- Creaig Dunton
- Albums and Singles
Clocking in at a meager 20 minutes, these two tracks mix ambience, noise, and traditional instrumentation into a fog that is sparse, yet complex, and has moments of arid beauty as well as dark, sinister passages. More than a few times this young composer reminded me of some of Organum's best moments, which is a massive compliment.
"Dissonant Distances" is a slow build into glassy feedback, with an organic ambience under it that succumbs to harsher tones throughout.It's a complex piece that is restrained and pensive throughout, with a darker turn towards the end.It is this piece especially that shows Dunn’s ability to create sounds that move and develop, but within a structured framework to never feel aimless or random.
"Senium III" begins with church-like bell tones, heavily reverberated and echoed into a sparse, but regal sound.The tone and drama that’s conveyed in this really simple composition really reminded me of Jackman’s recent work, specifically the "holy" trinity of Sanctus, Omega and Amen from recent years.The spiritual quality of these tones is very similar, though here there is more development and variation than on those Organum discs.
Kyle Bobby Dunn is a relatively new name in this scene, but already he shows a strong ear for drama and tension within the world of sound.This EP is a great example and he brings along the cold, overcast terrain of his childhood home with it.There’s drama, mystery, tension, and beauty contained herein, which is pretty impressive considering the small scale of this release.
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While Jenks Miller has his hand in a multitude of Chapel Hill bands, his Tony Iommi meets Tony Conrad metal project Horseback has received the most notoriety as of late. However, on this collaboration with the relatively new drone composer Nicholas Szczpanik, there isn't a riff to be found. Instead the two weave together seamlessly expansive ranges of tonal and textural sound into an album that travels through the darkness and into the light multiple times.
Both artists are often labeled "drone" by critics and writers, with Miller putting his own spin on Sunn O)))'s monolithic riffing, and Szczpanik creating expansive, sparse tonal works that aren't afraid to drift into dissonant noise territory.I would argue that this description is too simplistic based upon this album, however.While certain tones and motifs are allowed to stretch out for long periods, such as the tinnitus-inducing frequencies of "A Private Life," or repetitive church melodies of "White Light," there is always a large amount of movement and variation going on around them, such as the digital music box melodies and radio static crunch of the former.
"White Light" goes even further, shaping raw noises into icy winds, coupled with a slow and simple ritualistic drum beat.The sound eventually explodes into full on walls of harsh noise, but paired with a symphonic wall of synths to wonderful effect.This combination of beautiful tone with ugly noise also defines the closer, "Cranberry Sauce," which is initially soaring, high pitched shimmering textures and light, warm drones, but eventually met with an undercurrent of static that soon rises to an equal volume level, putting the pastoral ambient tones with violent wall noise, almost symbolizing light versus dark, or good versus evil.For most of the piece the two stay on equal footing, but a blast of noise dominates the last few seconds before the album’s abrupt ending.So, dark triumphs over light at the last second…that's rather metal.
Other pieces are less dramatic and more pensive, meditative studies upon sound."Sin Killers" is all submerged screeches and squelches over hollow, echoed rattles and buzzing drones with dark organ swells."Ossuary Dub" is more glacial rather than dark, with cold electronic walls of sound matched with echoed and processed terse percussion.I'm assuming the title is a nod to one of the remixes on Painkiller's Execution Ground set from the mid '90s, and while they're attempting little of the grindcore blast jazz from that album, the music feels like it could definitely be inspired by the deconstructed, icy remix the track is named for.
With as much as I write about albums in the genre, "drone" and "minimalist" (in the modern sense) is really past the point of saturation.With so many projects, especially from the metal side of the world trying to carve out their place, it becomes hard to separate the cream from the crap.This definitely rises to the top, however, because of both its actual sonic components and its powerfully effective composition.The minimalism is more in the classic sense, and the structures of each piece avoid the pitfall of simply repeating the same sound for long periods.American Gothic is a brilliant collaboration and worthy of being hoisted into the top experimental albums of the year, easily.
