Ssaliva Mercury Coast

Belgian shapeshifter Francois Boulanger has traversed several spheres of liquid electronics and mutated beat music across his half-decade of activity as Ssaliva, but in the winter of 2010 he holed up in an old historic house in the town where he grew up, Chaudfontaine, with a partially broken Tascam 4-track to pursue a different muse, on a different wavelength. The 22 grainy guitar instrumentals comprising Mercury Coast slide through a fractured prism of moods, reveries, daydreams, and deliriums, from paranoid surf to opiate lullaby to smeared haze and beyond. There’s a naked, intuitive feel to the songs, like sketches born from smoke and sleeplessness, tracked at strange hours. The frayed fidelity further enhances the album’s aura of cloaked emotion, altered states, and raw truth. Shortly after the sessions Boulanger and two Brussels associates, Dynoo and Nosedrip, launched a label (Surf Kill) to release the recordings but for unremembered reasons nothing materialized. NNF is honored to finally share this overlooked outlier to a wider world.