Via Parigi Vinyl, CD & Tape 6 Items

While there has been plenty of precedent, regarding Alvarius B’s fascination with the down and out of Anglo/American cultural refuse, That’s How I Got To Memphis is certainly his most realized collection of paying homage to it. The fact that this whole album is a collection of covers that have invaded AB’s current musical obsessions is testament to the timeless nature of the original artists songwriting prowess. Imagine Joe Meek coming back from the dead to produce a country western and northern album by a Saginaw miscreant fried up in the Orman botanical gardens of Cairo Egypt. That this album could be a perfect soundtrack to a Paul Lynch sequel to his portrait of failed ambition masterpiece The Hard Part Begins is irrelevant, because it stands alone as a sequel to another AB masterpiece, Baroque Primitiva. That this album also highlights actual Outsider artists from the halcyon days of holy, rebellious, loner losers should give hope, cuz outsider these days means you don’t have a gmail account or Meta colonized brain. That’s How I Got To Memphis is a superb collection of songs about longing, love lost and found, curios picked up and dropped off, tragedy and hope, confusion and epiphany while stumbling around through back roads to nowhere. –HM

"Step into the enigmatic realm of ‘Funest Human Nature’, an audacious collaboration between avant-garde luminaries Jac Berrocal, Pascal Comelade, and Vincent Epplay. In this mesmerizing sonic odyssey, the boundaries of experimental music are shattered as Berrocal's haunting trumpet, Comelade's whimsical piano, and Epplay's immersive soundscapes converge to create a kaleidoscope of textures and emotions. A journey through the depths of the human psyche, where surrealism meets primal instincts and the absurd dances with the profound. The trio's fearless exploration of sound, inviting listeners to unravel the mysteries of the human condition through an eclectic tapestry of sonic experimentation. From the eerie whispers of forgotten dreams to the jubilant cacophony of uninhibited joy, 'Funest Human Nature' is a testament to the boundless possibilities of artistic collaboration. Embrace the unexpected, embrace the sublime, and immerse yourself in the haunting beauty of this extraordinary musical venture." Pascal Comelade, born in Montpellier, France in 1955, is a prolific Catalan musician and composer known for his distinctive blend of minimalism, surrealism, and musical primitivism. He started his music career in the mid-1970s and has since created a unique sound using toy instruments, pianos, and traditional ensembles. Comelade's work is characterized by its eclectic influences, ranging from rock and folk to classical and avant-garde. He has collaborated with various artists, including PJ Harvey and Robert Wyatt. Over the decades, Comelade has built a cult following with his unconventional approach to music and his impressive discography that spans numerous albums and soundtracks. Jac Berrocal, born in 1946 in Saint-Jean d'Angély, France, is a pioneering avant-garde trumpeter and composer known for his fusion of jazz, rock, and experimental music. His career, which began in the early 1970s, is marked by innovative albums like "Musiq Musik" and extensive collaborations with artists from Nurse With Wound to Vince Taylor. Berrocal is celebrated for his theatrical live performances, which often incorporate elements of poetry and drama. His work continues to defy conventional music boundaries, maintaining a cult following and influencing diverse musical genres. Through his distinctive approach, Berrocal has carved out a niche in the avant-garde music scene, continuously exploring the intersections of sound, performance, and art. Vincent Epplay, born in 1964 in France, is an innovative sound artist and musician known for his work in creating immersive audiovisual environments. His artistic approach often involves the manipulation of sound to explore its interaction with space and audience perception. Epplay's works are characterized by a keen interest in the experimental music tradition, incorporating elements of chance and the use of unconventional sound sources. He has collaborated extensively with other artists, including Jac Berrocal and David Fenech, contributing to a dynamic and exploratory sound art scene. Through installations, performances, and recordings, Epplay continually challenges and expands the boundaries of auditory and visual experiences.

The "evohé" is the song of the Bacchants during the carnival. It is a bloody and humorous song that humiliates everything. In Euripides' work, the evohé is screamed when the city of Thebes is torn apart by fever and masquerade. Everyone laughs and sings, the maenads set the city on fire, masks pierce and disfigure the inhabitants, and Agave eats the head of King Pentheus, her son.

