Kythibong Vinyl, CD & Tape 19 Items

“What a shadow in the instrument, and what a murmur, of the forests from whence issued its wood.” Rainer Maria Rilke

While reading the “Midnight Skin” script for the first time, Carla Pallone (Vacarme, Mansfield.TYA) in Nantes met Fanny in Athens. And the Eucalyptus trees. And it was at this same moment that she saw through her window, an Eucalyptus tree. Fact and fiction are already mixing, and Carla Pallone welcomes this sign with a smile. Then comes the meeting with filmmaker Manolis Mavris, and his work: first “Brutalia”, then “Midnight Skin”. The writing is chiseled and precise. Each frame is a painting. At the center of the film: Fanny's solitude which excludes her from humankind. This solitude requires a place for expression. Carla Pallone thus imagines an “organic” music, linked to the way that wood, strings and other materials live and resonate. A poetic and strange sound universe, close to Fanny, to her physical and psychological states. She has found the perfect junction between acoustic and electronic, highlighting a modern violin, out of the times. The result is a soundtrack similar to Fanny, inhabited, dark and moving. Human.

Somewhere between Mickaël Nyman and Mica Levi, Carla Pallone knows how to write atmospheres, create landscapes and draw lines of fiction. Her classical training and her taste for ancient music have nourished her path as a composer, to open the spectrum of her music to the widest possible audience. With a strong appreciation for the strings, she explores a sensitive sound universe, which unfolds between organic and analog materials. Acute sense of melody, neoclassicism, minimalism... repetitive pieces of music rub shoulders with ritornellos with great joy. And if the violin is king, synthesizers also find their proper place as disturbing basses or melodic sweeps. There is great sensivity in her sound research, at the crossroads of musical paths, from the most classical to the most experimental, improvised or meditative.

Fortified by his collective experiences as a drummer and percussionist on the margins of free rock and improvisation - in Pneu, Papaye, Binidu or La Colonie de Vacances - Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy imagined Tachycardie, a project in which he initiates a paradoxically complex and raw vibratory art where rhythms and drones are born from matter and objects.

For his third disc under his fluttering pseudonym, Geoffroy blurs the lines between compositions/improvisations and field recordings and invites us to prick up our ears in a process of extended listening offering panoramic pieces. These nine practices are so many acousmatic rituals in a semi-natural environment conceived as sound tracking shots which can be listened to as one would apprehend a landscape and its different planes: electro-acoustic panoramas in perspective, at sometimes moderate volume, which invite an increased attention or, on the contrary, a more global listening to atmospheres. It seems that blurring the tracks between what he proposes to hear and the freedom of perception offered to the listener matters to Geoffroy in this compromise between rustic concrete music and rhythmic bas-reliefs played in a crooked way under the shed.

This collection of six pieces brings together nine practices, in formats ranging from a little over two to seven minutes. They function as so many vignettes of "Cinema for the ear" where the little naturalist stories, which we imagine taking place at nightfall, merge with the miniatures of domestic experimental music combining almost fortuitous rhythms and frequencies. The rustling of fauna and flora welcome with open arms the fragile and gently dissonant sounds of Geoffroy. Over the course of the practices, the elements of field recordings seem to integrate the vast palette of the sound director. The pieces thus take on more composed, dense and dynamic turns; we no longer know which of the dog or the synthesizer is barking, whether it's the wind blowing or sticks scratching driftwood, and we marvel at believing everything these concrete, sometimes absurd nursery rhymes tell us.

Three years after Probables, the first discographic manifestation of Tachycardie, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy continues to wander between acousmatic music, minimalism (Tachycardie Ensemble), field recordings and fake traditional music, following a most elusive trajectory. Competing in purity in his sound approach with the picky Ralf Wehowsky, Bernhard Günter, or even Thomas Köner, Geoffroy also maintains a resolutely physical relationship to sound that brings him closer to his peers (-cussionists) Will Guthrie or Eli Keszler. Despite these somewhat futile attempts at filiation, Tachycardie remains, somewhere in Touraine, one of the most exciting living anomalies in experimental music.

Three years after Pergélisol/Chorémanie, their first diptych album crossing post-punk radicalism and minimalist ambition, the quartet named after Maria Spelterini (an Italian tightrope walker who crossed the Niagara Falls on a wire several times in 1876) released a second record that transcends this delicate aesthetic balance and navigates well beyond/below rock and electronics.

