Akuphone Jazz | Fusion 9 Items

An original instrumental music project led by composer and Oud player Aly Eissa. Featuring his diverse musical influences, Eissa’s compositions create versatile and twisted meditative atmospheres throughout the musical experience.Aly Eissa is a composer and Oud player based in Cairo, Egypt. He was mentored by legendary composer Abdo Dagher and Oud virtuoso Hazem Shahin. Eissa’s style is deeply-rooted in the Egyptian classical and folk traditions, and influenced by various western genres. Since 2012, Eissa has been regularly performing his compositions with an ensemble for live audiences in Cairo, offering a meditative musical experience with a twist. One of Eissa’s musical approaches is the experimenting approach through a unique trio formation including the Belgian synthesizer player Jonas Cambien and the Egyptian percussion player Ayman Mabrouk. In this trio, Eissa is trying to explore a different sound and space in the originally composed Arabic music.

Akuphone is proud to present the Jerusalem-based improvisational trio Leviot and its hypnotizing debut album. Leviot (Hebrew for “Lionesses”) is the brainchild of the multifaceted musician and composer Yael Lavie. She is accompanied by classically trained percussionist and music teacher Cnaan Canetti, and synth enthusiast Yishay Seroussi. The project is a result of Lavie’s explorations beyond the restraints of classical kanun and her fascination for electronic sounds and modern composition. The project initially started after Yael performed and recorded with the Spiritczualic Enhancement Center. With Leviot, she favors improvised sets over rehearsed pieces, revolving around virtuous interpretations by Cnaan and Yishay. The three musicians have been active since 2019, playing their immersive shows in a wide variety of settings, venues and festivals.

The trio’s debut release is a live session recorded in late 2020 at the Mazkeka Studios (Jerusalem), for the lockdown edition of the annual Zikuk Festival. It’s a meditative improvised piece in five parts that melts boundaries between traditional and experimental music, combining primal and futuristic sounds. Lavie’s graphic melodies are a road map for the piece, as Leviot takes off on a cosmic journey with deep drones, whispering chimes, mesmerizing Arab melodies, pulsating rhythms and iridescent ambient patterns.

Akuphone is proud to present Fuji-Yuki’s last masterpiece, One Butoh. A musical immersion into the most exciting avant-garde dance style of the past century. Created in Japan in the 1960s by Tatsumi Hijikata, butō is the "dance of the obscure body". It broke with the traditions of classical Noh and Kabuki Theater, which, at the time, seemed outdated in the national context. Nourished by a European artistic avant-garde, butō stands out as a mirror of the socio-political turmoil of a post-World War II Japan. One Butoh resonates as a perfect acoustic introduction to this subversive art and propels the listener deep into his own soul.

Fuji-Yuki is a Japanese vocalist who uses her voice like an instrument. With special vocal techniques, glossolalia and electronic pedals, she creates a wide variety of sounds. Inspired by the spirits of Buddhism and Shintoism, she creatively transforms her vocals into an ambient drone or prayers resonating in a church-like space. Her live performances are always different, depending on the place and space they take place in. She is also known as the vocalist of the experimental band Sarry.

Jac Berrocal, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay are back with a true gem of an album: Transcodex. Turning more towards pop than in their beginnings, this fourth record follows the footsteps of their previous album, Exterior Lux. The trio seems limitless: they experiment with a large variety of styles (pop, dub, electronica, dark jazz), always colored by their very own touch. Jac Berrocal’s trumpet, richer than ever, plays over an ever-changing sonic landscape engineered by the duet of musicians/producers Vincent Epplay and David Fenech.

For this album, they invited two amazing musicians. Jah Wobble (founding member of Public Image Ltd and collaborator of African Head Charge, Brian Eno, Holger Czukay, Jaki Liebezeit, Evan Parker, Sinéad O'Connor) plays deep bass lines on two tracks. Jean-Hervé Peron (founding member of the German band Faust, and who recorded with Tony Conrad, Nurse With Wound, Pascal Comelade) brings his prowess to two tracks as well. Peron writes lyrics in French, German and Russian — and plays the French Horn like no one else.

The closing track of the A side is a tribute to Christophe Bevilacqua (1945-2020), friend to Jac Berrocal. The song summons the place Bevilacqua used to live in: an Art Deco flat on Boulevard du Montparnasse, Paris.

Even if its intentions are clear, Transcodex does not reveal all its secrets right away. It’s up to you to find the solution, the key, the Transcodex yourself. It must be revisited over and over again for its beauty to be fully revealed.

Expedition is a collaboration between sound artist The Dead Mauriacs (aka Olivier Prieur) and collage artist Evan Crankshaw, based on their mutual interest in treating exotica as both a subject and a material. Evan Crankshaw's 2015 collage book, also entitled Expedition, is assembled and collaged by hand from a vast archive of popular exoticist printed materials, and explores recurring motifs in expedition narratives, simultaneously evoking and alienating the exoticist fantasy.

In 2018, the book was interpreted for a live performance at Festival BBMix (Boulognes-Billancourt, France) in collaboration with The Dead Mauriacs, who created a complete exotica-concrète score accompanying projected images of the book & live narration. That collaboration can be heard on this album, an armchair-travel virtual-voyage to the heart of an imagined actual elsewhere, stitched from pieces of narcotizing fabulisms, disturbing actualities, and incomprehensibilities – an interior excursion into the exotic immensity.

