Carton Bed (& Traders) is the 5th track from the upcoming MicroMégas album (2013).
 It is musically inspired by the highlights of 70s prog music (Anekdoten, Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Genesis...), and deals with the increasing of poverty in occident, provoqued by capitalims effects (I was 3 during the first crisis in 1973): tradings, extreme liberalism,factories converted in subprimes, relocalisations, massive firings,and total disappearence of the value of work, replaced by the employment value... Employment is a social status, whereas work is human energy; without any salary, every work produced by man (or woman) has no meaning. You get no employment: you are nobody, and no matter what you are capable of, what you produce home, in your hobbies, with your familly, friends, neighbours etc.... Actually, our rich and democratic (or said so)worlds are experimenting new forms of homless people; employed loosing their house because of incidents in their private lives, such as sudden widowing, divorce, desease, addictions (financial debts, gambling, alcohol, drugs,sex...), unemployment, of course, and overworking... Many of them are still waking every day for their job, but are forced to sleep in mobile homes, temporary hotels, or in their own cars, or worse, outside, in tents or carton and paper beds. Because of all the reasons discribed above (or more different ones), they cannot afford for their rent any more. And they do not dare sharing this distress with anybody, as beeing poor, more than ever, is the ultimate shame... Bling TV, agressive images or degradating adverts say so, evrywhere. Categories most concerned by this brutal phenomenon are women... One more time...
As a terrible coincidence, meanwhile, other people, running all employers and employees, are getting tremendously richer and richer, amassing billions and billions, playing with financial values, like greedy children do with pimball. 
This long song is an hommage to the firsts, and a pamphlet for the seconds... As this tragedy is becoming international, I chose english (worldwide market language) to sing it...Chfab

Carton Bed (& Traders)

This is the 5th track from the upcoming MicroMégas album from 2013... The title was musically inspired by a certain willing to pay hommage to krautrock, and specially, for this time, to Popol Vuh and his extraordinary hypnotising atmospheres... And so appeared "vULPO VOH", (also a kind of Magma evocation), an obscure new planet, which is regularly run by deathly cosmic waves... This piece, another one occasionnally sung in english, describes completely planned and controlled hollidays people take, usually during summer. Everything has been anticipated; rooms, food, neighbourhood, entertainment, sports, culture and art, parents and children desires, and give you all the comfort you use to get when home, preventing you to get out of the place, and making you spend all the money you have, or are ready to spend there... Those places, run by tour operators, otherwise, most of the time, cold business men, remind us how easy it is to sell the idea of travelling, but idea only... Travelling means going far from your habits and valors, confronting to others, making you change your feelings and minds about yourself and mankind. Travelling  takes time to meet country and people, enough to get back  with changes in your life, because of those meetings. We should not be exactly the same, before leaving, once we get home... Does it often happen? 
The type of hollidays described in this track do not follow this principle; it just works on giving you the illusion that you have been far away, making you fly, or drive, or sail, thousand miles from your house, job,TV, friends, and boredom due to repetition of daily preoccupations... However, everything is totally reproduced to your destination... once there, you meet same people as you (casue they come from the same places as yours), eat same food, jut varied a little bit (to give you that famousexotic taste), and play same sports you've allways dreamed of... And so, only photographies, and videos, as time passes by, will testimony you have been there, and there, as no singular memories and souvenirs finally remain... You can, then, only say "I was there"... But what did you learn from it? History, social, and political context? Art and culture? Only the image of cool lazy days around the pool, quality and variety of food, service in the hotel, intensity of parties in the night club... Everything you allready had home, and around. So What's the point burning so many gas flying so very far? Mabe a certain taste of social belonging, and a certain colonialism perpetuation... 
So, "vULPO vOH" describes what an occidental society could offer this way in the next future: no need to fly away, but remain home, and be plugged in a virtual travel program... What will proove that it is still YOU comming back? Who were-you before? Who are-you now?
Cloned travellers, for cloned voyages... 
Actually, the places, on the pictures, are still the same, only differ the faces in the front. Where is yours? 
Put it on this one, and pay...
Chfab

vULPO vOH [31 07 13]

this is the last piece of MicroMégas's" Mesures Sociales", album realised in 2011...
I've allways been fascinated, and repulsed in the same time, by those men and women who go sailing around the world in high technical competition boats...for sport, of course, pushning one's limits, but alos for a lot more, which they can hardly describe... they often consider themselves as mad, during the crossing, or sick... 
Most of the time, these competitions give you only very few hours, or days, of pure happiness; the first days, when you leave the coast and human agitation, but then, the rest of the  months you spend at sea is like a long, stressing, exhausting and frightening struggle for life, survival, and day and night watch... The plastic habitat where you sail is extremely narrow, uncomfortable, humid, and aggressive. 
You slip, you hurt, you lose your temper, you become schizofrenic, and the last days are scaring you out of hell, joining back mankind, familly, TV, press and so on... As if you wish you where still very far from it...
this is leaving me bewildered...
What's the deal?!?!? How absurd it sounds... yet, in this experience, you learn very profoundly about yourself, your capacities, and limits... 
This piece, with lyrics, is an evocation of all that...

