Author: Octopus

If there is a musical universe that is particularly difficult to penetrate, it is that of The Hafler Trio. Led for more than twenty years by Andrew McKenzie, and by his numerous collaborators among whom Chris Watson, co-founder of Cabaret Voltaire, The Hafler Trio has always placed musical creation and listening at the level of […]

Christian Bagnalasta is back with Effervescence, the label from Nantes that follows its own path, with a new album that is less convoluted than the aptly named Bretzel Arabesque and that puts some order in his inspired and referenced musical universe. The messy charm of his first recordings gives way to a more ambitious and […]

More and more clearly, there is in France a school – excellent – of artists producing abstract music all different (it is enough to quote in the same impulse people as diverse as Atone, M83 or Colleen to be convinced of it), but which have for common point a love of the well worked sound […]

Discreet and multi-faceted personality (student, pianist, singer) of the French-Belgian independent scene (Another Record, We Are Unique Records, Greed Recordings), Delphine Dora has two dear friends in Valérie Leclercq (Half Asleep) and Jullian Angel. Of course of the journey in a fairy world, covered with childish images where Oui Oui would recite his Erik Satie […]

From February 18 to 28, 2009, the 6th edition of the Octopus Festival will be held… which had believed when the theme of inventors of instruments was launched that it continues on – already! – five editions. And yet, with five proposals, most of which have never been seen in France, in the form of sound installations […]

Because, and this is one of the great specificities of Michael Carter, the direct meaning of his musical confrontations is largely guided by his live and risky approach to the stage situation. The fellow has nicely impressed the local microcosm during his performances in flesh and blood where he does not hesitate to approach the boards […]

“I make the metal sing because I have metal in my blood. Iron is in the blood. The iron is in the body, The iron is hot, the iron is singing, the iron is howling. The iron is dense, the iron is dancing, the iron is in the blood”.  Listening to Feromil, alias Emilien Leroy, discussing the […]

“Music, I don’t invent it. It exists naturally ”. Listening to Jean-François Laporte, we quickly guess that his status as an electro-acoustic composer is not an end in itself. Inventive musician, researcher, almost philosopher, Jean-François Laporte has developed a personal musical experience which tends to nourish his life experience. It is in the search for a certain authenticity […]

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is a dark and cruel game in which American and Japanese statesmen ally themselves, in order to counter a Sino-Korean coalition whose cyber hackers would be able to jeopardize the world economy. You meet heroic spies, dubious politicians and unscrupulous mercenaries, the goal of the game being to eradicate enemies by all […]

The sequel is precisely a series of albums produced first for an English label, Reflex, then German, Normal. It opens with the cornerstone of the group, Virus Meadow (1986) – a very short album, as if the group were still reluctant to deliver their music to the world – which will follow with regularity The Millpond […]

In a mid-90s interview for Les Inrockuptibles, Jennifer described herself as very sexual. Sexuality played a very important role in the image and the words, perhaps even more than today. I’m not saying that this dimension has necessarily disappeared from your work – fortunately, no – it is perhaps less explicit there, and perhaps also shifted towards […]

No less than four years have passed between your last two albums. I remember that during the tour that you did in the form of a voice, guitar, piano trio, with your partner Thomas Bartlett in 2006, you were already playing “Night Melody of the Pull”, “Climbing my dark hair, “Someone” or “Drown those days”, almost […]

You have been developing for a few years a vast and ambitious project: to collect and make known the work of artists of the non-western noise / industrial / ambient scene (Asia / Africa / South America). What convictions drive you in such an enterprise?  I want to fight the fairly widespread claim that the West […]

Bringing together three figures of improvised and experimental music, the drummer and manipulator of objects Paul Burwell, the (for the occasion) flautist and whistle player David Toop, and the “body” artist Nestor Figueras, the Cholagogues project is one of these cult recordings of which the only vinyl version, long out of print, undoubtedly required a […]

A character as committed as he is controversial, the German visual artist Joseph Beuys was a supporter of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art. Like the Fluxus movement, it abolished the boundaries between art and everyday life, rejecting the notion of work of art and considering that every human being is an artist. Title of one […]

The latest release to date (the third for the Empreintes Digitales label) of the electroacoustic works of Jonty Harrison, composed between 1999 and 2007, “Undertow” places the listener straight away on reefs against which the waves come crashing down and then plunges them. very quickly under the surface of the water, the composer’s favourite sound […]