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Now somewhere in the realms of prog/psych/metal/whatever, at one point Norway's Motopsycho were among the crop of potential "next big things" in a post-Nirvana world, creating music that wasn't far removed from the "alternative" scene that would soon be exploited and plundered to give us the likes of Nickleback and the existence of "nu-metal". Even then, however, there was a streak of weirdness that the band would later tap into more deeply, and on the double CD/triple LP Timothy's Monster, the band perfectly balanced catchy rock with bizarre outbursts. Long a cult favorite, this set reproduces the original album in its entirety (the US and UK versions edited the longer pieces to make it fit on a single disc), with an unreleased "first draft" of the album, and a disc full of outtakes/B-sides. It’s a lot to digest, but even for the casual fan, it's a strong set.
It's hard to not feel a bit of nostalgia when listening to this album, even though I wasn’t aware of it when it first appeared.I was a freshman in high school when it initially came out, and while I was absorbed into the world of second generation industrial music, I was still hearing and appreciating a lot of the "alternative rock" that defined 120 Minutes and other video shows.Timothy's Monster has a lot of these sounds…the jangly guitars, the overdriven bass, sharp drum tunings, etc., but never does it feel dated or derivative, there are simply too many brilliantly weird moments to prevent that. For example:on a quick listen "A Shrug & A Fistful" sounds like conventional alternative pop, but upon closer inspection, the harsh white noise blasts, guitar abuse and banjo parts clearly keep it strange."Kill Some Day" is like the surging, anthem-like chorus of a song held in statis for the full duration:it mostly keeps the heavy, chugging sound for its full seven minute duration."On My Pillow" even channels some of Pavement's slower, lurching songs without the intentional amateur sound and with the addition of some Theremin.
The longer tracks bring this out even more:the ten minute "Giftland" opens with abstract noise, then slowly becomes shaped into a dramatic, developing track with dual drummers, each one hard panned into a separate channel and later includes cinematic string flourishes, all building to a loud crescendo and then quietly closing out."The Wheel" is mostly propelled by an organ/bass sound that also explodes dramatically, but for the latter portion is subjected to heavy effects and processing to make the sound even more unconventional than it started with.
The unreleased "first edition" of the album that constitutes disc three feels like a dry run or demo version of what was finally released, and includes some tracks that were left as B-sides or never heard from again.For the material that appeared on the final release, there aren't significant differences:"Leave It Like That" has a thinner sound and a little less drama overall, and "A Shrug & A Fistful" has some hard panned guitar and a stop/start structure that wasn’t as prominent in the final version.The tracks that never were heard from again make sense being excised in the end though, "On The Toad Again" is a plodding screamfest that marries old school Sabbath to '90s grunge metal, but actually works in a fun sort of way, but would be completely out of place on the album.The same for the appropriately titled "Very 90's, Very Aware," which also leans more into rapid fire drums and grungy bass, its simplicity is its weakest spot and makes it far less engaging than most of the other material here.
The final disc comprises b-sides and outtakes from the album, and it is what would be expected, consisting of odd experiments that sometimes work, and sometimes don’t.The metal tendencies are on display once again with "Seethe," but with the tight, rudimentary rhythmic guitar parts it resembles Psalm 69-era Ministry, which I personally think is a good thing."Jr" is at its core a song that would have been appropriate on the album, but is heavily muffled and filtered to the point it sounds like it’s playing on a shitty boom box next door."Mr. Butterclut Goes To The Fair, Meets The Viscount, And That's Where We Leave Him At The End of This Episode…" has a title that's longer than the song itself, but is an odd piece of soundtracky material that could be the backing for a radio play that is bizarrely brilliant.The closing "Sonnyboy Gaybar" also is a goofy gem, written five minutes before it was recorded live.It's a Norwegian take on American country/bluegrass, and is as strange as one would expect.
At first I was suspicious how this set would appeal to the "average" listener.Often these deluxe expanded reissues are packed with subtle remixes or demos that are interesting the first time they’re heard, and then ignored afterward.This is an exception to that rule, because even people who are hearing this album for the first time can appreciate the supplemental material.A few of the tracks on disc three are hard to differentiate from their final versions, but those are few and far between.There's a lot of material to take in here, but it’s almost all compelling, and even those occasional missteps in the bonus material aren’t nearly as bad as other band’s unheard stuff.It might be a bit much to play in one sitting, but none of these discs are stinkers.
