PRE-ORDER/PURCHASE 'Cobra Fakir' by Miriodor @
AMAZON (digital & physical): http://amzn.com/B00E334J8Y
ITUNES (digital): https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/cobra-fakir/id687622586
BANDCAMP (hi-fi digital): http://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/cobra-fakir

Over a nearly 35 year-long career, Miriodor have continuously produced music that is intricate, melodic, challenging and filled with both humour and fire.

Cobra Fakir is the group's eighth studio album and, like all their releases, is a captivating new-music gem filled with great musicianship, terrific tunes and a distinctive and personal sound.
A cobra fakir is a snake charmer, who uses carefully concocted melodies to put the mighty reptile under a sort of sonic spell. That’s an apt analogy for what will happen to even the hardiest ears upon introduction to Miriodor’s newest eccentric-but-bewitching batch of tunes.

Miriodor are one of the core bands of what’s become known as the R.I.O. (Rock in Opposition) style, an international agglomeration of artists whose core tenet has remained a commitment to creating challenging music that freely incorporates everything from progressive rock and jazz to avant-garde experimentation and even elements of various folk traditions.

The group's long evolutionary process has led to the trio we hear on Cobra Fakir: founding musicians Pascal Globensky (keyboards, synths, piano) and Rémi Leclerc (drums, percussion, keyboards, turntable) with longtime member Bernard Falaise (guitars, bass, keyboards, banjo, turntable). The multi-layered complexity of the pieces they’ve crafted for Cobra Fakir belies the relatively spontaneous method in which much of the music was made.

"Being back to a trio format (once again), about one year before our target date for a release on Cuneiform Records in September 2013, with very little material on hand, we rolled up our sleeves and got immersed in the work. We built on what we had, which was a few sketchy pieces (demos) and we also recorded several improvs, planning to extract stuff from them and then creating new pieces from that. For about 8 months, this has been a very fun and very intense period of exchanging files and challenging each other with either strange and unexpected stuff, super arrangements, a great solo, or simply a very promising new tune.

For this record, Rémi has been fiddling a lot with various percussive objects and machines (acoustic or electronic), a strong interest of him lately. This gave the album a wide array of colorful tonalities in the percussive department. Bernard had lots on his hands, from morphing into a bass player, creating his numerous guitar parts, and adding a myriad of arrangements and textures, with keyboards, turntable and editing. All this, plus the job of mixing the album and participating in the mastering of the album made for a pretty busy fellow. Pascal had fun toying with improv extracts, adding textures and atmosphere a bit everywhere on the pieces, throwing a pinch of concrete sounds for good measure, ending up with some uncharacteristic passages for Miriodor. It has been a hectic, very intense and brain-squeezing period for the three of us. We delivered in time, and the baby’s going fine, thank you!"

Miriodor, "La roue" from 'Cobra Fakir' (Cuneiform Records)

"...a turbulent masterpiece that leaves a residue of angst lingering long after the CD ends." 
– Alternative Press 

"Present's sound is almost a concentration of Univers Zero -- more Univers Zero than the thing itself -- due not only to the presence of two dominant members of the group, but also to Present's being a quartet (drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards), which allows for the very essence of the musical vision to emerge without any frills or distractions." 
– All Music Guide 

After co-founding Univers Zero in 1974 and co-leading that group through their first two albums, guitarist and composer Roger Trigaux left Univers Zero in May, 1979, right after the completion of Heresie. 

His new ensemble, Present, was a more electric and a more compact ensemble: electric grand piano (Alain Rochette), electric guitar and electric piano (Roger), electric bass (Christian Genet, also of Univers Zero) and drums (Daniel Denis, also of Univers Zero). 

Originally conceived strictly as a studio project, the band began rehearsals in 1979 and began to record their first album, Triskaïdékaphobie (The Fear Of The Number 13) in January, 1980. After all the rehearsals and all of the work of recording this album, Roger realized that this was a perfect ensemble to play live, as the musicians all got along well and the ensemble was small enough to be a practical outfit and the band began performing in the fall of 1980. Since Present only had about 35' of music written for the group, in their earliest days, the band also performed two 'covers' from Univers Zero's repertoire; Dense (from Ceux du Dehors) and Vous Les Saurez En Temps Voulu (from Heresie). Recordings of these two covers, from a performance from 2/28/81 are included here as bonus tracks. 

