Rockfort! French Music for September, Reviewed by David McKenna

Following Lala &ce and Low Jack’s superb Baiser Mortel, this is the second album from the same Parisian rap-adjacent scene to appear on PAN (as well as on Lala &ce’s new &ce Reckless imprint). It feels both like a companion piece – Le Diouck (real name Magueye Diouck) featured on Baiser Mortel and Grace Joke has also sprung out of a performance at the Bourse De Commerce gallery and performance space in Paris – and a thrilling assertion of plurality and fluidity in its own right from the Franco-Senegalese musician, performer and graphic novelist. With Grace Joke, Diouck has set out to demonstrate his range across tracks that bounce between R&B, trap, cumbia, rock, dembow and more, aided by an array of collaborators including Yves Tumor, Lala &ce and Bonnie Banane as well as producers Modulaw, Lewis OfMan, Loubenski and Boukan Records boss Bamao Yendé.  Tracks like the almost grunge-y ‘Émeraude’ and Lala &ce feature ‘Fly Anyr&ce’, with its swirling, Middle Eastern strings, really kick, but flamboyance, delicacy and tropical vibes are also in plentiful supply. Vocally, Diouck is correspondingly elastic, singing and rapping in French, English and Wolof (the most spoken language in Senegal) and making full use of a range that runs from a choked, plaintive high register down to a gravelly growl. 

Experimental guitarist Nina Garcia’s second solo album, Bye Bye Bird, released earlier in the year, was justifiably lauded, and this project with turntablist Arnaud Rivière is equally impressive. On Bye Bye Bird, Garcia’s molten guitar was poised between melody and clangorous atonality, occasionally tipping into outright violence. Rivière, meanwhile, uses a prepared – or “damaged or destroyed” – turntable. The outcome of their collaboration is an intensely lively dialogue conducted in a language of squeaks, scraping, squeals and screeches, with the pair constantly teasing and testing each other (and us). ‘HI-SPEED DUB indicator’ is the most condensed expression of their approach, Garcia and Rivière thrusting and parrying and using silence to sharpen the edges of each stab. They open out more on the other two tracks, ‘HI-SPEED DUB switch’ and ‘SKIP-BLANK stack’, which shift between sonic chitter-chatter, bursts of aggression and passages of sustained fuzz and feedback; the former wrong-foots you with low-key, ringing tones before unleashing metallic bedlam. 

2023’s haunting, perception-shifting Soleils Noirs was my favourite release yet from Jean-Sébastien Nouveau’s Les Marquises, using samples, electronics and live instrumentation to craft something simultaneously intimate and epic, as capable of evoking dusty film reels and faded photographs as the movements of celestial bodies. Live À l’Opéra Underground is based on a recording of a performance at the Opéra Ae Lyon in 2024, part of its adventurous Opéra Underground programme, and featuring completely reworked versions of the pieces on Soleils Noirs. Violinist Agathe Max is still on board but is accompanied by Martin Duru on keyboards and sampler and Parisian string quartet Quatuor Una Corda. Nouveau says that this is “more than just a live recording” and constitutes a “new sonic object”; it’s even more expansive than its sister album, with the mass of strings adding greater drama and more intense peaks to Soleils Noirs’  stately evolutions, but also more grounded, since – regardless of what was done at the mixing stage – it feels as though you can still perceive the real acoustic space. 

This is the third album from Spelterini, named after Italian tightrope walker Maria Spelterini and featuring members of Papier Tigre, post-hardcore four-bands-in-one mega-supergroup La Colonie De Vacances, and Chausse Trappe. They specialise in minimalist, gradually intensifying epics; previous release, Paréidolie, was just a single 33-minute piece. ‘Hyomon-Dako’ gestures at motoric without actually employing the Dingerbeat, locking into a single chord and a hopping rhythm, veering off into a more agitated break at around its mid-point before returning to its jerky groove with renewed purpose. Its companion, ‘Magnésie’, kicks in like prime early Stereolab if they’d had more of a hardcore edge, building up ferocious momentum through frantic strumming, droning bass and precise ride-work, electric squalls bursting out like steam released from a pressure cooker, and reaching its climax with a pounding train rhythm that gradually grinds to a halt, all energy finally expended. Exhilarating. 

