Browse by Label: NO FORMAT (FRANCE)

Artist:	GONZALES
Title:	Solo Piano
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	LP
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	NOF 004LP

Originally released in 2004, the No Format label makes this highly-acclaimed record available on vinyl. Over the last 10 years, Gonzales has transformed himself from Berlin-based underground entertainer to Paris-based pianist and producer. From a collaboration with Daft Punk to a piano concert for David Bowie's Meltdown Festival in London Royal Festival Hall, Gonzo straddles the underground and the overground. Since 2003, Gonzales has been based in Paris, producing with Renaud Letang (Manu Chao's co-producer). His role is to arrange and play all the instruments, on albums by Jane Birkin, the Canadian singer Feist and Charles Aznavour -- until Mr. Aznavour fired the Gonzo-Letang team late in the game and started over. This gave Gonzales even more time to prepare Solo Piano, 16 themes for left hand accompaniment and right hand melody; the influence of French piano style (Ravel, Satie) as filtered through Canadian folk and American jazz (Nina Simone, Keith Jarrett). Throughout the album, Gonzales' former job as silent film accompanist shines through. Pressed on white vinyl housed in a full-color inner sleeve with an insert.

Artist:	KOUYATE/NEERMAN
Title:	Kangaba
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	NOF 012CD

Originally released in 2008, the No Format label now makes this incredible collaboration available once again. France's David Neerman is a free spirit in an orbit of his own across Europe's fledgling creative scene. A lunar poet of the vibraphone, he's as much at home in the precious, evanescent universe of Korean chanteuse Youn Sun Nah as he is in the spontaneous, urban slam of Anthony Joseph & The Spasm Band, contemporary post-jazz, or the thousand-year-old poetry of Mandinka music. In short, a musician of today living very much in the present; a man both curious and erudite with a hunger for all kinds of music from Morton Feldman to Sonic Youth. Lansiné Kouyaté is a maestro of Mali's music and an undisputed master of the balafon, "the classical piano of Africa." As a child prodigy (with a griot mother, and a father who played the balafon), he was enrolled by the National Orchestra of Mali when barely ten and then hired away by Salif Keita before he started turning up unexpectedly almost everywhere. He has partnered with the greatest names in West African music from Baaba Maal to Mory Kanté, but he's also a bold experimenter who's adapted the ancestral sounds of his instrument to the most diverse languages to be found in either "serious" or popular contemporary music, from Béjart's ballets to Joe Zawinul, via the rappers of Positive Black Soul, the Cuban music of Omar Sosa or the Red Earth: A Malian Journey project helmed by Dee Dee Bridgewater. On this release the balafon and the vibraphone ring together collectively -- so close and yet so far apart in tessitura, sound, matter, playing technique, history and imagination. Over long hours of improvisation, the two musicians would exchange their wisdom and other possessions, progressively laying down the bases for a mutant universe of sound whose process was totally organic and laid on the foundations of Mandinka music, yet which made a radical break with all the clichés of the music called "fusion" or "world." Accompanying them on this recording are contrabassist Ira Coleman (Dee Dee Bridgewater, Laurent de Wilde), drummer Laurent Robin, and Malian singer Mamani Keita on the magnificent song "Touma." With this album, Kouyaté & Neerman explore new territory that is both authentic and innovative, a work of poetic power that is absolutely stunning.

Artist:	LAVEAUX, MELISSA
Title:	Camphor & Copper
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	LP
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	NOF 013LP

LP version. Camphor & Copper is Mélissa Laveaux's first genuine album, produced from the base tracks of her self-produced debut. So is it fair to refer to Mélissa's sound as an eclectic mix? Without a doubt, how else could it be described? Born in Montreal in 1985 to immigrant Haitian parents, she grew up in Ottawa, Ontario in a mostly Anglophone community. One of her first challenges then was to integrate herself in her new environment without leaving behind anything cherished from her original Franco-Creole culture. Apart from Elliot Smith's "Needle In The Hay" and Eartha Kitt's "I Want To Be Evil," two masterful reinventions that somehow fix the imaginary boundaries of her musical universe, Copper & Camphor is composed of entirely original pieces which combined, reproduce that impressive and paradoxical mixture of maturity and freshness that characterizes all great songwriters. With this album, all of Mélissa's pent-up creative energy accumulated over years of apprenticeship seems to explode at once, immediately hitting the right note, the minimalist arrangement providing a perfect setting for the poetic impact of the songs' lyrics. And last but not least, there's her voice. It unfurls, majestic yet fragile, profound and sensual, deliciously young and immediately seductive. Almost unconsciously, it seems marked by the ever-present trilingualism that has undoubtedly marked her own life: the rhythmic fluidity of English, the nonchalant syncopation of Creole, and the harmonic sophistication of the French. There is no doubt that this album guarantees the singer's entry into the ranks of the most promising singer-songwriters of our times. Pressed on white vinyl housed in a full-color inner sleeve with an insert. Includes one vinyl-only bonus track.