This reissue of Triskaïdékaphobie includes the original album, newly transferred and remastered by the group's long-time engineer, Udi Koomran as well as the aforementioned 20' of bonus material!
credits

Present (on 'Triskaïdékaphobie') is 
Roger Trigaux: guitars, Fender Rhodes piano 
Alain Rochette: Yamaha CP-80 electric grand piano 
Christian Genet: electric bass 
Daniel Denis: percussion

Present, "Promenade Au Fond D'un Canal" [excerpt] from 'Triskaïdékaphobie [remastered​/​expanded]'

Present - 'Le Poison Qui Rend Fou [remastered​/​expanded]' (Cuneiform Records) to be released on February 4, 2014.

"Magma and King Crimson comparisons are relevant, but the dark and edgy Present are an entity unto themselves." 
– Atlanta Press 

"Dark, Bartok-like arrangements driven by Gothic rock percussion and the tortured guitar of Roger Trigaux. This is classical rock with an industrial vengence..." 
– DownBeat 

Present was founded in 1979 by guitarist/composer Roger Trigaux, who first came to attention as the co-leader of Univers Zero, which he co-founded in 1974. 

After two now legendary albums with Univers Zero (Univers Zero - 1977 and Heresie - 1979), he left to have the chance to create his own, personal, musical vision. 

A quartet of guitar, piano, bass and drums, Present featured the stupendous drumming of Daniel Denis, the other co-founder of Univers Zero, so Present's sound is a more rock-oriented encapsulation of the unique music Roger had been composing, performing and honing for years. 

Originally recorded in 1983, Le Poison Qui Rend Fou (The Poison That Makes You Insane), the band's second and final album until their rebirth in the mid 90s, is a classic of complex, Rock In Opposition-style electric chamber rock. 

This reissue of Le Poison Qui Rend Fou includes the original album, newly transferred and remastered by the group's long-time engineer, Udi Koomran, and a booklet telling the story of the band and this album, with many never-before seen photos. Additionally, there is 25' of QuickTime movies of the group's final concert featuring bassist Christian Genet, from Livry-Gargan, France, 1/23/82, as well as a second "disc" that features the entire 80' concert from 1/23/82!
credits

PRESENT (on 'Le Poison Qui Rend Fou') is 
Roger Trigaux: guitars, Fender Rhodes piano 

Alain Rochette: Yamaha CP-80 electric grand piano, piano, synthesizer 

Daniel Denis: percussion 

Marie-Anne Polaris: vocals 

Ferdinand Philippot: electric bass ("Le Poison Qui Rend Fou") 

Christian Genet: electric bass (Livry-Gargan, France)

Present, "Ersatz" from 'Le Poison Qui Rend Fou [remastered​/​expanded]' (Cuneiform Records)

This is a collection of excerpts from the album "Phosphorescent Dreams" (2014, DiskUnion Arcangelo).

Univers Zero • Excerpts from Phosphorescent Dreams (2014)

Thinking Plague, "The Echoes Of Their Cries" from 'Hoping Against Hope' (out 2/10/2017 on Cuneiform Records)

Clouds scud across a storm-wracked sky, but while briefly exposing rare shards of blue, most often, blacker, gloomier grays lurk behind the mists. 

Sometimes a work of art enables us to articulate our thoughts and feelings in times of upheaval and chaos. In an era when the world has seemingly come off its hinges, an album like Hoping Against Hope offers listeners the consolation that they are not alone. But more than that, this intellectually complex work offers tools to help us make sense, affectively at least, of the whole sorry mess. 

Thinking Plague is a storied band, whose thirty-five year history has seen it cleave consistently to the extreme limits of what is possible to do within rock music. Much of the music it released has owed more to traditions external to rock, such as folk, chamber music, and particularly, the avant-garde tradition of twentieth-century classical music. 

