Rockfort! French Music for October, Reviewed by David McKenna

I think ‘Premier Soleil’, the opening track from Midget!’s last album Ferme Tes Jolis Cieux, might be one of the most beautiful songs of past ten years. British composer Gavin Bryars is another fan of the song, so much so that he ended up collaborating with the group over a series of concerts that featured a hugely expanded line-up (with Ensemble 0 and vocal group Macadam Ensemble) and Bryars’ arrangements. Some of those were of material that appears on Qui Parle Ombre, but the album itself is shorn of Bryar’s contributions. No matter. It does find the duo of Mocke and Claire Vailler teaming up with electronic producer AtomTM, who worked on several albums by Mocke’s old band Holden, and delivering another sensational set of cosmic chanson. 

The title of the brief and beguiling first track, ‘La Porte S’Ouvre’ (The Door Opens), suggests that we’re about to cross a threshold into another reality, and it glides into ‘Qui Parle Ombre’, a kaleidoscopic songscape that feels analogous to the mysterious, multi-coloured blob on the album cover; the sound swishes and swooshes around the stereo field, Vailler’s soaring vocal, sometimes hovering above a bed of cooing, multitracked harmonies, is hair-raising in its purity of tone and controlled intensity. It feels like being serenaded by the aurora borealis. The rest of the album intersperses longer pieces like ‘Transfiguration’ – a richly ornamented fantasia, with flute and bassoon augmenting Mocke’s spidery guitar and Vailler’s lush keyboards – with miniatures including 40-second guitar piece ‘Deux Êtres’. But every song seems to be bathed in the same mysterious, wintry light. Qui Parle Ombre is consistently graceful, and its peaks are sublime. 

This is a striking debut from the Franco-Moroccan duo of Sinclair Ringenbach and Vanda Forte on Marseille-based “Mediterranean” label Gros:Œuvre. Marseille, France’s oldest city and an ancient trading port, has always had close links with the Middle East and North Africa, acting as a gateway between France and Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, and it’s still a hub for migrants from the Maghreb. Gros:Œuvre has embraced its location on the porous boundary between East and West, working with several acts of mixed heritage who combine sounds from around the Mediterranean basin: “cyber-chaabi” producer Syqlone, Kabylie Minogue’s Arabic-accented acid house and Caïn و Muchi. Dounia د​ن​ي​اcomes on the heels of a handful of excellent singles and EPs that fused various bass music styles (frequently throbbing dubstep but also grime and, on early track ‘Martyr’, drum & bass) trap and industrial techno with North African/Middle Eastern scales and Vanda Forte’s heavily processed vocals, which can be plaintive, assertive or coolly detached and are delivered in various Arabic dialects. The album pursues the same dark and spacious sound design, fusing carefully sculpted metallic noise, subterranean bass and sinuous melodies to scintillating effect.  

Given that Brama feature a hurdy-gurdy player and sing in Occitan, you might expect this to be another of the drone-folk projects that feature regularly in this column. But Brama is a very different animal, a rollicking power trio fusing folk with 70s hard rock, psych, krautrock (cf the motoric-inspired opener ‘Somnhar’) and luminous three-part harmonies. Hurdy-gurdy is still used to drive the trancey energy but there are few slow-building drones here; tracks like ‘La Bruma’ burst out of the speakers with such joyous intensity that you can’t help but be swept up in it. ‘Senraija’ does have a gorgeous, misty dawn of an intro that temporarily moves the album into straighter folk territory, but the calm is eventually broken by a stinging riff before the band take off again at full clip. They remind me of Mdou Moctar in the way that they revitalise hoary rock tropes through a combination of local flair, blistering musicianship and infectious enthusiasm. 

No Tongues are one of my favourite jazz-not-jazz groups in France, and in this, and the entry below, we have two members of the band branching out in fascinating ways. Trumpet player Alan Regardin’s Ritual Tones is a single contemporary/drone piece for trombone, flugelhorn, sax and positive organ – a type of small, easily-tuned pipe organ – spread over three movements. ‘Tones’ is 17 minutes of layered, gradually shifting… tones that gently merge and clash, finally resolving in a drawn-out organ chord; the shorter ‘Prelude’ massages your ribcage with a profound bass drone while brass lines gleam and glower; and ‘Ritual’ builds in more defined changes to being the piece to a poignant conclusion. Deeply immersive and impressive.

Matthieu Prual’s La Démesure Du Pasproject finds him enlisting a troupe of other musicians for some improv on the move. Having embarked on a ‘walking concert’ project in 2021, last year he decided to record several itinerant sessions, moving through a variety of locations – rural and coastal spots, and a submarine base in St Nazaire – responding to and interacting with the sounds around them: birds and running water, passing cars, stones. It manages to be both restful and delightfully playful; ‘Double Flûte’ matches flutes to splashed water as percussion, and ‘Marche Fictive’ captures cries and peals of sax in an echoing, hilly landscape. 

