Versatile Vinyl, CD & Tape 10 Items

When we started playing music together in 1997, we could spend a lot of time on each individual track. It would mutate, go through many phases, until we’d get to the point when we’d decide to capture it and mix it on the fly.

Twenty-five years later, we changed gears. This album was produced across a two year period, during several sessions in our studio (the third member of the band), following this process: we plug the machines, we start a musical conversation, we press record when it gets interesting.

In the studio, that moment always comes, when a fragile and magical balance happens. That’s when we record, usually in one take, sometimes all in the same stereo channel, the computer sitting in a corner, its presence not interfering with our ears.

La Folie Studio is the fruit of this process.

Let’s get numerologistic with this new age reactionary-philosophic strategy manifesto:

Playing electronic music, whether alone or not, must be joyous, funky, and make you feelgood.

The studio is not a sanctuary but a place of life. Technology must not be intimidating.

Welcoming friends and new objects in the studio should be an infinite source of inspiration.

If nothing happens in the studio, turn off the light and play a percussion record.

Techno heads of all ages need something more spontaneous and freer than little thumbnails shared on a pocket computer. Château Flight offers a musical experience carved on grooves.

With 25 years of experience, Château Flight can cure all your musical ills, instantly and painlessly.

The key to success: midi sync + din syc + external trigs.

Uprooted, the sound of here and there. Uprooted is a project curated by Vidal Benjamin. The concept behind the project comes from his own personal experience of being uprooted. Under the wing of Versatile Records, he has decided to launch a collection of double-sided limited edition, vinyl only, celebrating the dualityof people who take their roots from a place and embrace another culture.

The idea is to ask an appreciated music activist with a double cultural pedigree to choose two tracks. One track that incarnates the place where he or she comes from (the sound of there, side A) and another

No digital for this série. Vinyl only.

Old friends John Cravache and I:Cube teamed up to release Chimère Fm’s debut album on Versatile records. Endless improvised studio sessions seamlessly blending electronic synthesis and post dada cinematics. Dreamy synth funk rubs against pagan rhythms and minimalist electronic drones. This album will take you to soundwave paradise. Chimère Fm is an imaginary radio station broadcasting its stellar weirdness live from Paris !

After it became known that the Red Light Complex in Amsterdam had to close Gilb’R invited his friends Satoshi Yamamura and Abel Nagengast down for a session up in the ‘… studio’. The trio dived in head first and with eyes closed. The night was buzzing with impromptu music, singing and poetry and one evening lead to another. The gathered results are a raw homage to its illustrious surroundings and can be listened to on an inspired 6 track 12”. The Babel EP is out on Versatile Records.

Davy Kehoe, from Dublin’s Wah Wah Wino delivers 2 remixes of Triangle Days, a highlight from Gilb’R’s LP On danse comme des fous. While the instrumental remix drives us into a melancholic vibe, where Davy uses harmonica in a subtle way as he did for his latest live show, the vocal mix is an unusual approach to remixing. Davy decided to add his own vocals on top of his mix, and arranged it in a different way. The result is that the track is brought into a total pop territory. Ruutu Poiss, an Amsterdam based Estonian producer has deconstructed Super Spreader, to rebuild it into a complex yet driving form of club music. And last but not least, Gilb’R offers L’inconscient rebel, an unreleased jam recorded live during the Triangle studio days in Amsterdam. Some latin electronics? Digital guaguancó? Definitly a weird groover.