Thinking Plague are often cited as the leading light of the American arm of the ‘Rock In Opposition’ movement, genre-defying and, above all, unique. 

The arrangements we hear on Hoping Against Hope are those we will hear live. Even when singer Elaine di Falco’s accordion is written and recorded in multiple voices, the parts are realizable by a single instrument. 

Leader and composer Mike Johnson and newest member Bill Pohl’s tightly scored twin guitars are panned out wide enough for the listener to balance the pursuit of an individual voice against the ensemble texture, which is the creative focus, a carefully crafted polyphony served by each instrumental voice. Pohl’s addition brings a second electric guitar to the texture for the first time, enabling more sinuous scoring, rather than making the sound more ‘rock’. 

There is a familiar vocabulary in play, a harmonic palette and a phraseology that has evolved considerably over the band’s lifespan without extreme points of rupture, despite major changes and sometimes long gaps between releases; this is clearly the same band that we heard in the 1980s, but Johnson is writing from a creative position that is fruitfully removed from that he occupied even four years ago. As demanding as this music may be, it is made to sound easy, and more importantly, beautiful.

Buy now

Thinking Plague, "The Echoes Of Their Cries" from 'Hoping Against Hope' (Cuneiform Records)

"With a career going back over 30 years, French-Canadian band Miriodor have carved out an instantly recognizable sound that straddles avant rock and jazz...Miriodor have a wonderful sense of melody to counter their more experimental tendencies, and [the band] pulls off the hard to achieve feat of being both quite odd and very accessible at the same time." 
– Astounded By Sound!

"Metaphorically, we could say that Miriodor is a planet, with aliens communicating in their mysterious ways with planet Earth," says Miriodor's keyboardist, Pascal Globensky. In that sense, the long-lived Montreal band's ninth album, entitled Signal 9, could simply be considered the ninth set of musical messages from that exotic heavenly body.

The Miriodor discography has been building strength upon strength with each successive album. The band combines jazz, classical, rock, and international influences for an arresting, idiosyncratic sound that eludes description but remains immediately identifiable as Mirodor.

Picking up where the most recent coded message from planet Miriodor, 2013's Cobra Fakir, left off, Signal 9 arrives like an invitation to an otherworldly voyage. Each track marks another twist and turn in a journey across strange, captivating landscapes populated by creatures, crafts, and constructions whose like has never been glimpsed outside the band's idiosyncratic ecosystem.

Globensky, drummer Rémi Leclerc, and guitarist Bernard Falaise have expanded Miriodor to a quartet with the addition of bassist Nicolas Lessard as a full-time member. Accordingly, the band works like a one eight-handed, four-brained organism here, operating more organically and collectively than ever.

And while Miriodor often forges some of their heaviest sounds to date over the course of Signal 9, the album is also loaded with off-the-wall humor and some beautiful, contemplative melodic moments. The combination makes for some crafty contrasts, frequently flipping back and forth drastically from one mood to another multiple times within a single composition for a jarring-but-thrilling effect.

Once you return to your everyday life after emerging from the alternative universe of Signal 9, the whole album seems like some kind of fever dream you've just emerged from. But the big difference is that it's a dream you're eager to leap right back into again.

Bernard Falaise guitars, keyboards, turntable
Pascal Globensky keyboards, synths, piano
Rémi Leclerc drums, percussion, electronics
Nicolas Lessard bass, double bass, keyboards

Signal 9

Miriodor, "Venin" from 'Signal 9' (Cuneiform Records)

Tardigrada

from psychic existentialism, released on for noise's sake. http://www.last.fm/music/Scissor+Shock

scissor shock - cat planet woman

PURCHASE Guapo's 'History Of The Visitation' (Cuneiform Records) @
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/History-Visitation-CD-DVD-Guapo/dp/B00AALHW3C/
BANDCAMP (digital - audio only from CD+DVD): http://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/history-of-the-visitation
ITUNES (digital - audio only from CD): https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/history-of-the-visitation/id594018321
WAYSIDE (physical - ships worldwide): http://www.waysidemusic.com/Music-Departments/Guapo-Eblast.aspx