Aluk Todolo are another act with members who have been pursuing their individual projects of late, with guitarist Shantidas Reidacker putting out an album of crepuscular, ambient/post rock and bassist Matthieu Canaguier aka Inselberg taking a drone folk route. But they’ve returned to the mothership, and drummer Antoine Hadjioannou, for another towering, and typically cryptic, follow-up to 2016’s stupendous Voix: all the titles are a combination of small and large dots. The instrumental trio exist on the fringes of black metal, having emerged from bands in the scene, but are as informed by Ash Ra Tempel and Amon Düül II, as well as the deranged gothic prog of Italians Jacula. They refer to themselves as occult rock, so I’ll stick to that. They don’t really do riffs as such – a typical AK track weds an insistent hail of tremolo-picked guitar to relentlessly driving drum/bass patterns, bursting out of the traps and building inexorably to moments where everything sounds like it might fly apart, the guitar ever on the verge of, but never quite, slipping its rhythmic moorings. The second track might well be the peak in that respect, while the fifth adds spiralling space rock guitar and the closing sixth recalls Voix’s most atmospheric passages. 

You’ll know by now that the Pagans label and the La Nóvia collective are two of the most crucial incubators of talent within the French folk scene, and with D’En Haut’s self-titled second album they’ve helped to bring one of the year’s most compelling releases into the world. D’En Haut are the duo of well-established figures of the new folk movement, Thomas Baudoin and Romain Colautti. Both sing (largely in Occitan, as far as I can tell) and employ a variety of instruments, including drone boxes and percussion. The latter is crucial; D’En Haut finds the pair singing traditional religious songs (“generally about love”, they say), chanting in harmony over lattices of clacky, woody percussion, bells, drone and buzzing acoustic bass. It grabs you from first moments of ‘Au Paradis’, earthbound but gesturing towards transcendence, through the lolloping ‘Quian Èri Joen Pastor’, the wonky folk blues of ‘Lo Pair De La Novia’ and achingly doleful and dreamlike closer ‘Hilhòta De Delà L’aiga’. Weirdly hooky, vigorous and, in moments, rapturously psychedelic, D’En Haut might well be this year’s French folk masterpiece. 

Le Rêve De Polyphème, also on Pagans, departs completely from the French folk brief. It’s a sparkling collaboration between the Nanterre-based, eight-person gamelan ensemble Gamelan Puspawarna (‘gamelan’ refers at once to the instrumentarium, the musical style and the group) and darbuka-player Wassim Halal, wedding Balinese music to Halal’s exploration of Lebanese and Turkish romani influences. The interlocking gamelan phrases, chiming and rippling, sit so beautifully with Halal’s nimble, shuffling beats that there isn’t a dull moment on the 19-minute ‘L’heureux Loup’. Elsewhere electronic sounds and effects are introduced. On ‘Murmurations’ a trickling synth sound is like a gentle massage and the sounds from the ensemble appear at times to be on the verge of dissolving. By contrast ‘Cynoque’ opens with bursts of noise like digitally processed animal cries before hitting you with a high-speed barrage of frantic, metallic polyrhythms. Le Rêve De Polyphème is a wonderfully successful experiment, by turns meditative and invigorating.

Here’s a beautifully wintry debut album from Agnès Gayraud, of La Féline, and Paul Régimbeau, who records solo as Mondkopf as well as with bands including Foudre! (you’ll want to keep an eye out for the release of the latter’s stunning Voltæ Chthulucene a little later this year). A subtly reworked ‘Burger Shack’, survives from their 2021 EP, and it sounds even more exquisite, a two-chord arpeggio and Gayraud’s lonesome lilt buffeted by increasingly powerful waves of siren-like synth and crackling guitar. With the exception of stirring synth ballad ‘How Many Years’, the slow burn is Grive’s preferred mode, as the pair (usually working with a drummer) build layers of bruised, stoner-ish guitar and detuned synth drones. Gayraud’s always had a cinematic sensibility but the shift to English has opened up a different lyrical mode that, in this musical context, evokes wide-angle shots of North America’s vast open spaces and mythological landscapes, characters crying out in the wilderness or “weighed down by something heavy” at the foot of a mountain (as is the case in ‘Quicksands’). 

Cheers to New Forest-based Métron for providing a home to another remarkably intimate French record, after Audrey Carmes Quelque Chose S’est Dissipé last year. Paris-based, Franco-British Miller’s release is also inspired by American mythology and burrows deep into her interior landscape, where associations and impressions derived from Paris, Texas and Twin Peaks become enmeshed with her own stories. ‘Le Ranch De Mes Rêves’ (The Ranch Of My Dreams) is perhaps the key here, not just for its title but for the fact that it’s a strange sort of cover: we hear Miller singing along with a crackly recording of the original, a song from 1936 performed by French icon Sheila, as though we’re eavesdropping on a private moment – and perhaps we are, since the album incorporates sources including voice memos and other collected sounds.  Sheila’s song is itself a cover of American country tune ‘Hotel Happiness’, so it reaches us, on Pre-Country, having been twice refracted through a French prism. The rest of this dream diary is full of poignant, translucent miniatures, field recording fragments, candyfloss country songs sung through Auto-Tune and Laurie Anderson-style vocal experiments. Gorgeous.

This trio, which brings together two generations of the French underground, have drifted between labels, including Blackest Ever Black and Akuphone, while fine-tuning their collaboration. Broken Allures, their fifth and perhaps their best, brings in high-calibre guests in the form of Cosey Fanni Tutti (who provides unmistakable vocals, guitar and cornet as well as lyrics for two tracks) and Jah Wobble. The expanded team flesh out the group’s dark Fourth World-y sound – but not too much; it still retains its wraithlike eeriness, with Berrocal’s trumpet lines snaking around industrial grooves, tribal rhythms, atonal stabs of guitar, stark electronic pulsations and probing bass.