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- Duncan Edwards
- Albums and Singles
This hypnotic listening experience is as pleasantly soporific and gently gritty as if Mazzy Star had been produced by Alex Chilton.
 
The ramshackle-sounding "Pure" probably highlights the group's sonic ambition as well as any song here, with Clark Griffin's languid, sparkling, guitar lines and the haunting, if slightly incomprehensible, voice of Wednesday Knudsen nicely separated from a percussive strum of acoustic guitar resembling a "treated" tambourine.
Griffin wisely has a contrasting abrasive tone on other tracks and the duo's sound is augmented here and there with drum machine, flute, and use of echo. Knudsen sings in French on two or three songs including the spacious cover of Serge Gainsbourg's "Laisse Tomber les Filles" which builds into a weird chant with an instrumental break of squeaks somewhat similar to how it might sound if a box of activated Buddha Machines were attacked by sleepy kittens. I'm not sure if Pigeons can pull this gorgeous, urban- folk mysticism off in concert but they are currently playing dates on both US coasts, and down into Florida, Louisiana and Texas.
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Before Sublime Frequencies began their plunge into the gritty and forgotten corners of global music, there was Pat Conte, a curmudgeonly postal employee and WFMU DJ from Long Island with a basement full of 78s. In the '90s, he curated an impressive series of rather unusual compilations named after an enigmatic and semi-legendary collection of photographs published in the 1930s. This is the second volume in the well-deserved vinyl reissue of the series and it is everything I could hope for: an achievement made even more remarkable by the fact that Conte had never traveled further than Canada when it was originally issued.
Yazoo/Outernational
Given the absurd scope of this double-album (two decades, the entire world), it should come as no surprise that the material assembled is eclectic in the extreme.Conte did not get mired down in unifying themes or in-depth examinations of any particular culture. He just took all of his best finds from the period and put them on an album with some brief background information.It's an approach that works extremely well, as these songs are almost invariably excellent, surprising, or both.It is not often that a Puerto Rican Christmas song can gracefully appear in company with a devotional hymn to Krishna or an ode to the chastity of Kazakhstan's young women, but Conte's "kitchen sink" celebration of all things exotic and forgotten has an internal logic that suits the material just fine.Pat applied a similar approach to his cryptic and colorful liner notes, treating quotes from Charles Darwin, conductor Leopold Stokowski, some random Eskimo, and Pindar ("All things hateful to Zeus in the earth and sea tremble at the sound of music.") with equal gravity.
Conte's taste and judgment are pretty unerring throughout these 23 songs, as even the pieces that I didn't particularly like (a French bagpipe dance, for example) tended to be either compelling or unlike anything else that I have heard before.I found two string-based Greek pieces to be especially revelatory and haunting (even before I read their morbid descriptions): both A. Kostis's finger-picked tale of a school fire and Rita Abatzi's kanonaki lament about being buried and forgotten sound impossibly sad and remarkably contemporary.It is apparently not a big leap from 1930s Greece to current Eastern- and raga-tinged guitar music at all— and those two artists definitely didn't leave much room for any improvement.More importantly, I had absolutely no idea before last week that I would ever have any interest in Greek traditional music and now that I do, I suspect I will have a very frustrating time finding more of it (especially this good).It is difficult to understate how far ahead of the curve Conte was in his efforts to unearth amazing and hopelessly obscure music from the distant past and how brilliantly he succeeded.Anyone with a taste for the exotic and esoteric will find a lot to enjoy here, and probably even find at least one artist to become mildly (or unhealthily) obsessed by.
Pat devoted decades to dusty scavenging, endless archiving, and near-impossible research to realize this project and it shows.Zeus would not find this hateful.
Samples:
- Rita Abatzi, "Prepei Na Skeptetai Kaneis"
- Cuartetto Iberia, "Zacataque"
- A. Kostis, "Kaike Ena Sholio"
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When it was first released in 1959, Alan Lomax described this album as "the wistful and tender magic of the young girl that is beyond art." Obviously, Lomax was a bit impartial since they had just completed an exhaustive song-collecting journey through the American South together, but it is impossible to think of a more apt description. Collins' appeal has always been the unwavering simplicity and purity that she brings to the well-worn songs that she loves, traits that are just as timeless and trend-proof as any traditional melody. Sweet England is not the crowning achievement of Shirley's influential discography, but its reissue makes its clear that her vision was firmly in place from the very beginning and that the passage of five decades has done little to blunt its impact.