When Pierre-Antoine Parois, Arthur de La Grandière (members of Papier Tigre), Meriadeg Orgebin and Nicolas Joubaud (members of Chausse Trappe) are not in the ranks of La Colonie de Vacances or deep in the dictionary, looking for album titles ("pareidolia" is the phenomenon where the brain creates optical illusions of familiar faces or shapes where there is only abstraction) they imagine the most radical vanishing points to their possessed "Drum & Drone".

Alternately bewitching and heady, this new thirty-three-minute piece of post-krautrock with industrial accents and the allure of ritual music is born from the interaction of a drone and a rhythm evolving side by side, crossing, mixing and responding to each other before disappearing.
Paréidolie opens with near-silent purity, a held synthetic note posed alongside a skeletal beat. The sound spectrum gradually widens, multiplying little by little and combining electronic sources and textures until it generates dissonant sinusoidal vertigo punctuated by a turgid polyrhythm and supported by electric bursts; until the rupture, marked by a bell sound.
On the other side of the mirror, the silence is soon swept away by rustling modulations and convulsed electric feedbacks, slowly restoring a pulsating dynamic, like a negative vision of the first twenty minutes of the piece as one would hear it behind the red velvet curtain of David Lynch. The bell rings again, without stopping this time, and closes the piece with a discontinuous ringing restoring the initial purity.
A resolutely promising young project, Spelterini reconciles the rhythmic and textural rigor of the Austrian post-rockers of Radian with the regressive electric incantations of the Americans of Mosquitoes and signs a breathtaking piece evoking a strange ritual in a power plant.

“In french, one can say that "the lake isn’t on fire", meaning that there is no rush. But what would a lake on fire look like?
This new Chocolat Billy album, as its title announces, tries to picture it.
The urgency is there, it is hounding us, informing, spreading, but it is embroiled in a “danceable solution” as Brian Ferry would have said in the days of Roxy Music.
With Chocolat Billy, we don't dance in circles, we travel in dreams in half-built landscapes. Jacques seems to be blowing in his tuba, which one imagines to be a little dusty, and this simple movement of air is
transformed into a note on the sax leading the path from the cave to the river.
Besides Jacques, (we will not know what happened to his various partners that we encountered in a previous album), we come across several families of figures. Où vas-tu Zolatale? "Au Cinéma" seems to answer the following title. And it is Italy on the Cinecittà side that we visit to the rhythm of a shimmering afro-beat, taking the time to salute the great Mario Bava, then a Mediterranean California of acid-synth Beach Boys. We enter in a huge apartment reminiscent of a tango, not Piazzolla's but Zbigniew Rybczyński's film. We even dance in the dark following a reptilian progression, disregarding the angles and walls that our swaying hips might encounter. And above all, we don't dance alone.
We do not shuffle; the tracks move forward, compact, on their sustained rhythms, but one can linger to whistle the Orientologist. The fire in the lake does not create a bubble and does not give in to panic, it is crossed by colored and sinuous lines which intertwine supplely but can sometimes break abruptly as the design of the cover suggests. "Scutigères flamboyantes vs rats de bureau versus", this intense text found on a flyer
at Novö Local, an underground concert venue in Bordeaux, seems to have drifted to finally find its place in the band's music. One can imagine that other materials that make their music so rich were picked up along
the way, kept aside, waiting for the right moment to use them, this little nothings, like Jacques with his found mask which is a bit old.
Whether for dance or for life, there is an urgent need to keep your feet on the ground. And if you catch yourself looking at your shoes, it's not "shoegazing" but it's to check that they will hold up. "
Jean-Francois Magre

In 2002, to provide on the spot a first act for a concert, seven people from Bordeaux accidentally named their very young formation Chocolat Billy. Quickly, the group tightens around four people but the name, although absurd, is preserved. The quartet then takes a liking to exchanging instruments, unless it is the instruments that take a liking in changing musicians.
The result, echoing this game of musical chairs, is at the crossroads of several sonic paths, a hybrid form, alternately playful and dancing free-rock, experimental pop, world noise, naive songs.
Composed collectively and as democratically as possible, the pieces of Chocolate Billy, albeit written, give the lion share to improvisation and elasticity.
They played left, right and center with Deerhoof, The Ex, Thurston Moore, The Osees and a whole gang of great musicians.
To date, seven albums have been released on the labels Les Potagers Natures, Kythibong and Frissons.
Armelle Marcadé Magermans, Jo Burgun, Ian Saboya and Jordan Pirozzi make up the formation today.
credits
released April 22, 2022

Audiobook and Soundtrack from her show "Le Périmètre de Denver".

Limited edition of 500 copies.