23wa’s previous album, 2023’s Rorschach, could still largely, if loosely, be considered a rap album. This new one from the Aix-En-Provence artist is something else – a trippy, thrilling, unsettling and exhausting sprawl, a massive, 83-minute blob of post-everything, internet-brain pop. Each track is a stage-managed pile-up involving elements of everything from Japanese pop, hyperpop and glitchcore to trap, juke, reggaeton, winsome indie pop and samples from Daft Punk’s ‘Around The World’. Guests include Hakushi Hasegawa, who “whispered on my mic and played percussions with my mandolin”, Shanghainese artist and producer SEBii and Théo Poyer from Japanophile French band Tapeworms. Conventional structures are shunned in favour of perpetual, stream-of-wired-consciousness evolution, momentarily unleashing fierce blasts of glitchy noise and ultra-processed beats before collapsing into puddles of rainbow-coloured melodic goo. 23wa’s wan vocal lines in the latter moments can be dreamy but they also sometimes drag; my favourite sections are the most upbeat, like SEBii collaboration ‘Giga’ which, after a few bursts of party horn, rides in on a bouncy dembow beat emphasised by elastic band twangs and cartoonish rapping; the footwork-y ‘Arise’; and the absurdly punky ‘MOMOMO’ with its uncharacteristically blunt message “la jeunesse emmerde le Front National” (‘the youth tell the National Front to get fucked’). It’s undoubtedly too much – in fact, that might even be the point – but its peaks are deliriously, riotously enjoyable.

Hermione Frank’s music as rRoxymore has always tended towards warmth and suppleness. But her third album, and the first since returning to her hometown of Montpellier after a decade in Berlin, is one on which – perhaps not coincidentally – the harder edges have been almost completely smoothed away. The kicks, when they do make an appearance, as on ‘Moodified’ and the luscious ‘Nectar’, are cushioned by bubbling basslines. Apparently intended as a new age album, Juggllng Dualities also reveals kosmische influences, especially on opener ‘Am I Human?’, synthetic blobs bobbing around like the wax in a lava lamp. Elsewhere, as on ‘Upward Spiral’, Frank builds sound-worlds that teem with pulsing and fluttering sonic matter. ‘Lows And Attractions’, the last track on Juggling Dualities, begins with a recording of an unnamed person discussing Buddhism, sound being “subjective and objective” and the fact that when we hear a bird “we are not really listening to the bird… the bird is in my mind already.” One of the dualities I detect is that of the organic sense of movement within her tracks versus their hyperreal glow, as per the electronic twittering on ‘Upward Spiral’ – perhaps the sound of the virtual birds that exist inside us.

Ray Bartok appeared in the very first Rockfort column, back in 2011, and since then they have progressed at a leisurely pace; this, their fourth album, is the follow-up to 2017’s TVSHOTS. In any case, it’s brilliant to have the duo of JS Brosse and Philippe Sirop – here augmented by Bristolian guitarist Jesse D Vernon (of Morning Star and This Is The Kit) – back for this concise and hugely entertaining set. The pair’s outsider canon includes Moondog, The Residents, Morphine and James Chance – who they have also played with – and one can also pick up trashy traces of The Cramps, B-52s and Suicide, chewed up spat out in the shape of wired grooves and oddly perfunctory lyrics about crawling on lino (‘Creepin’), gardens full of bees (‘Bees’) and the void of space (‘Void’). ‘Bolly Swing’ interpolates a sample of legendary Bollywood singer Mohammed Rafi and backing singers augment the chugging ‘Butterfly’ – complete with staccato B-52s keyboard  – and the strutting funk rock of ‘Widow’. Catch that buzz.