Higelin
Inédits 1970

Outernational pop group Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek unveil the second and final part of their double album ‘Dost 1&2”. Once again, their subtle and groovy Anatolian psych folk sound matches the powerful quality of the songs often led by Yıldırım’s sublime vocals and bağlama (Turkish lute). With ‘Dost 2’, the band have broadened their songwriting horizons and refined their idiosyncratic arrangement skills.Most of ‘Dost 2’’s material was composed by the band, with two notable tracks composed by guitarist flautist Antonin Voyant whose melodic work brings the music to an unnostalgic, yet deep and meaningful place. The lyrics were penned by Derya Yıldırım in collaboration with Berlin based writer Duygu Ağal, adding another string to Grup Şimşek’s bow.Here they captured a lively, unique piece of interpretation which connects to the meaning of ‘Dost’ as the text inserted inside the vinyl / CD explains “DOST is a friend, a comrade, a brother, a sister and even more than that. DOST is the connection to keep this life and world meaningful”. No doubt that with ‘Dost 2’ Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek will bring sounds, people and emotions together.Dost 2Derya Yıldırım Grup Şimşek

Altin Gun has a famously recognisable sound and it is once again laid bare heart for all to enjoy. This new album is a triumphant return for the much-loved sextet from Amsterdam and one that is high on energy levels throughout. Though familiar in that way, this Ask album finds the band ditching some of their synth-drenched former sounds and 80s and 90s pop leanings to return to their 70s Anatolian funk of their roots. It almost sounds like a live album such is the hustle and bustle of the music with the results sounding all the more warm and welcoming.

German band Kreidler reach the rather significant milestone of a fifteenth studio album here with Spells And Daubs. By now they are masters of their form, which is a mix of electronica and krautrock but with hints of influence from British pop music. The rhythms are bendy and dubby, ever evolving and alluring from the off with well defined lines and lots of little details all fleshing out the grooves. Dark melodies never grow too foreboding as clicks, whirrs and hits swing to and fro over the top. It is a trance including record that demands close listening on a good system for maximum effect.

Very delight cosmic pop & Ambiant works by Brother and sister, Citron Citron, the new revelation of the Geneva underground scene!Chagrin Bleu explores the melancholy of the night and the joy of a flight under the sun. Songs with transcendent refrains, and synthetic laments with romantic melodies, carried by groove box-like rhythms. An album on the borders of chamber pop, medieval chants and ambient. The lyrics are at times poetic, angry or dreamy.The first sketches of the album were drawn during the first confinement when time was slowing down. The songs were then recorded in a DIY way by the band in their studio in Geneva during the year 2021. The first sessions were recorded on tape with a Tascam 688, then expanded and edited on computer. Some additional recordings were made with the help of sound engineer Yavor Lilov (L'Éclair) and some guests : Fhunyue Gao on theremin, Sébastien Bui (L'Éclair) for some synth parts.The album was then worked on and mixed with Jacco Gardner in his Antwerp studio. His analogue world allowed the sound of the album to grow and deepen. With his echoes and tape machines, the mix could be approached in an organic and evolutionary way.

It comes in 2013 in Brazil, and is fastly become an important record for Folk lovers ! Providing a deep and meditative production ! Indispensable ! This is my first solo record. It was made during an unexpected but very welcome exile, in a land I wouldn't have predicted I'd linger for too long; the west of the west. From there on it's turning around, so I thought. My arrogance was to think that I'd be immune to the promised land effect, the invitation wasn't for me, I was passing through, and not particularly impressed. But the sense of distance and my newly acquired refreshing anonymity kept me staying, they felt useful. I found myself leaning on that distance, projecting onto it, the space echoing back to me with a new voice. There was my double, in the distance, a company, the only viable witness to that distance, a critic of what I was craving, a bully, a brother. This realization produced a dialog, an attempt to reconcile with this onlooker, a plan to think less and feel the way though, as the jockey craves to merge in spirit with his vehicle, to be guided by it. Cavalo means horse in portuguese, a word we also use for people who channel spirits in service, something normal to us in Brazil. Another instance of an amalgam between vehicle and vehiculated, and writing these songs felt like that, an attempt to merge these often conflicting voices, the mind and the gut.I was as a foreigner, enamoured by the new and yet still attached to the luggage I thought I had left behind, dragging things I thought I had abandoned. They say we travel just so we can come back, I say we do it to look back, even if we never return. Distance was a gift to me measured by a certain discomfort, a type of pain that floods without drowning, that washes. Maybe that's what saudade means. I don't feel I am ever possessed when I write but I do feel I am a vehicle to a voice I hear and sing back to in an ever so slightly failed attempt to portray it.I have repeatedly found myself a foreigner, so I grew up imagining I was brave for it, an explorer, moving from city to city every three years as a kid, pretending to have the forbearance and courage I ended up forging while secretly carrying the resentment of the imposed detours, of the wait to return. When I finally arrived back in Rio no longer a child and with an accent three times tampered I realized that my home town wasn't mine, that I had invented it in light of what I saw elsewhere, its memory a dream of scents and light that didn't seem to exist in space, maybe in time. I discovered myself a stranger, what I had been since I first left and knew to be temporary, what I realized was definitive. And it was a bitterness at first but it slowly turned into something sweet, warm, I felt free and grateful, I suppose I had to invent that too, cut the bushes to a new path. I departed again.I ended up finding myself in a type of desert, dry with foreign trees, a fake oasis, so I thought. I was happy to feel alone, overwhelmed with the void clear of familiar reflections, with immense silence, a mirage at last, the place where I wrote these songs from. I believe that everybody can feel foreign in one way or another; in the way that they feel they're perceived by others, in their bodies, their streets, in their fate perhaps, so I dream that this feeling turned into songs, a vehicle to me, a tool that served me and moved me, can also move you, serve yet others, with luck.To give room to the voice of this echo, amplify it, I opened up as much space in the music as I knew how, subtracted all undue, undressed arrangements, threw adjectives away. I used different languages to forge a new voice, one empowered by lack of vocabulary, without subterfuges, one that had to know what it wanted to sing. I also threw away the cover of the album. Everything that was inside protected by the cover came out, naked, clean of directions, added flavours, serving suggestions. Words, simply. And the simple beauty of the page revealed itself, black and white that we like to use as a synonym of things clear and exact, but that is where the infinite delight of interpretation resides, where the fertile gap is. A page is beautiful because it's only a possibility, it has to be entered to signify. Inside the sleeve only the music. And there was yet another distance: inside and outside, words and music. the thing and the name of the thing, me and my name in print. Between one and the other is the open hand, the train at the station, an opening in the veil, a familiar scent: the unpredictable mirror, echoing.Thank you for the chance.Rodrigo Amarante crédits