Stéphane Laporte's solo musical project, Domotic, is a fine example of longevity. Since Bye Bye, his first album released in 2002, the Parisian conscientiously digs a groove aligning on the same axis — which over time looks more like an orbit — the aesthetically perfect pop of the Beatles, psychedelic rock, Old School Ambient, the glorious electronica of the 90’s, the eccentricities of "library music" and the rigor of minimalism. However, it would be unwise to reduce the half-dozen albums and the handful of shorts signed by Domotic to these few influences, as the approach of each of his discs corresponds to an instrumentarium, a precise recording method and an associated concept. Moreover, it seems that for Domotic the construction process is just as important as the result obtained. It is perhaps this perpetual search for new technological and aesthetic experiences, governed by unusually high requirements, which leads him to produce pop as one would compose scholarly music. In the early 2000s, Laporte began to produce music through Pro Tools software by training as a sound engineer. In the evening, he tries his hand at recording synth sounds that will compose Bye Bye, his first record for the Active Suspension label. Three years later, Ask for Tiger, his second album, transposes his fine melodic triturations into song format and vocals make an entrance. There follows a period during which the Parisian will favor collaborations: Centenaire, post-folk rock project in the company of Aurélien Pottier and Damien Mingus, Karaocake, lo-fi pop duo with finely outdated keyboards, alongside Camille Chambon, and Egyptology, “synthetic-cosmic” pair with Olivier Lamm. On the sidelines of these various projects, Laporte returned to solo production, in 2013, with Before and After Silence, a lo-fi and rugged psychedelic pop album, followed by a series of compositions for art films and short films and instrumental albums, including two for the Antinote label under his own name, and a minimalist krautrock record for Gonzaï. His career and his various experiences have allowed the Parisian to refine the complex aesthetic identity of Domotic while multiplying the caps: multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger but also sound engineer and producer as he admirably showed by passing behind the console for Orval Carlos Sibelius’ Super Forma in 2013 and Forever Pavot’s La Pantoufle in 2017. Under a dark and deep blue cover with a design reminiscent of sound illustration records, Descriptions of an unfolding event immediately displays its content "Chords / Melodies / Textures / Rhythms / No words". Combining his passion for soundtracks, his talent for writing songs without words and a composition process inspired by both musical and aesthetic minimalism, Domotic develops on this new album themes reminiscent of François de Roubaix or Ennio Morricone's soundtracks. The endlessly pared down writing and composition are based on the simple repetition and changes of chord of layered melodic forms played on piano and synth and supported by vocals; these finely orchestrated melodic patterns are then gently mangled, as if subjected to a drift which would gradually modify their shape and texture. This second step consists in exploring the possibilities of disappearance of these precious variations into rich textural depths. A bit like the American visual artist Sol LeWitt whose work of wall drawings is based on the repetition of simple shapes constructing a true visual narrative. Laporte develops a musical development made up of thirteen pieces that function as so many perspectives, modulations and alterations of melodic patterns; this game of repetitions / variations / deteriorations accentuates the narrative dimension while creating a play-set of distorting sound mirrors, blurring the temporality and bringing out a certain nostalgia. As an assertive purist, Laporte has favored analog devices (pedals, magnetic tapes and spring reverb) for filtering his sounds, giving them subaquatic metallic nuances and offering them an organic unraveling. Imagine Vladimir Cosma grinded by Christian Fennesz or Broadcast granularized by Jan Jelinek; you're almost there, with the difference that Domotic, even in its most advanced dissolutions, likes to preserve a certain physicality to the sound which conveys powerful images. He thus poses side by side a piece with strong and clear instrumentation and its submerged false doppelganger, with degraded contours and resonance, and suggests to hear its melodic DNA through the hull of a submarine: the themes seem to liquefy, the rhythms are no more than a distant hydraulic punctuation and the blips evoke the sweeping of a sonar. If the majority of the titles of the pieces (Very Deep, Deeper Again, Through Phases, Suspension 2) reinforces this feeling of diving into deep waters, Laporte nevertheless allows himself a wink tribute to the composer Morton Feldman in the shape of a melodic madeleine, with the hit-like Morton, available in 2 versions, Pop Drums and Gamelan, which sounds like the credits of a 70s American soap opera, and its Asian version. Special mention to A willingness to fall asleep, a minimalist avatar in the form of an aquatic hypnosis session where a piano motif swims with timeless grace between an asthmatic oscillation and a spectral chorus drowned in reverb. An ambitious project initiated by Stéphane Laporte in 2017, Descriptions of an unfolding event crystallizes the vast musical inspirations and aesthetic concerns that have animated Domotic for several years. Before and After Silence (2013) and Smallville Tapes (2017) were already exploring this logic of “pop decomposition”, each in their own register and time; this new disc sees Laporte at the top of his melodic art navigating between minimalism, psychedelia and liquid experiments. And we envision Steve Reich and Ennio Morricone chatting with Jacques-Yves Cousteau on the Calypso deck...