A few eager ears will tell you that Plain Songs could have been released a short decade ago, overexposed years for the sprawling Chicago scene. But we are in 2007, and it is to the credit of W.W. Lowman to record such an album today. Patience seems to be the keyword of this disc prepared over three […]

With their naive simplicity, Yuichiro Fujimoto’s records can arouse both fascination and exasperation: no doubt for this reason that they are situated on the fringe of what is usually considered to be music. In the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s “ready made” which, in their time, posed the question of the status of the work of […]

All categories champion of the project with the longest name (borrowed from an Earl T. Wilson’s song, for the anecdote), Morgan Caris has fortunately many other qualities, such as this particularly developed melodic sense and this approach of the arrangements of a wadded sweetness that Iron & Wine would not deny. For this first release […]

Half of the experimental electronic duo SND, Mark Fell offers on this DVD with rough sonics an overview of his computer graphics work, a sober but refined mix of smoothed colored aesthetics, geometric insertions, abrupt signage shapes and cold digital variations. Maintained by a sound flow of repetitive tones and ultra-piercing intrusive frequencies, the general […]

It’s hard not to fall into contemplative mode when listening to Al Voltant d’un Paral.lel, the third solo album by Catalan guitarist Ferran Fages, whose collaborative work with Alfredo Costa Monteiro in Cremaster, with French musician Pascal Battus (the Fagus duo) or with various choreographers and musicians such as Rhys Chatham, Phil Niblock or Derek […]

Tellemake is Christophe Guiraud’s solo project. This drummer used to play in several rock and free rock bands such as Spoonful and Dogma. Scarbo, produced by the Toulouse-based label Angström Record, is his second record. After a dark and oppressive Morning EP, Tellemake widens his sound spectrum. He makes acoustic instruments such as cello, accordion […]

After The Helical Word released in 2005, Brandon Nickell, this young American only 25 years old, based in Oakland, and responsible for the label Isounderscore, offers us five new compositions at the confluence of concrete, experimental and noise music, with an assurance that has become rare. Plunged under some threatening ice cap, sometimes with a […]

Strings of Consciousness + Asva (Sunday, January 25 from 8pm in Paris, La Maroquinerie) International collective gathered around some pillars of the experimental and electronic scenes in France, guitarist Hervé Vincenti, saxophonist Perceval Bellone or laptop operator Philippe Petit, mentor of the Bip-Hop label, among others, Strings of Consciousness translates its musical dimension by a […]

In an almost logical continuation of the album Nocturnes – his second, released in 2002, yes already – Imagho aka Jean-Louis Prades continues his way, digs a furrow, turns the screw. Always in love with arrangements that give pride of place to an acoustic guitar of John Fahey fame, but also Takeshi Nishimoto, Robin Allender […]

Adieu, Arnaud des Pallières’ first fiction film, was a UFO when it was released in 2004, in the landscape of European cinema. The strong, sometimes disturbing and heavy presence of this unusual film was due to the complicity between a musicophile director and a cinematic musician who had already collaborated on creative documentaries. Martin Wheeler […]

With his soft hat screwed on his head, his fingers riveted to his accordion and his mouth staring at the microphone with his plaintive incantations, Ghédalia Tazartès navigates at sight in the open hall of the Maison des métallos, lulled by the noisy electronic accompaniments of El-G and Jo Lang, his fellow travelers of Reines […]

Who is Capillary Action? Capillary Action is the name under which I and a group of ever-evolving musicians play and record. Everyone involved in Capillary Action is also involved in other projects. The constant turnover in the band gives me the freedom to do what I want, without worrying about everyone’s schedules; it also allows […]

Since 2003, the Amor Fati association has been fighting for the diffusion and promotion of contemporary improvised music from its bastion in Bordeaux. There is no irredentist or secessionist spirit here, because it is with the idea of facilitating relations between innovative artists and a curious public in a geographical area of Aquitaine that some […]

It is surprising to discover, forty years after its creation, this forgotten film by Moshe Mizrahi. Sophie’s Ways (Les Stances à Sophie) is the second feature film by the man who won an Oscar in 1977 for his adaptation of La Vie devant Soi with Simone Signoret. It was during several stays in Paris that […]