Pourquoi J'Y Vais  W [27 10 11]

This long instrumental and vocalised piece tells about the urban area where I live, create, and work. It is inhabited by  90% disadvantaged people, socially, physically, and emotionaly. 
Maurepas is composed of many cultural horizons, languages, and communities. It is a place where people were born, arrived, or build the houses and towers, there. the long building on the photography is about to disappear, for the benefit of a new subway station... People have allready been moved on, quite next this place. The annoucement  for this event immediately made me think about "Get'em Out By Friday", from Genesis... 
Maurepas is paradoxal; 
people live there in a certain intellectual, physical and social misery, in the middle of numerous trees, vegetations, flowers, long avenues and tall buildings, and everything there seems to coexist quite peacefully. 
Violence? Yes, it happens, of course,  but you don't really bear it, you know what I mean?... 
This area is also very vivid, where plenty volunteer associations are willing to keep the whole thing together... Yes, in thos times of selfishness, there still is a pouch of solidarity...
I intended to mix different cultural influences in the music, as well as expressing tense atmospheres, lyrical joy, mystery and contemplation...

Maurepas  [29 11 11]

Here comes the first openjng tune of  "Mesures Sociales". I choose on this track, to put in music two different poems of Arthur Rimbaud; "Ouvriers", and "Ponts". They are in prose, and have a reasonable length to use them as a sufficient material for a consequent piece of music. I was also inspired by Leo Ferré, as he himself orchestrated many symbolicist poets...
Those two poems talk about lower class  people at work, fanfare, suburb noises and smells, and a walk with a beloved young woman. All these ingredients are very narrative, and favourable for reverie, as Rimbaud did like to describe.
I hope this slice of talking music will do so... 

Enrika (Ouvriers & Ponts)

Here is a brand new 2013 track from Micro Mégas! This title was simply inspired by my new son, and was created during his gestation and birth... May both, Victor, and this track, bring luck to each other...

VICTOR

Here is a very early prog piece, created in 2009 (maybe my very first ever!). Unfortunately, I lost every frame of it, due to the sudden of my external disk!... many songs vanished with this one, leaving me with just mp3 last edits, but far non finished tracks, such as Abbys Repetita, which need of course to be mixed and mastered... Anyway, I listenned to it recently and found that, well, it wasn't so awfull... This track speacks about the dangerous relations between mankind and Oceans (and nature more generally)... The way we use water, the way we exploit it, the way we use it as a gigantic garbage can as we feed from it in the same time... Sometimes, it occurs to my mind fearing that, mabe, one day,  all the terribly huge monsters that have been detected by sonars, but non identified as such, because of the extreme depth they were recorded in, will get back to the surface and take massive revenge on our civilasation... This is a hommage to H. P. Lovecraft and Jacques Rougerie, and to the very small impact of man in the universe...

Abyss Repetita (22 12 09)

This track is an hommage to oriental influences I received and caught in my own life. My father was born in the french colonies, beyond the Meditarranean see, and all my family on his side, had the same destiny, joining France after independance... This sudden exile was very violent to them, not realising how violent France intrusion was, for Algeria, Tunisia, Marocco, and all the french speaking african colonies... More generally, Europe used Orient territories as private gardens, hunting lands, slave markets and ressources exploitations...  During decades, people from maghreb, Middle orient and center Africa risked their lives and reputations coming to Europe, to find better conditions of living, finding a job, raising families, and integrate, with extreme difficulties... Cultural and political problems were stressed in our wealthy nations, rejecting people who, jadis, were serving us while we ruled their lands... Despite their souverainty, we went on behaving like conquerors with them, in our own gardens, parkings and churches... Surprisingly, The actual crisis, opening this 21st century, is putting us, europeans, in very fragile social and cultural states... it seems that we white christian civilised people, are finding real difficulties keeping or finding a job... Anger and despair are growing more and more, which, is certainly going to lead us to desorientation (I love the word!...)... Just as all the poor and the needed who crossed the seas to find shelter somwhere else... It seems that, evrithing increasing in the wrong way, we will represent the immigrants of tomorrow, from poor old ruined Europe, to new developping countries... how ironical! We will know what nostalgia is... This piece is a way to express all that, as it is a vibrant hommage to music, poetry, cooking, clothing, stories, littrature, writing, and all sciences from orient, who made our civilisations grow, and sometimes prosper... 

Orient [08 02 13]

This new piece from MicroMégas was inpired by a drum sample that I created from the prog band Hidden Lands last album (2012): "In Our Nature". The title is the transcription of the name of that band, that I admire quite much. The idea was there, evidently, expressiong how to explore new uniscovered territories, exactly like every artist and progressive composer should try to do... It also is a way to say that, despite of the inexorable presence of mankind on the surface of the earth, there STILL are some virgin places on this planet, lands who never caught any trace of man... May this statement last and stand  long, long, long time  again...
Musically, it is the drumming pattern which gave me the direction to follow, as it very often happens to me, in that particular case. I just chose to add another drum sample, to give more "progression" to the piece. This time, it was inside Paskinel' works that I found the jewel, the drum sample for the middle section. Paskinel is a friend, a wonderfull composer and drummer, all the more that he is my partner in the ALCO Frisbass project. Each sample from his works is a true hommage to him and his music... Chfab

Terres Tues  [17 03 13]

Micro Mégas is the prog solo project from Chfab (Fabrice Chouette is his real name) , french artist (non professionnal) living in Rennes, raised with piano accademic studies at the age of 9, then discovering, beyond classical education, pop, chanson, rock and progressive music by himself, very keen on music press and knowledge since then. After a quite long period of accademy piano reject, he decides to try follk and classical guitar, one string after the other, but without any lesson, then percussions and drums, that he practiced very occasionnaly, that is why Chfab considers himself as a real amateur. After theatrical studies, plays and few directions, different band and duo projects in Paris, tha appearence of new tools for music in computers, in the 1990s (Chfab was born in 1970) definitly decided him to produce music, without the practical band difficulties. He started creating approximatly during 2008. The following tracks (made in 1913) represent his 3rd effort, after two non edited albums. 

Micro Mégas

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