Member of the rhythm section of La Colonie de Vacances, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy — the singularly sharp drummer of Pneu, Papaye or Binidu, and sound sculptor in Tachycardie (a shamanic project of polymorphic
drones) — joins forces with Guillaume Brot, guitarist of Llamame La Muerte and Tu Brüles Mon Esprit for a project that’s light years from a guitar / drums two piece planet.
United Color of Black Metal shows us “all the color” in abstract and experimental forms and offers to hear an intriguing “Petite Musique of Noises” which evokes the work of the heroes of the electroacoustic / noise of the dawn of the 90s as well as the sabotages of the electronic twists of the turn of the century.
Both UCBM machinists set in motion a noisy menagerie — frequencies and trajectories voluntarily escape their intervention. It gives to their fragile constructions an additional freedom and some dynamics.
Heterogeneous sound objects confront each other in a minimalism that tames the unpredictable; these moving sounds seem to be left to their own devices, intersect, flee, and sometimes confuse their courses in
precious moments — it’s sensitivity and narrative power generate a real poetic dimension.
This cerebral music refuses to start a beef. It draws using a palette of imperfect and damaged concrete sounds: magnetic pulsations, eroded tones, dirty oscillations, tinkling of wood and metal, residual breath
and rustling of all kinds.
Articulated in six parts, from I to III and from V to VII, Synchronicités connects arrhythmia distillations, busted gamelan and concrete epiphanies in pieces rarely exceeding five minutes. You’ll hear the first
crackling of the transistor — and when the slightest caress will rumble, your ear will be trapped, captivated and attracted into a new sequence of an “ear cinema” knocked up under the lean-to of your backyard.
If there is anything black about United Color of Black Metal — apart from the shadow in which Brot and Geoffroy indulge — it is undoubtedly the humor. Neither multicolored, nor really black and even less metal,
at most furtively metallic, this project is above all resolutely elusive. Synchronicités offers in a polished sobriety a serious, loose and challenging music displaying a persistent smirk. These pieces recall the
compositions like Illusion of Safety of Dan Burke as much as the sound trademarks of the German labels AMusik and Sonig.
Allow me introduce the second LP of United Color of Black Metal — an easy-listening record for deaf & tough guys.

Black Truffle presents People Pleaser, the new LP from Nantes-based drummer and percussionist Will Guthrie. Initially rising to prominence in Australia as a drummer in the fields of jazz and improvised music, Guthrie later turned increasingly toward electronics and amplified percussion, developing an idiosyncratic style of electro-acoustic performance characterized by shimmering metallic textures, rapid-fire textural transformations and aggressively high volume. Recent years have seen a return to the drum kit in both solo and collaborative work, in performances where Guthrie uses duration and endurance to push at the limits of his formidable technical abilities as a player in the free jazz tradition, working variations on short rhythmic units into an endless flow of non-metered pulse. Although drawing on many aspects of Guthrie’s past work, People Pleaser stands alone in the catalogue of his recorded work. Working fast and intuitively over a period of three weeks, Guthrie has crafted a suite of song-length pieces that combine his drumming with electronics, field recordings, and sampled detritus. Inspired by rough and ready sampling style of producers like RZA, J Dilla and Knxwledge, and by the endless possibilities of musique concrète, People Pleaser uses a highly divergent array of sound sources, building pieces from drum and percussion tracks left over from other projects, audio ripped from skate videos, noise electronics, fragments of a police interrogation, and anything else ready to hand. Guthrie’s unique rhythmic sensibility is the thread drawing all these elements together, his drum performances propulsively rhythmic yet insistently irregular in a way that sometimes brings to mind the uniquely open rhythmic space carved out in the early Weather Report and other classic fusion. Drawing together a manifold of influences in an entirely sui generis way, People Pleaser is a raw, exciting, and surprisingly accessible peak into the laboratory of a unique sensibility.

Art is a matter of different phases and influence. The artists' core reaches out like heat waves. And very rarely do these artists' core merge like Brigitte Fontaine and Arseki Belkacem have. Their Saravah Era lasted ten years (1969 to 1979), ten years of "folle sagesse" (crazy wisdom), above all genres and song limitation.

