[engl] Somewhere between Buffy Sainte Marie’s Illuminations, Nico’s Desertshore and Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes work, Sophia Djebel Rose gives us a first album to rank among the unclassifiable of folk music. Minimal and abundant, austere and generous, classic and baroque, Sophia Djebel Rose has succeeded in this gamble of combining the extremes, but it seems natural if we are willing to consider that some whispers have the force of a cry . Métempsycose is made up of nine titles which are odes to forests and the earth, lullabies or songs of hope. Entirely recorded at home, on the high plateaus of Auvergne (middle of France), the album delivers this light specific to the mountains in which it was born. The artist says she often feels an intimacy with the world around her, insects, rock, the very small and the very large. So this idea of metempsychosis, according to which our souls travel through beings, allows her to explain this intimacy with the world. Because ultimately that’s what this album is about: our belonging to the Living.

[engl] Tony Malacara is a Mexican American musician/artist based in Southern California. For 11 years, Malacara performed internationally with a well known garage rock band (from Switzerland to Spain to the UK), playing festivals like Austin Psychfest, opening for iconic 60s groups including the Zombies and the Standells, and sharing bills with Ronnie Specktor and Roky Erickson. Malacara’s first solo album is psychedelic and dreamy with sinister undertones. A self taught musician, Tony writes and sings his songs, overdubbing bass, guitar, piano, organ and mellotron for recordings. Tony Russo, Malacara’s lead guitarist and longtime childhood friend, provides polished, floaty structure while Shane Graham of Dream Phases provides intuitive and precise drums and percussions. The album was recorded in LA by the talented musician and recording engineer Joel Jerome. Influenced by hazy visions of witches and ghosts, Malacara transports you into an otherworldly realm that hovers between the hopeful and the ominous.

[engl] Agency is the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment. Human agency entails the claim that humans make decisions and enact them on the world. But in the time of the Anthropocene, Earth seems to have taken all the characters of a full-fledged actor. It is not humanity opposite the rest but humans in direct interaction with earth, elements, objects, animals and plants. So we better rebuild our democratic institutions and let the “things” have a say in future plans or the future might one day explode in our face.

[engl] The Swimming City is Zea’s fifth album, and the first one featuring guest artists. Immediately in the first song “Sub Specie Ludens” Mats Gustafsson appears on baritone sax and “People Shrink, People Grow” features Oscar Jan Hoogland on piano, who returns in “All Words Have Been Here First”, the song that also features the characteristic and recognisable clarinet playing of Xavier Charles who De Boer made a 7" single with in 2012 called Bourgeois Blues. Zea has toured all over the world and played in thirty five different countries including Ethiopia and Ghana. In Ghana Zea set up a studio with local musicians where two of the songs on The Swimming City were recorded: “Dark Minded Me” and “Ik Kin Der Net By”. This last song is sung in Frysian, De Boer’s first language, who grew up in a small town called Makkum, in Fryslan in the northern part of The Netherlands.

[engl] The Quietus: "These tracks seem to come up unseen and tap the listener on the shoulder; and initially obtuse metaphors make wider points courtesy of a clever lick or a simple phrase. The combination of gentleness and bracing honesty is very disarming: a track such as ‘I Never Threw A Stone’ for example can easily create space for contemplation and allow a sensual indulgence in all the odd nooks and crannies of the sound. If ever a record deserved to be heard in its own time, it’s this one." RJF