Jac Berrocal is a 1946-born musician (trumpet player), poet and sometime film actor who came of age in the ‘70s Paris improv scene, where the boundaries between music, art and theatre were porous and begging to be breached. Inspired by bebop, chanson, free jazz, beat poetry, early rock ‘n roll and myriad Eastern influences, and with an iconoclastic, anything-goes approach to instrumentation and technique that would later align him with post-punk sensibilities, Berrocal blazed an eccentric and unstoppable trail across the underground throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, both solo and as part of the Catalogue group he co-founded. During this time his uproarious performances routinely wound up jazz and rock audiences alike, but earned the admiration of many musicians: Steven Stapleton invited him to perform on two Nurse With Wound albums, and other notable collaborators in his career include Sunny Murray, Lizzy Mercier-Descloux, Lol Coxhill, Yvette Horner and James Chance. In the 90s his protean achievements were celebrated on the Fatal Encounters compilation, but far from slowing down in the autumn of his life, Berrocal has maintained an extraordinary work-rate, keeping studio dates with Pascal Comelade, Telectu and Jaki Liebezeit, among others.

Now Berrocal has found the perfect foil in David Fenech and Vincent Epplay, two fearlessly inventive improvisers, composers and catalysts who create challenging, acutely modernist yet historically aware settings – wrought out of synthesis, guitars, computer processing, field recordings and unorthodox percussions – for Berrocal’s unmistakeable voice and breathtakingly lyrical horn sound to flourish.

Fenech cut his teeth in the mail-art scene of the early ‘90s, leading the Peu Importe collective in Grenoble. His 2000 solo debut was recently reissued by Felix Kubin’s Gagarin label, and he has also worked as a software developer at Ircam, and played with Jad Fair, Tom Cora, Rhys Chatham and James Plotkin; in 2011 he formed a trio with Berrocal and Ghedalia Tazartes for the Superdisque LP.

Epplay is a highly regarded sonic and visual artist with a particular interest in aleatory composition and autonomous pieces, concrète, and the puckish reappropriation of vintage sound and film material, with dozens of published works to his name on labels like Planam/Alga Marghen and PPT/Stembogen. Exterior Lux is the third part in the series of albums and was again mastered by the legendary Noel Summerville.

"It’s like The Bonzo Dog Band meeting Scott Walker, with Codona booked for the interval music" (Brian Morton - The Wire)

"Jazz, Dub, Musique concrete and a Gallic punk spirit, coalesce into a sound so potent it is a wonder it hasn’t been done before" (Rewind Forward)

"An eclectic mix of folk anarchy, West Coast jazz cool, African kalimba, French poetry and studio dub. All the beauty and terror of jazz at its most lawless." (Andrew Male - Mojo)

Musician, composer and one of the most revered figures for today’s younger generation of experimental and alternative Arabic music-scenes, Kamilya Jubran (text, oud & vocals, collaborates with long standing musical partner, composer, accomplished trumpet player and seasoned electronic musician Werner Hasler (trumpet & electronics).

In Wa (Arabic for and), their third album together as a duo, Kamilya Jubran and Werner Hasler continue to interrogate their listening and their expression, their research and their desires, to unravel a musical universe of possibilities; “a unison of timbres, cultures complementing, the complicity of verses, and modes and languages confronting each other ” in the duo’s own way of communicating respective origins and contemporaneity.

Lyrical, within a sound full of contrast and ornamentation, they pursue an expansion of their repertoire with imaginative interpretation and improvisation. For this release via Swiss label Everest Records, Jubran and Hasler seek new sonic and phonetic territory, based on the wasla compound form found in the classical repertoire of Near Eastern music and in Western modern and improvised music; a suite of musical explorations within one composition. In the 45-minutes-long piece that makes up the full length album, they gradually unveil to us the tenants of this artistic dialogue, as they deepen a longstanding musical pact nurtured since 2002 based on the probing and opening up of musical modes and traditions. The chemistry between Jubran and Hasler’s exchange gives birth to a singular, original and extratemporal sound.

Kamilya Jubran (singer, oud) and Werner Hasler (trumpet, electronics) have been collaborating since 2002. Their first collaboration Mahattaat was their earliest experiment into bringing together disparate cultural and artistic roots. Their next collaboration, Wameedd, released in 2004, combined Jubran’s vocal skill and limitless imagination with Hasler’s melodies and his original aesthetics in electronic music. The duo then released Wanabni in 2010 followed by W asl in 2016, featuring French double bass player Sarah Murcia.

Boîte Boîte is the latest compendium from French trumpeter Jac Berrocal. Composed of rare and previously unreleased tracks, it plunges the listener into the fascinating world of this unclassifiable and timeless avant-garde artist. Recorded between Paris, New York, Berlin and Riga, the works are received like postcards from an unknown sender and enjoyed without moderation. The selection, devised by Jac Berrocal himself, oscillates between experimental tracks such as the eponymous « Boîte Boîte » and electronic pop delusions such as « Amarena ».