Prepare yourself for an experience that’s simultaneously otherworldly and assaultive. On paper, the music of Guapo reads like a riddle – the British quartet’s sound is based around ideas like controlled chaos, atonal harmony, uplifting darkness, and beautiful destruction. Nothing about the band or their work seems to adhere to even the most open-minded set of preconceptions about the meaning of umbrella terms like “rock,” or “progressive,” or even “experimental.” But when you abandon the need to reconcile any of these concepts with each other, and simply let their latest album, 'History Of The Visitation', speak for itself, everything becomes radiantly clear.
 
'History Of The Visitation' is the ninth album from the forward-looking foursome, and their second for Cuneiform Records (their last one for the label was 2004’s 'Five Suns', and they’ve since released 'Black Oni' (2005) on Ipecac and 'Elixirs' (2008) on Neurot Recordings. The band’s return to Cuneiform finds them following through on the kind of epic constructions that sprung forth from the aforementioned albums. The record is dominated by the 26-minute tour de force “The Pilman Radiant,” offset only by the 11-minute journey “Tremors from the Future” and the considerably more compact sonic sculpture known as “Complex #7.”

Over the course of the band’s 19-year history, fans and journalists alike have tossed a lot of comparisons in Guapo’s direction. Magma, The Ruins, King Crimson, Univers Zero, and many more names from the “progressive” and “Rock In Opposition” realms have been bandied about as reference points, and references to the likes of The Mars Volta or Boris wouldn’t be completely out of line either. And while elements of all of the above can be heard within the bold, bracing aural environs of 'History Of The Visitation', they only account for part of the story.

Certainly the commonalities of the aforementioned artists – a tendency towards dark, moody, sometimes menacing musical colors and an abhorrence of all overt rock tropes – are crucial to Guapo’s m.o. as well. But 'History Of The Visitation' can’t simply be considered the sum total of its most obvious influences. For one thing, the presence of reedmen Thomas Scott and Dave Newhouse from Maryland avant jazz-rock institution The Muffins among the album’s guest musicians should alert keen-minded listeners that the take-no-prisoners harmonic melee of modern jazz is among the sonic subtexts here. And the addition of strings, woodwind, and brass serves to underscore the orchestral side of what Guapo accomplishes in the sweep, scope, and near-symphonic grandeur of their extended compositions. In other words, when approaching HOTV, leave room in your mind’s eye for the image of Sun Ra jamming with Stravinsky.

Both the CD and the limited-edition vinyl versions of the album come with a bonus DVD featuring a spellbinding performance of “Five Suns” filmed at NEARfest 2006 in Bethlehem, PA, and “King Lindorm” from the 2007 Rock In Opposition Festival in Carmaux, France. This is the only live footage of the band available to the public and features former member Daniel O'Sullivan of Ulver and Sun 0))).

Guapo, "The Pilman Radiant" [excerpt] from 'History Of The Visitation' (Cuneiform Records)


Puntata radiofonica d' Inediti live: Cassiber - Chris Cutler, drums,   Alfred Harth, tenor and alto saxes, clarinets,trombone     Heiner Goebbels, piano,synth,guitar,voice
Christoph Anders - Vocal,guitar, prepared tapes


Univers Zero - Daniel Denis, Guy Segers, Andy Kirk, Alan Ward, Dirk Descheemaeker


Per chi c'era uno dei festival indimenticabili di qualche anno fa, da musica fuori controllo del 1982 alla Rote Fabrik di Zurigo, la Fabbrica Rossa occupata, un'ora per i Cassiber appena nati,in splendida forma, e una ventina di minuti di Univers Zero di Daniel Denis, con l'esecuzione di Combat.



www.radiocittafujiko.it/trasmissioni-intersezioni





Cassiber - Univers Zero 1982 - live in  Zurigo - Rote Fabrik -  Inediti live radio show

Cuneiform Records is an independent record label releasing adventurous, boundary-bursting music by artists from around the world. Founded in 1984.

Popular tracks tagged #Rock in Opposition