Imagine Prometheus, the thief of fire, the father of civilisation, had been spellbound by the sirens chanting and never felt pain, when the eagle bit his liver. Total enchantment, created by sound to overcome the pain of existence. A sound, styled by the ideal harmony of body and soul. And yet, the pain is still there, hidden between the notes, driving a romantic vision of salvation. If Prometheus could have translated his fictitious epiphany into singing, it might sound like Ghédalia Tazartès’s chanting in “White Layers Over Black Paper”, one of the eight snake dance tracks-not-tracks by German producer Detlef Weinrich aka Tolouse Low Trax and French singer, hurdy-gurdy, spinet and harp player Emmanuelle Parrenin. During some days of intimate plays in Paris they created “Jours de Grève”, a bouquet of music full of mirrors, eyes, statues, secret doors, rooms, and blood. With the offhanded help by friends and like-minded souls like Versatile aura mystic Gilbert Cohen, French avantgarde saxophone player Quentin Rollet and his fellow countryman, experimental voice artist Ghédalia Tazartès, they transformed in Cohen’s studio impulsive emotions into a kind of medieval cult sound that dances with tribal dub layers in search for a higher ground. The session took place during an intensive time of public strikes in the French capital, that tied up the public life of Paris and gave birth to the album’s title Jours de Grève. After the jam, Weinrich drove back to his old hometown Düsseldorf, sat down with his friend Jan Schulte aka Wolf Müller and mixed the captured notes, sounds, rhythms and singings into pristine tripping music, that avoids stylistic categorisations. As rather architecture, sculpture, painting, performing or film could express what Parrenin’s hypnotic hurdy-gurdy performances, Tazartès’s ancient deeply emotive ululations, Rollet’s almost religious saxophone notes and Weinrich’s toting grooves evoke in the psyche, it might be better to go back to Prometheus and the fire, that brought us light and warmth. Jours de Grève does too. And it is a stolen one. A borrowed one. Affected by art and life outside of sound. Lent from a forgotten monument in a random city around the world. Swayed by an afternoon glass of wine in a Parisian street café. Affected by music of all ages. Unconsciously developed in the spirit of Philippe Doray and Les Asociaux Associés, Théâtre du Chêne Noir d'Avignon or Areski Belkacem’s collaborations with Brigitte Fontaine. Above all Emmanuelle Parrenin extramundane voice swings, mutating between speech and chant, while Ghédalia Tazartès mourns like a wise illusionist. In tunes like “Caltec’s Dance” you even feel the airiness of early Fun Boy Three recordings. All that is rooted on Weinrich’s Tolouse Low Trax magnetic signature grooves, this time floating between dark tribal upbeat sexiness and dubbed-down bass sculpturalism. If it is true that illuminating music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it, then “Jours de Grève” is an in impulse composed primitive state of rhizomatic paranormal psychic phenomenon, that incorporates all the worlds, that the naked eye cannot see.

We were very surprised at Versatile when we received this file from flocofloco2020@gmail.com. And we still have very little info on the track that was there. “On m’a dit…” by Floco Floco is a lo-fi afro-disco stomper hailing straight from the new ghettos created by confinement. Something had to give and we are glad that Floco Floco, whoever he is, has chosen us to ease his lockdown mind: “I’ve been told to stay at home, on WhatsApp all day long, working in the studio, reading books I haven’t read, I hope it won’t be too long, I don’t know if I can hold, smoking weed day & night, like never I have been before”. Not a message, just a statement. The answer on the track was so good that we decided to come with more versions… We asked our friend Bufiman aka Jan Schulte to put his magic and he came with two versions. One stellar arpeggio, with no beats but a serious drive as well as an instrumental Disco version. Gilb’r slowed down the whole affair and turned it into a cosmic nonsense vocal reprise, with a different bassline, chords and arrangement. A great summer pack!

Versatiles presents a series of remixes of tracks from Head Voices, the late long format from Ariel Kalma & Gilbert Cohen: through dub manipulations, downtempo lazy atmospheres or electronic profusion of bleeps and kicks, each one opens a new interpretation of this crossover project.
On A Side, Australian producer Leo James turned indeed « De Luscious » into an epic 12 minutes monster dub version, in the vein of Moritz von Oswald & Mark Ernestus’ Rhythm & Sound. On The flip, Canadian producer Priori who recently released the great
On A Nimbus, gives here a deeper and minimal interpretation of « Tu Ne Peux Pas Savoir ». Finally, Versatile’s boss Gilb’R remixes an exclusive version of « Tribu Sauvage », previously only released on digital.

Stefan Schwander aka Harmonious Thelonious is definitely not a newcomer. He has been around for a long time and has already released lots of amazingly varied music on labels such as Emotional Response, Italic, Meakusma and Diskant. He’s also an integral part of the infamous Duesseldorf / Salon Des Amateurs axis that is an obvious hotbed of talent. He describes his style as "American minimalism vs. African drumming vs. European sequencing", a heady mixture which is clearly evident on this EP though with a definite Middle Eastern twist. Here at Versatile HQ we were introduced to this clutch of tracks by one of the members of Acid Arab and we were totally blown away. Stefan has a very unique production style, fusing all of the above elements with a hint of Gamelan, a dash of tweaked FM synthesis type sounds with a dose of warm ambience and finally his own singular touch on the mix. We are very happy to present you these 4 tracks to you, an essential EP from one of European music's true originals.