Artist:	SISSOKO & VINCENT SEGAL, BALLAKE
Title:	Chamber Music
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	LP
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	NOF 014LP

Originally released in 2009, now available on LP once again. One bare room in Salif Keita's Moffou studio and three recording sessions without overdubs were woven inside the protective cocoon of the Mali night. Sheltered from the agitation of mankind inside the heart of the world, Ballaké Sissoko (kora player) and Vincent Segal (cellist) chased out of their minds everything that can distance a musician from his art -- all the vain considerations of genre and style that only have interest for collectors of labels -- the better to concentrate on the essence: harmonious imbrications of language and signatures, and the interlacing of their inner song, to which the subtle waves of improvisation and the secret vibrations of silence contributed additional density. Their complicity is such that the kora and the cello, far from resulting in an overly formal exchange of rejoinders, seem to express themselves here with a single voice: Sissoko and Segal mix their blood and their sounds to conclude a pact that aims to cause a (precisely) unified world to spring forth with incomparable clarity. What the listener hears in Chamber Music is both rare and precious: two sensibilities in unison, on the same wavelength, creating music which, literally, follows naturally. This art of conversation based on understanding, on the attentiveness of one musician towards the other, is developed here to its highest degree of exactness. The care brought to the human aspect of all music is something that Sissoko and Segal have been cultivating for more than two decades. Sissoko's strings have notably crossed paths with those of Taj Mahal and the pianist Ludovic Einaudi, while Segal has enjoyed many roles as an accompanist, arranger and producer with such diverse performers as Cesaria Evora, -M-, Blackalicious, Piers Faccini, Sting and Marianne Faithfull. Formerly stable-mates at the same label (Label Bleu), the two men formed a close bond of friendship, and you can hear this clearly. Pressed on white vinyl housed in a full-color inner sleeve with an insert.

Artist:	KEITA, MAMANI
Title:	Gagner L'Argent Français
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	NOF 017CD

In Mali, it is customary that those who have the royal name of "Keita" are banned from singing or playing an instrument. Fortunately, there are some exceptions. Mamani Keita, who used to be a back-up singer for another Keita outcast (Salif), is set to become one of the main ambassadors of modern African music. Gagner l'Argent Français (trans. "To earn French money"), her third album, verging on rock, is her most electric to date. The one where she is the most daring. It highlights a strong, passionate and independent personality as well as a rebellious voice in which her Mandinke heritage is unleashed by the inventive and eclectic sonic environment created by Nicolas Repac, the guitarist and arranger famous for his work with long-time collaborator Arthur H. Mamani crafted the songs for Gagner l'Argent Français, to which the guitarist Djeli Moussa Kouyaté brought the finishing touches. The tracks were then subjected to the intricate sonic editing of Nicolas Repac's poetic imagination. Some of them rely on a rock foundation with a tapestry of guitars and a binary rhythm. Others transport us into dub's hypnotic round or the hard-hitting paraphrase of Afro-beat. The traditional Mandinke instruments -- ngoni, kora, monocorde -- are meshed with globalized samples, klezmer clarinet, Chinese lute and classical strings. In the end, it could sound like one of those exotic gardens where the magnolias cast a shadow over the ferns, where the cactus pisses off the rhododendron, where confusion is king. But there is nothing but harmony, respect and adventure with a horizon that keeps moving as the songs progress, suspension bridges that bring us from one world to the next without even a hint of turbulence, from the savannah to a marvelous used record store, from a village chant to an old 1930's tune. It is within this surprising, audacious, unorthodox yet coherent environment that Mamani Keita proudly and fiercely asserts an independence that she has dearly earned.

Artist:	MICHEL, MISJA FITZGERALD
Title:	Time Of No Reply
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	NOF 019CD

French jazz musician Misja Fitzgerald Michel pays tribute to the magic of Nick Drake's music on this mostly instrumental album where Meshell Ndegeocello lends her voice and a few words to a song -- a manner of saying that the voice of the Englishman is heard first and foremost in the notes and the rhythms he left to posterity. The concept of bare simplicity is one of the key ideas that brought Misja Fitzgerald Michel to Nick Drake's world. In his works, no matter how elaborate they may be, the Englishman never yielded to the temptation of superficiality or verbosity. The acoustic guitar is at the core of a disc that is much more than just another guitar record -- first, because here and there, other influences can be heard; the barrier-breaking cellist Olivier Koundouno, the arranger and lighting technician Nicolas Repac or the songwriter Hugh Coltman. Misja, far from the isolated ghetto of "guitar music," chose to adventure onto the boundless fields of musicality alone. His aesthetic choices stem from that adventure, that is, quite simply, a yearning for poetry and sensation.

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