Sweet England was recorded in a whirlwind two-day session in a house way back in 1958, when Shirley was just 22 years old.The session was a farewell present of sorts from Lomax, who was just about to head back to the US for yet another long-term song-scavenging expedition.At the time of the recording, Collins was still a bit new to the banjo, so a few other musicians were enlisted to back her.Despite Shirley's self-deprecating liner notes suggesting that the whole thing happened quite a bit sooner than she would have liked, she nevertheless managed to finish a whopping 37 songs over those 48 hours (the same session also produced the somewhat superior False True Love).There is definitely some justification for Collins' lukewarm enthusiasm, given how much she ultimately evolved, but both albums yielded some absolutely beautiful work and made an enormous impact on the nascent English folk scene, as instrumental accompaniment for folk music had yet to fully come into vogue.
Of course, the albums for which Collins is most revered came a bit later, such as her collaborations with her sister Dolly, Anthems in Eden, or Folk Routes, New Routes, but Shirley's voice was still beautiful and uniquely her own even at this early stage.Also, the quality of traditional songs ripe for reinterpretation was just as depthless in 1958 as it would be at any other time.Unfortunately, I am not entirely in love with the song selection on this particular album, as I don't like nonsensical refrains like "hey down, ho down, dare dare down" or comic pig noises– the "lighter, banal songs," as Shirley puts it.Most of the pieces in this vein were ones that Shirley learned from her mother when she was a child, so I can certainly understand their inclusion and their larger importance in the folk music tradition, but they were not fated to remain a part of her repertoire for long.Thankfully, there are also some great lovelorn ballads here that stand among her best work, particularly "Polly Vaughn" and "Barbara Allen."
Despite the fact that Collins was not quite at the height of her powers at this stage, I am quite fond of this "me and a banjo" era, as I feel that working with an entire band diluted her impact a bit.Anyone that feels similarly about Collins' oeuvre will certainly find some striking and intimate "singles" and alternative versions of later re-workings here to get excited about (like I did), but the curious should probably go elsewhere first.Fountain of Snow seems like probably the best overview for my taste, but every phase of her career has some wonders to offer.
Samples:
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In 2005 Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom released Days of Mars, a suite of sprawling, futuristic soundscapes played on Gavin Russom’s home-built synthesizers and recorded live onto tape. While sparsely praised at the time, the album has held up remarkably well, enough so that DFA decided to press a single of a previously unreleased track culled from those sessions.
From the start, Gonzalez and Russom were unfortunately pegged as a revival act. That label may be apt, but it reduces what makes their work compelling. Days of Mars certainly owed much to earlier electronic music, especially the German "kosmische" artists of the '70s. Nonetheless, Gonzalez and Russom brought a powerful, dramatic sensibility that distinguished them from their influences. Now that younger groups such as Emeralds and Oneohrix Point Never are mining the same territory to slightly more critical acclaim, arguments against retro-futurism have, for the time being, abated somewhat. Yet it’s the quality of the music, and not a shift in the fashion cycle, that makes "Track 5" seem timely, even though it was made more than five years ago.
The piece begins with a trebly one-note pulse. Through the following twelve minutes, the pulse mutates, steadily gaining and losing notes. Subtle bass tones and rubbery keyboard melodies appear to fill the composition out until we, the listeners, are surrounded by a multitude of shifting patterns, dancing like sheets of windblown rain illuminated by neon lights. A guitar cuts-in mid-song, playing a simple three note-riff—its dialed back, slightly distorted sound blending in well with the electronic sounds swirling around it.