"Le plaisir secret que donne une chanson, dessin à la craie sur le mur de tes sons" (the personal delight within song, a chalk drawing on your wall of sounds) whispers Areski, right after Brigitte's voice on the penultimate song of the double album "Vous et nous". Released in 1977, this free flowing record contains 33 songs, it's their 6th album after "Comme à la radio", "Brigitte 4", "Je ne connais pas cet homme", "L'incendie" and "Le bonheur", and it continues to spread the wide and generous spectrum of the couple fully blossoming talent. Electronic experiments, North African trance, refined acoustics and medieval drones gracefully blend with the acid and candid tongues of the singers, surprising us each step along the way. The making of this record was also full of twists and turns. It started out as a solo effort by Areski at Jean-Pierre Chambard's studio. Little by little, as Areski was filling tapes with poems and improvised skits, Brigitte would sneak into the studio at nightfall, adding her voice here and there, her whispers then became screams, giving fuel to the fire in a total blaze, a surreal blaze. The solitary work ("je") thrived to become us ("nous") and you ("vous") ...

Benjamin Barouh, June 2018

Unfortunaley the last batch of these arrived with ceased corners and therefore we sell it a bit cheaper.

More than 10 years ago, Vincent Dupas, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy and Jérôme Vassereau created Binidu in parallel with their respective bands, Fordamage and Pneu, then very singular and of the most joyful french rock music. Their collaboration is a trek that started from green and sunny pastures to sink over time into mountains surrounded by storms. Binidu holds nothing back in composition, always ready to reinvent himself with each new album.

After "Yes", the first fresh and luminous one released in 2013, the second "Nouvel Ancient" in 2018, more adventurous and kind of lost in an apocalyptic world, the trio returns today just as adventurous but more in a peaceful way with "// ", a creation mostly focused on his appetite for the acoustics and electronics combination. A long-distance running music, which, from the top of the ridge lines, looks at the world with lucidity, embracing the entire landscape, valleys, towns, all the way to the sea.

It is their label, Kythibong, which, on the occasion of the festivities around his twentieth birthday, brings Binidu out of his brief hiatus. 2022 therefore sees the trio reunite and begin to compose a new repertoire with a strong desire to play at a low volume and thus be able to perform in a wide variety of locations. They then broached the composition of the third album changing their instrumentarium. The drums are now reduced to a split snare drum and a hi-hat, the modular synthesizers take an important place in the composition, Jérôme and Vincent play on small amps, the latter exchanges his electric guitar for an acoustic Parlor, and the sound of the voice is now devoid of any effect.

Over the course of rehearsals, Binidu starts to imagine “//” as an overall piece with five linked long compositions. Thirty-five minutes of music, alternating very acoustic phases and other electronic ones, creating supernatural spaces, moments of reflection, some pop, hypnotic and/or rhythmic bursts.

More than 10 years ago, Vincent Dupas, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy and Jérôme Vassereau created Binidu in parallel with their respective bands, Fordamage and Pneu, then very singular and of the most joyful french rock music. Their collaboration is a trek that started from green and sunny pastures to sink over time into mountains surrounded by storms. Binidu holds nothing back in composition, always ready to reinvent himself with each new album.

After "Yes", the first fresh and luminous one released in 2013, the second "Nouvel Ancient" in 2018, more adventurous and kind of lost in an apocalyptic world, the trio returns today just as adventurous but more in a peaceful way with "// ", a creation mostly focused on his appetite for the acoustics and electronics combination. A long-distance running music, which, from the top of the ridge lines, looks at the world with lucidity, embracing the entire landscape, valleys, towns, all the way to the sea.

It is their label, Kythibong, which, on the occasion of the festivities around his twentieth birthday, brings Binidu out of his brief hiatus. 2022 therefore sees the trio reunite and begin to compose a new repertoire with a strong desire to play at a low volume and thus be able to perform in a wide variety of locations. They then broached the composition of the third album changing their instrumentarium. The drums are now reduced to a split snare drum and a hi-hat, the modular synthesizers take an important place in the composition, Jérôme and Vincent play on small amps, the latter exchanges his electric guitar for an acoustic Parlor, and the sound of the voice is now devoid of any effect.

Over the course of rehearsals, Binidu starts to imagine “//” as an overall piece with five linked long compositions. Thirty-five minutes of music, alternating very acoustic phases and other electronic ones, creating supernatural spaces, moments of reflection, some pop, hypnotic and/or rhythmic bursts.