One cannot explain what this song is; one would need to describe the flip side of the sung, its extremity. Perhaps one cannot even hear it... most likely, the song has already affected us before crossing the threshold of our lucidity. It wells up... It glides over memory; one cannot know its melody, there are no lyrics, no notation, no tradition, no learning... no university of the sung abyss can be established. The orgy of matter is sovereign and incommunicable; the song it gives birth to is always alien, foolish, and lost; it is a sung panic. -Pan's panic, offering a pack of blind dogs to Artemis and suggesting, in passing, to send them hunting in her debauchery. The dogs of naked nature run like mad at an impossible speed, devouring every creature they scent in the wind, consuming all flesh within their reach. One can imagine that the pack reappears invariably in too assertive human affairs, facing certainties against which its wildness imposes itself more violently than against anything else. For example: when we are a bit pleased with ourselves, sensing the impression of having composed, of having imposed our order on the order of matter... immediately, it seems we can hear them barking in the distance. We freeze, we listen, we would prefer to believe it's hallucinations. But no. It is indeed the order of matter returning to express itself with the dogs. Order pours over us, the carnival imposes itself, and while the dogs eat our heads, they offer to admit that the foundation of our order was all soft, all foolish and spongy, all decomposed, that the decomposed order from below, the sincerity of matter, had never ceased to be orgiastic. When the dogs devour us, it's because Pan has brought back the mud. He has ladled a large serving of material broth back onto us; he has made all things copulate again. One imagines a song that is not at all solemn but belongs to a kind of cold and sacred-less mystique; it is the grip of the sovereign jester. An apparently disorderly and boldly stammering song that sees itself overturned and enjoys it...

French Chanson, Noise, echoes of music from faraway and long ago, modified radio transistors and other old electronic gear… After releasing several sets of raw, almost entirely improvised direct-to-tape recordings duplicated by hand in a workshop on the border of the Bauges mountain chain, the Bégayer Trio made new friends. Orphans without a home, they were welcomed like brothers by the Parisian label Le Saule, spotted by the chic Geneva-based Bongo Joe Records, and thus were able to devote a year to the making of their debut album, “Terrain à mire. Une maison rétive. Contrainte par le toit.”

Co-produced by the two families mentioned above, the album was a first beam in the musical structure laid by this trio of Alpine fellows: what they sought was the most exact form of mutt-itude, a nomadic journey through intentionally scrambled ancient musical signs by way of French, Italian and Arabic song, gleefully following René Char’s aphorism, later borrowed and translated by Hannah Arendt as “Our inheritance was left to us by no testament.”

Bégayer’s mission– in the name of those without tradition, the rejects of a culture of scarcity born in the twilight of popular customs amidst the screams of Noise on village squares and in the flow of digital swarms– is to create a hitherto unknown genre of hybrid gypsy rhapsody. The culture of scarcity can be experiences as a kind of cruel joy, an occasion to bridge the unsteady interpretation of ancient practices with contemporary experiments and build upon singular variations and excess. Up to now, every stutter-song intended to produce a joyful though disquieting object whose obstinacy and cruel simplicity triggered a disturbance, a distancing, a studied thing that stares right back at us.

Now the trio has become a quintet working towards a new kind of concert : with no beginning and no end, in which concert-time and quotidian time merge in order to deliberately drain of any autonomy the temporality of performance. Through the vocals, the homemade percussion and numerous strange instruments, two immutable musical activities will be celebrated and brought to bear on each other: the song of the people, whose cry of hunger and togetherness breaks through the barrier between art and life – and the art of performance explored as communal effort to describe our times.

The second part of the famous collaboration between two UK based electronic pioneers: John Bolloten aka The Rootsman and Bryn Jones aka Muslimgauze. For this album the original The Rootsman material from his albums “Into The Light” and “52 Days to Timbuktu” was remixed and deconstructed by Muslimgauze. As always with Bryn Jones, all material is inspired by Arab culture. We hear distorted dub rhythms, sawn-off loops, traditional music, male and female voices and then distorted rhythms again. Closing your eyes, you can find yourself in the middle of an eastern city, walk along its noisy streets, admire the ancient architecture. This noise can tell amazing stories!