Although Delia and Gavin have ceased working together, "Track 5" will hopefully raise the group’s posthumous reputation. At least as far as one modest 12" single can do. For his part, Gavin Russom has continued to make innovative electronic music under the monikers Black Metoric Star and the Crystal Ark. What all three projects share is a meditative almost spiritual dedication to sound construction. Gonzalez and Russom’s music may seem at first rickety and coldly machinelike, but underneath everything is a continuous pulse that is undeniably human.
samples:
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“Tuesday Rollers and Strollers” opens with densely layered instrumentation marked by large amounts of processing and long, extended loops. This can be quite tedious, as it is standard practice for the bedroom recording artist with no virtuosic talent, but Forkner pulls it off spectacularly. A whirlwind of rhythm guitar, unearthly vocals, and drumming provide the backdrop for countless guitar solos, which swoop down through the mix like eagles diving in for the kill.
The rest of the album takes on a more sedate vibe, but at no point does the quality drop. Forkner’s attention to minute details is evident throughout New Clouds. The gentle patter of percussion that opens “Major Spillage” develops slowly and methodically into a progression of sustained synthesiser notes, ghostly vocals, and a general feeling of wide open spaces. The transition across the track is, at first, barely perceptible. At some point I suddenly realized that the music had moved well beyond what I was expecting. Eventually the primitive percussion and drones of “All the Boogies in the World” are broken up by some intense electronic trickery, which makes for some seriously enjoyable headphone moments.
Forkner makes albums for people who listen to albums. Any of these pieces on their own is nice enough, but taken as a whole New Clouds is fantastic. Subtle nuances don't merely occur within each song; the way each track flows into the next works exceptionally well, too. Moreover, each piece has been finished off masterfully. It all sounds so rich and full; listening to it on my mp3 player did a great disservice to all Forkner’s work. This is an album that needs an hour put aside for proper listening. A good sound system only enchances the experence. Playing this on a sub-standard meidum means missing out on a subtle and blissful experience.
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I don't mean to suggest that Smith and Jones or Smith and Chasny have all that much in common musically, but they all produce distinctly American sounding music. What they write is married variously to folk and country traditions, the myth of the wild west, or American nature and mysticism. On Cities Smith focuses squarely on nature and myth, with an eye towards the reclamation of land and beauty lost. Beginning with "Cities in Decline," Steven paints a portrait of man as criminal and of nature as judge, jury, and executioner. A shifting drone made from a frayed violin sets the tone for the entire album and for the appearance of a descending guitar melody that imitates the opening song's title. With Smith we descend into a world set ablaze: skyline's burn in the distance, cities become unsafe, and the unsympathetic stillness of the wild offers itself as the only shelter from mankind's dread fate. Of course, it turns out to be a graveyard itself. Smith's style is so sharp and perfectly honed that vivid images jump out of the music and offer themselves instead of laying in wait for an adventurous listener. On Cities the power of impressionism is utilized to its fullest. Bright and clear melodies populate the record, but they are used to contrast the vast swathes of tonal color and smears of texture that make up most of the record. Where singable melodies and familiar song structures emerge, they do so quite strongly and with a great deal of emotional power. "Line to Line, Pole to Pole" is one such instance. The song lasts but a minute, but in that time Smith splits open his record and reveals a fragile beauty full of wonder, remorse, and fractured memory.
As it turns out, much of the album sounds like an imperfectly recalled memory. There are spots on the record where Smith's playing reaches for some unseen apex, but falls short and breaks down. It's as if his fingers can't quite remember what to do or as though they've become weak. On "The City Gate" a violin leads the action, but its typically brilliant tenor is rendered rough and feeble, like it would sound if a child were playing the melody but still learning how to draw the bow across the strings. Misremembered or misplayed phrases appear all over the record, but in a deliberate fashion. In other places, instruments sound distant and uncertain, as though the narrative being told is full of "maybes" and "I believes." And this is what I mean by Smith's playing being especially impressionistic: he's not worried about songs so much as he is about painting a picture or describing a scene. "The Road" is an example of him combining both approaches in the same song. A guitar with nylon strings walks over a simple organ melody and the crackling glimmer of Smith's electric accompaniments. The arrangement imitates the cadence of someone walking or stumbling down a path with a scorched and blistered plain providing the sad setting for this almost pathetic scene. The title and tone recall Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name and I have to assume Smith is referencing it, even if unconsciously. It would make the perfect soundtrack to that destitute story.