French musician exiled in Walloon lands (he lives in Huy, a small town between Namur and Liège), Christophe Bailleau has given us to hear in the past soundscapes at their worst interesting, most often captivating of fragile restraint. As evidenced by the visitors to his sound installation L’Echappée Belle, in collaboration with Julie Maréchal and […]

It is no longer necessary to prove that math rock is a popular and artistic genre. Very worthy representatives of the style, the four Japanese of LITE push the envelope very far, at the risk of freeing themselves from the aficionados – should we say the ayatollahs – of the caste, and of conquering new […]

It’s as heartbreaking as Elliott Smith’s most tragic moments, the track “Guts” on the opening of Not If But When, the fourth album of the enigmatic Will Holland, aka Lost On Purpose. Adept of a mystery cult, the Californian songwriter, who can easily be imagined as a fiercely independent home studio rat, has been active […]

David Thrussell continues the militant adventure of his fetish project, the great Black Lung, whose comeback is confirmed by The Grand Chessboard with The Coming Dark Age. The paranoia of Black Lung in the speech leaves little by little the place to more realism, and this album carries the sign of the environmentalist engagement of […]

From a duo of actors as exciting as Stephen O’Malley (Sunno))), Khanate) and Peter Rehberg (Pita, Fenn O’Berg, founder of the Mego label), we could not decently expect a lambda ambient production. Second of their collaborations, this aptly named 2 is in line with the eponymous album, musical soundtrack of the dance show “Kindertotenlieder” (signed […]

Would Mego be reissuing all the classics of its catalog? Indeed, after Christian Fennesz’s Endless Summer, here is – admittedly, in a completely different genre – that the Austrian pioneer label restores Kevin Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma to its former glory. But, unlike the aforementioned record of the famous Viennese loops guitarist, it is here […]

Third album of the young Japanese Yuichiro Fujimoto, The Mountain Record continues to dig the singular furrow traced by his two predecessors Komorebi (2004) and Kinoe (2005), and transports the listener to the limits of music and daily life, in a duration marked by silences and the absence of events. As on his two previous […]

When four saxophonists, keen on experimentation, riveted on the open fields of spatiality and vibration of the textures offered by their instruments, meet as often to work on a long term project, the perspectives often prove to be endemic. Since 2003 Marc Baron, Jean-Luc Guionnet (both alto saxophone), Bertrand Deznler (tenor saxophone) and Stéphane Rives […]

Dupont is far from being an unknown on the European improvised music scene, a jazz bassist who worked with passion in the 1980s and 1990s. But H. D., also a master of electric bass, then opened up to the Afro-Parisian scene (Caribbean effluvia found here and there in Ultraboles), as well as to the experimentations […]

To do things simply, to deliver reality by revealing it in its most intimate aspects: the approach chosen by the two musicians, who have everything in common in terms of sound manipulation, is a marvel of calm, beauty and pastoral voluptuousness. The thickness and richness of the sound material is made up of recordings in […]

After the anecdotal Aswad, it’s the big comeback of Mathias Mootz alias m², who is also the craftsman of Panacea. This time, m² decided to invest the catacombs and to surprise those who thought he would continue to assail his saturated beats, hardly polished by his recent oriental tourist escapade. The frozen spark is an […]

Octopus: What do you look for in collaborations – with Pete Namlook, Burnt Friedman? Uwe Schmidt: Sometimes I’m looking to be surprised by the other person, but sometimes the collaboration is about your inability to make an idea work on your own. However, it’s always about finding an emotional and personal vibe that connects you […]

Spire, a new thematic series of the Touch label, allows the (re)discovery of contemporary classical and electronic writing for the organ on the occasion of itinerant concerts and varied programs. This recording, the second volume of Spire after a very successful first studio opus, realized at the Cathedral Saint-Michel of Geneva, proposes for the first […]

Octopus: You can read on your website the long list of artists who have influenced your music. From Eric Satie to John Coltrane, without forgetting Björk, Stereolab or the Kronos Quartet… You might think that this list is a bit exaggerated but you realize that you really find all these universes in your music. Which of these […]

Many are already those who, to capture their inner music, had to make their instrument. So many visionary inventions, often gone unnoticed in their time, but of a major influence on the history of music.Musicians and composers continue to illustrate this original phenomenon today: they develop, build and play these unique instruments. They thus maintain a subtle […]