Pierre Rassin
Biguines Et Mazouks

This kinda sounds like it looks. Hot summer vibes.

Sound system park-life smokers! Heavy on the sub and the smiles.

Elusive and kaleidoscopic drum-machin jazz-funk afrobeat synth muzak to start the cocktail party.Press.The Amsterdam based New Cool Collective has released an impressive amount of albums within the last 28 years. With an astonishingly diverse list of collaborations ranging from Matt Bianco and Tony Allen to Orchestra Baobab’s saxman Thierno Koité. Awards for film scores, hit records, popularity polls, and even a style award for Benjamin Herman’s impeccable wardrobe. New Cool Collective has become an extremely tight unit, totally at ease performing on live television shows, stage plays, giant stages, tiny clubs, jazz festivals, pop festivals, world music festivals and anything else you can think of. Playing a familiar mix of Jazz, Latin, Afrobeat and Boogaloo. In more recent years the band has extended its impressive catalog with strong releases such as Electric Monkey Sessions 1 & 2 and the quirky electronic sounds of Dansé Dansé. In the spring of 2021 the band left its hometown of Amsterdam to record in Rotterdam. Allowing the band the soak in new energy and influences ultimately resulting in a new record: YUNIKōN. The characteristic drum machines and synths featured on predecessor Dansé Dansé haven’t disappeared, instead, the band has combined them with organic field recordings and engineer Simon Akkermans’ ‘Wall of Sound’. Allowing most tracks to evolve until reaching their final form during the last moments of the mixing process. Title track Yunikōn symbolises the album for the band members: “elusive and kaleidoscopic” just like the mythological creature from which the album title borrows its name.

Ethiopian pop sounds by using rhythms from Latin music, soul and jazz, and adding highlife, electro, go-go, samba, and roots reggae to the mix._________________________PressSons of Ethiopia by Admas, the 1984 Ethiopian synth treasure - reissued !Frederiksberg Records is proud to announce the first ever vinyl / digital reissue of Admas’ “Sons of Ethiopia”, the privately pressed album from 1984. Fully licensed from Admas, released with their support, the album includes restored sound and art. The extensively researched booklet features unseen photographs and interviews with the band.Sons of Ethiopia is a mostly instrumental album, rich with global influences. It is one of the few recordings to be produced outside Ethiopia in the early 1980s. It is a key document of the Washington DC exile scene. The core members of Admas – Tewodros ‘Teddy’ Aklilu, Henock Temesgen, and Abegasu Shiota – had previously played in a group called Gasha, one of the few local Ethiopian bands. Admas was born from Gasha, as an outlet for their more experimental instincts.Emerging from the community of Ethiopian exiles who fled the brutality of the Derg – the military dictatorship that had deposed Haile Selassie – the album was the sound of a new generation. The members of Admas were not musicians from the ‘golden age’: they were children of the terror of the Derg time. Their music formed during an era of state-sponsored neighbourhood bands and a propaganda-tinged traditional music scene, where the weekends were sound-tracked by the remaining hotel groups of a bygone Imperial world.Admas took Ethiopian popular music into wholly new territory. Having established a residency at the Red Sea restaurant in the early 1980s, the Admas players were steeped in the polyglot musical culture of the American capital. The diverse sonic influences of the city filter into the music, making the album a radically modern work of Ethiopian fusion. Mulatu, Girma Beyene and their peers in 1960s Addis Ababa had created an Ethiopian pop sound by using rhythms from Latin music, soul and jazz. Admas threw their net wider still, adding highlife, electro, go-go, samba, and roots reggae to the mix.Sons of Ethiopia is the fresh sound of youth, freedom and imagination, which the band made for themselves and by themselves, owning every part of the process. But it is also a music of exile. Admas performed week in, week out, for crowds of fellow Ethiopians, many of whom had lost family and friends to the Derg. Sons of Ethiopia channels this loss, longing and hope. It is at once imbued with the melancholy and nostalgia so typical of Ethiopian song. And at the same time, is a joyful work of synthesis and experiment with deep roots.

Emerging from Lower Franconia's hidden reverse, Johannes schebler, known as ambient-poltergeist "Baldruin" and surreal folklorists Christian Schoppik & Katie Rich of "Brannten Schnüre"-fame have puzzled and amazed outernational audiences from the stranger end of the avant/lo-fi spectrum in recent years. The trio is now collectively dreaming as "Freundliche Kreisel",reaching for terra incognita rather than common ground on their most bewildering and accessible outing to date. Arch-pontifices of the electro-acoustic and outsider-art realm, they fill in gaps and invent missing links on the go with somnambulistic ease, confusing the hypersensitive and hyaline timbres of contempo-electronic aesthetics with the naïve charm of Germany's obscure Kassettentäter and mutant-NDW.Think Daniele Mana and Lorenzo Senni digitally rewiring the 4-track recordings of Gareth Williams' Flaming Tunes or sometimes, much scarier, it feels as if it's the other way round. There certainly is an air of whimsical yet post-ironic romanticism to the songs contained here, a madcap, tongue-in-cheek ghost story as filtered through the transcendental senses of a childhood perspective. This attitude is best personified in the disarming innocence of Katie's vocals whose intonation touches on nursery rhymes as much as on dirges and bizarre 'schlager' kitsch.Heirs to the tradition of magic realism, examining fragments of an arcane sacred mundanity like a crack in the concrete of everyday life, Freundliche Kreisel dwell on this often neglected microcosmic topography, yielding an adventurous and visionary piece of a decidedly Franconian next-level post-modern folklore.

On the Makossa label!