Armando Trovaioli
Sessomatto

Para One · SPECTRE: Machines of Loving GraceMachines of Loving Grace, available in half speed mastered 180g double lp housed in a heavy sleeve with UV spot varnish. Machines of Loving Grace, the new album by Para One, whose real name is Jean-Baptiste de Laubier could be called fiction. It is an object freed from constraints, formats, genres, territories: the gospel of a new world. Six years after Club, eight years after Passion, his previous LP, this lover of electronic music, who has also been putting his sensitivity to the service of movies (soundtracks for Céline Sciamma in particular) opens with this record a new dimension in his artistic career. “I needed to break away from patterns and systematisms of formats, and take unexpected turns. To do so, I had first to allow myself to do so”. Allow oneself and maybe above all confront oneself – with one’s childhood, with one’s childhood’s ghosts, and what fantasies, ideals, memories, and grey areas they harbor. He had to go back – without giving up on his position as an adult, as a full-fledged artist – to the sources of his imagination, to the moment when music was holding almost mystical power. And then revisit it to make something new out of it. Just like Sanity, Madness & the Family (the feature film directed by Para One that he just finished and of which it is a consubstantial part), Machines of Loving Grace has an investigation around a family secret and the father figure as its starting point.

Astigmatic Records continue their interest in legendary Polish conductor, composer and arranger, Henryk Debich, whose music made the Polish Radio and Television Orchestra famous all over the world.From digging through the Radio Lódz archives, these nice gems were picked from from the golden era of 1974 to 1977 - also the time when one of the greatest examples of Polish jazz-funk was recorded: the highly collectable 'String Beat' album.This album is loaded with funk, drama and mood, played out though heavy drum breaks and rousing brass/string sections; Debich's orchestra effortlessly manoeuvred between funk and disco, touching on illustrative music and jazz.

TNAT001 - CA - 1970/2019RP

Éditions Appærent is extremely proud to present the original soundtrack for Christopher Makoto Yogi's film I Was a Simple Man, composed by Alex Zhang Hungtai and Pierre Guerineau.I Was a Simple Man is a ghost story set in the pastoral countryside of the north shore of O'ahu, Hawai'i. Revealed in four chapters, it tells the story of an elderly man facing the end of his life, visited by the ghosts of his past. Incorporating familial history and mythology, dream logic and surrealism, I Was a Simple Man is a time-shifting, kaleidoscopic story of a fractured family facing the death of their patriarch that will take us from the high-rises of contemporary Honolulu to pre-WWII pastorals of O'ahu and, finally, into the beyond.The soundtrack is a delicate, elegaic paean to Hawai'i as it appears in the film; lush and florid; subtly psychedelic; bathed in moonlight. The sound of the island — the spirit of the island — is as much an instrument as Zhang's saxophone or the scattered, raindrop piano that peppers the record. Even at harsh peaks, like a no-input mixer talking to itself like a lonely ghost, the record retains a sense of quizzical calm. Both nothingness and interrogating nothingness; misery and magic.