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Baker's Dozen

A Babylonian Tower: Marc Hollander's Favourite Music
David McKenna , June 17th, 2020 08:34

Marc Hollander's Aksak Maboul have released one of the albums of the year and his Crammed Discs label have consistently provided a wide-ranging soundtrack to the globe. He guides David McKenna through favourite albums in this week's Baker's Dozen

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People In Control – When It’s War
One of the many great offshoots from This Heat…

MH: And Family Fodder. I put it because it’s the first record on Crammed but also because it symbolises that period of post-punk creativity with other bands that were really inspiring, like This Heat for sure – they are an example of something that came before punk and continued, and connects to Krautrock and stuff like that. Scritti Politti is another band I’m really into, their first releases. And Young Marble Giants, who gave me ideas at the time when I was writing the Ex-Futur album.

The label technically started in 1981 but the first record that has Crammed Discs on it was Un Peu de l’Âme des Bandits’ which came out the year before, it’s a self-released record and at the last minute I thought “you should put a label name on it, you do that don’t you” and so I just took my first name backwards, I didn’t think I was doing a label - it’s ‘les disques de Marc’ or ‘la marque (brand or label) de disques de Marc’, but it’s also crammed full of stuff of course. The first two releases were singles by Family Fodder and People In Control. They (People In Control) only did this track and it’s fantastic. It’s also the whole influence of dub, which was around way before obviously, but that whole way of working in the studio. This track was actually mixed in my kitchen in Brussels, on an eight track I think, we had big mixer in the middle. A pan-global sound studio in the kitchen, it’s funny.