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CD
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NOF 019CD
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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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CD
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NOF 017CD
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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.
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LP
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NOF 013LP
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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.
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