoming Kink Gong I had different names, one of my projects, designed by cultural circumstances in China at the beginning of the 21st century, was Dian Long ('electric dragon' in Chinese). I landed in Shanghai in 2000 in …

LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Heldon's second album Allez-Teia, originally released on Disjuncta in 1975. Before making his own music in the early '70s, Richard Pinhas was a King Crimson fan. The British group has buzzed in Pinhas's mind for decades, but their greatest impact came early. When he first saw them play, Pinhas was struck by music played during intermission. "When I saw (King Crimson guitarist) Robert Fripp and Brian Eno perform in Paris later, I realized that the intermi…

French minimal-wave shadows from the cassette years, 1980-83. Fondation's cold drum machines, brittle synths and noir atmosphere distil an entire underground era: austere, romantic and hypnotic. A coldwave excavation.

**Ltd. numbered edition of 800 copies, white vinyl** Carsten Nicolai’s Noton present a masterclass in minimalist electronic discipline with Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda + Alva Noto’s powerfully future-proofed Live 2002 performance, recorded at Newcastle’s Baltic arts centre This recording marks the only ever concert by the trio and its release serves as a tribute to the much-loved Vainio. “Mika was not only a friend and collaborator, but also an inspiration for my work as an artist. This is a cel…

LP version. Bureau B present a reissue of Richard Pinhas's Rhizosphere, originally released in 1977. Richard Pinhas is one of the most important French electronic space rock musicians. Following five albums with his band Heldon, he released his first solo record in 1977. Backed by Heldon's congenial drummer François Auger but no longer bound by the group dynamic, he explores his freshly purchased Moog modular system in search of new sounds. It marked a departure into new realms. "We don't need n…

At last, the re-mastered vinyl reissue of one of the biggest cult albums in the history of Crammed Discs. This record is constantly being (re)discovered by generations of fans, musicians and DJs, who hail it as an unsurpassed Afro/electronic milestone. The album was recorded in 1983 and results from a studio encounter between experimental electronic music composers CY1, Congolese musician/vocalist Bony Bikaye, and French composer Hector Zazou, with involvement by sound engineer Gilles Mar…

**Sea Blue vinyl; Edition of 700** Souffle Continu Records present a reissue of Heldon's Stand By, originally released in 1979. Richard Pinhas began by absorbing Jimi Hendrix as an adolescent, leaving that behind at the beginning of the 1970s, after having heard what Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock were doing with synthesizers, and then discovering the seminal duo Fripp and Eno. It was one year on from this epiphany that the first album by Heldon was released (1974). The main idea was to rock and…

**Swamp green vinyl; Edition of 700** Souffle Continu Records present a reissue of Heldon's Heldon . 6 . Interface, originally released in 1977. The idea in the mind of Richard Pinhas, the driving force behind Heldon, was to produce music "as cold as a huge block of ice" a vertiginous experience, of course influenced by the King Crimson trilogy, from Larks' Tongues In Aspic (1973) to Red (1974), except that Heldon represents an electrified version, leading to a perfect rapport between though…

**Edition of 300 copies, sold out at source **1976-1979: four years of intensive creativity for Heldon, following on from them leaving the home-studio on the Île Saint-Louis for Davout also in Paris, where a Moog 3, purchased from the Beatles, was ready in a space reserved for the leader of the group, Richard Pinhas. From here on, a trilogy was created which compares favorably with King Crimson of the period from Larks' Tongues In Aspic (1973) to Red (1974), the French band breaking new ground…

Gatefold sleeve. Includes CD. Because Music present the first reissue of Pascal Comelade's Paralelo, originally released in 1980. This first reissue identically features all the elements of the original version: the black and white sleeve with its painting made by Don Jacques Ciccolini, and all musical features popularized by Pascal Comelade (repetitive music, the concept of sequences, and continuous sound). Auto-produced on his own label Parasite, Comelade mainly uses one instrument for a…

French artist and autodidact Ghédalia Tazartès who is born in Paris in 1947 is a true nomad spending more than 30 years within musical practice and experimentation. Ghedalia is the orchestra and a pop group all in one person: the self is multitude and others, freely connecting the sounds, the rhythms, his voice, his voices. The extra-European music open the ear to Ghedalia's intra-European exotism. The permanent metamorphosis is a principle of composition, it escapes control, refuses classificat…

Ryoji Ikeda - Japan’s leading electronic composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda focuses on the essential characteristics of sound itself and that of visuals as light by means of both mathematical precision and mathematical aesthetics. Ikeda has gained a reputation as one of the few international artists working convincingly across both visual and sonic media. He elaborately orchestrates sound, visuals, materials, physical phenomena and mathematical notions into immersive live performances and in…

A collaboration between Mexican ambient producer Fernando Corona (better known as Murcof) and multi-award winning French classical pianist Vanessa Wagner, these re-interpretations of modern minimalist scores by Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman bring new life to three iconic 20th century classics. The opening on ‘Metamorphosis 4’ of Philip Glass is carried by a frantic race where synthesizers loops are carried away to the piano, without ever leaving the listener out of breath. The alter…

Holotype Editions was founded as a means of bringing out music by some of the most unique and peculiar artists of the last decades. What could be more fitting for the imprint’s seventh release, than the duo of cult artist Ghédalia Tazartès and multi-instrumentalist, composer and singer Maya Dunietz. Recorded live at Cafe Oto, in December 2013, Schulevy Maker documents the duo’s first live appearance. An amalgam of bizarre samples, concrete sounds, live piano and bells, juxtaposed with the otherw…

The frontier for French electroacoustic mystical music has traversed much ground since Pierre Schaeffer shuffled on the past and laid out a map without borders or designated ground. Seventy years in this land of the fried, there are a plethora of Ideas and ongoing potential coming from all corners of the globe. Inheriting the wisdom of past masters whilst forging a signature style of his own, Kassel Jaeger sits as one of the premier explorers of these unknown worlds today. Comprised recentl…

Complete Music For Films 1960-1984 is a three-CD set that gathers Luc Ferrari's complete works for films from 1960-1984, including electronic pieces, concrete music made in GRM, and some hybrids including traditional instruments. Very rare pieces, most of which are unpublished (including collaborations with Jean Cocteau and Jean Tinguely), are presented here for the first time, offering a complete scope of the innovative 20th century composer's foray into film music. Complete Music For Films 196…