Cities is both painful and pleasant, much in the same way as McCarthy's book. Small victories are won throughout the album, especially where simple beauty and awe burst through all the destruction and distortion. "All is One, One is None, None" closes the album on this note, where a kind of bittersweet reverence is intimated. A half-yelled, half-sung chorus of wordless notes is set beneath a buzzing wave of guitar noise and glinting harmony. As the song fades to nothing, a resigned quietude takes over and the bleak landscapes of Smith's mind appear to silence the possibility of saying anything more. There's no struggle and no pain in the music, just a quiet breath and a small feeling, like standing in the shadow of the world.
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- John Kealy
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This download-only single combines a pair of Herb Diamante collaborations, the first with Sun City Girls and the second with the lesser known Diatric Puds. Neither song is particularly impressive, mainly due to the vocals but there is a quirkiness present that does make these two songs strangely attractive.
 
Diamante’s rendition of the Bobby Vinton classic "Mr. Lonely" sees his voice threaten to split in two as he forces a heavy vibrato onto his vocal chords to create an overly melodramatic take on a song already heavy with melodrama. The music for this song was originally released on the soundtrack album to Harmony Korine’s film of the same name and I feel it was much better without the addition of Diamante’s vocals. The hammy performance here destroys the beauty the Sun City Girls initially managed to wrangle from the song.
The second song on this single (is it really a b-side when it is two files on a hard drive?) is an original called "In New Moon’s Lull" recorded with Diatric Puds. The campy, ghoulish music is like a spacier version of The Cramps and sounds more like a novelty single from the '60s along the lines of "Monster Mash." Diatric Puds have tapped into the kitschy horror sounds of the 1960s horror soundtrack but, as much as I like the music, Diamante again puts me off. However, with repeat listening it is beginning to grow on me and out of the two songs, this is definitely the strongest.
 
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The French Caribbean of the 1960s was one of those improbably perfect and fertile musical climates that can never again be replicated: the musicians of Guadeloupe and Martinique were heavily exposed to African, Haitian, and Cuban styles, yet were operating in such sufficiently insular pockets that different regions developed their hybrid musical styles independently of one another. The result was an incredibly varied and convoluted distillation of "hot" jazz, biguine, rumba, compas, bélé, gwo-ka, calypso, and guaguanco into what eventually became known as tumbélé.
The album kicks off with frenzied biguine (“Jeunesse Vauclin”) by clarinetist Barel Coppet, who actually played with Duke Ellington and Count Basie in Paris during the 1950s. While Coppet may have the most conspicuously impressive musical past (at least to those of us outside the Caribbean) among the artist featured on the album, his talent is not unique here. Tumbélé! is teeming with urbane, virtuosic jazz musicians playing alongside propulsive rhythms informed by rural drumming styles that originated from slave plantations. Naturally, this collision of highbrow culture and large goatskin slave drums was viewed as scandalous and highly politicized at first, but it quickly caught on nonetheless (presumably because it is awesome).
It is difficult to pick favorites from such a uniformly solid collection, but the surprisingly minimal gwo-ka “Ti Fi La Ou Té Madam'” by Anzala, Dolor & Vélo is hard to top due to its relentless deep African percussion, catchy call and response vocals, and wild saxophone improvising. Other standouts include the sensuously shuffling “Jean Fouillé, Pie Fouillé,” the sizzling calypso of “Cocas-La,” and the weird surf guitar and “crazed Haitian organ” of “Jet Biguine.”
The only minor grievance I have with Tumbélé! is that there is so much similarly propulsive material that it is somewhat overwhelming to take in one sitting. There is literally no filler included, but a couple more slow and sultry tracks would have been welcome to break-up the unrelenting dance frenzy a bit. Essentially, however, this is an absolutely great album and truly impressive feat of musicology (even though it confronts me with the unfortunate realization that people in Fort-de-France and Pointe-à-Pitre got to experience nightlife at a level that I cannot even begin to comprehend or hope to replicate).
Samples:
- Anzala, Dolor & Vélo, “Ti Fi La Ou Té Madam'”
- Barel Coppet et Mister Lof, “Jeunesse Vauclin”
- Raphaël Zachille, “Manzè Mona”
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