Rockfort! French Music for March, Reviewed by David McKenna

Compared to the last La Nòvia release, Faune’s spooked Des Fantômes, this new one with Yann Gourdon on hurdy-gurdy and Antoine Cognet on banjo sounds relatively straight at first. But, as well as the hypnotic power you would expect from these masters of new trad, it has a quicksilver quality. For the most part, Gourdon here eschews extended droning; his playing here is lively and nimble. Versant is about dance tunes, and Gourdon is locked into its own dance with Cognet’s muscular and dextrous banjo. On the likes of ‘Bourrée D’après Urbain Trincal / Bourée Des Vieux’ (most of the tracks here are medleys) he unspools fiddly melodies while, with the ‘trompette’ string – the one that sits on a bridge called the ‘chien’ (dog) and generates the hurdy-gurdy’s unique buzzing sound – he plays bass lines that dart around like a bee in breeches. There’s a sort of alchemy at work here, in moments where the tones from the two instruments combine and swell and it’s as though there’s a whole ensemble playing, or in delightful tunes like that in the second half of ‘Mazurka D’après Urbain Trincal / Mazurka À Camille Roussin’ that seem to be robed in an extra layer of sparkle. 

Apparently when electronic improviser Méryll Ampe was 10 years old, he was invited on to French TV channel Canal+ to speak about his hobby, building wood cabins, and would later obtain a degree in wood sculpting. Now Ampe sculpts electronic noise in real time, and has been steadily building a reputation as a thrilling improviser. This blistering double album features both new productions and, for its second half, recordings of live performances at the Sonic Protest and Plein Bruit festivals, as well as a Groupe De Recherches Musicales commission for the Akousma festival in Montreal. Ampe uses analogue gear to generate and mould crackling torrents and churning electrical storm clouds, while on the likes of ‘Apparition Du Faune One’, he plays rhythmic games with what sounds like a drum machine tom sound. There’s room for a little prettiness and melody too; ‘In The Woods’ sounds like a substation serenading itself. Ampe is also a drummer and his mastery of rhythm and tension is evident throughout, along with his feel for texture and sonic depth as he applies or peels away strata of fizzing noise.

Abdullah Miniawy is an Egyptian singer, composer, poet and actor, who has already made his mark with beautiful solo work like last year’s Peacock Dreams and the international Le Cri Du Caire project. French producer Simo Cell has already demonstrated his range on 2023 album Cuspide Des Sirènes, which pulled bass music, trap, footwork and ambient in delightful new directions, while the recent FL Louis EP was a French Touch tribute to the extent that it was accompanied by a Flat Eric-style creature. I wasn’t overly enamoured of the puppet, but he’s hitting new heights here. The album’s theme is the failed promise of the internet but this is an album that is alive to the joy of human interaction and cross-cultural collaboration. Simo Cell’s vivid sound design is in evidence on exhilarating bangers like ‘The Dala Effect’ with its suction cup beat, the rapid, clap-driven ‘Living Emojis’ which, as per the majority of tracks, features Minaway’s luxuriantly AutoTuned-and-delayed melisma – a first for him, as far as I’m aware. Elsewhere,‘Reels In 60’ fuses dub with trap fills and humid trumpet and ‘Travelling In BCC’ comes over like a technofied Jon Hassel. Kenyan metal vocalist Lord Spikeheart also pops up to grace opener ‘I See The Stadium’ with his distinctive growl. Here’s hoping they keep this going because Dying Is The Internet is soulful and exhilarating.  

Delphine Dora is extremely prolific and there are releases I miss, but it’s reassuring to know that she’s always there, producing consistently delightful work. Her output follows its own wayward chronology; L’Ineluctable Pulsation Du Temps was apparently written in 2018, “in parallel” to the 2020 album L’Inattingible. Whereas the latter featured numerous guest instrumentalists and vocalists, the entirely instrumental L’Ineluctable Pulsation Du Temps is Dora at her most hermetic, entirely absorbed in her own dreamworld. The 10 tracks here combine rippling and circulating piano arpeggios with droning keyboard tones from a Nord Electro. They recall the work of minimalists like Philip Glass without replicating it, since Dora’s work eschews serene, clean lines in favour of stumbling cascades of notes that feel as though they are in sympathy with the erratic movements of the heart. The prettiness of ‘Désynchronisations’ piano figure is disturbed by what sounds like a malfunctioning, off-key music box; somehow these clashes add to the beauty of the piece. It’s hard to pick highlights from such a unified work but ‘Flux’, with its quavering synth-pipe organ and bell chimes, is utterly gorgeous. Thankfully for us, Dora’s dreams are always worthy of attention.

Double bassist Jeanne Gorisse is classically trained but has established herself as an improviser in Paris’ experimental scene. This second album builds on the spare, captured-in-the-raw Immersion Libre, bringing in multitracking to tape and bass guitar while retaining and even accentuating the debut’s biting edge. The layering gives Moires a more robust sound and a greater textural range. The groaning low end from the double bass reaches into your chest cavity and gives it an abrasive massage – not exactly soothing but definitely invigorating, and the electric bass is sometimes bowed, or used to unleash an unexpected flurry of notes at the end of ‘Freya’, provide ‘Lachésis’ with a rapid, insistent bassline and add damped-string plunking to ‘Ni Mais Si’. There’s sometimes a bestial quality to the sounds Gorisse produces – ‘Arnanke’ suggests a dog shut in a room with a wasp – while on closer ‘Atropos’, or the juddering climax to ‘Firmaments’, she’s channeling elemental forces. 

Much like his mentor DJ Mehdi, Brodinski (real name Louis Rogé) straddles the worlds of ‘electro’ and rap, famously co-producing Kanye West’s ‘Black Skinhead’ with Gesaffelstein, as well as working with Danny Brown and Atlanta rappers like Young Scooter and Bloody Jay. Over the past few years he has also been bringing a serrated techno edge to beats for French MCs like Bloody$anji, Bob Marlich and Rad Cartier and Mono City continues in that vein. It’s an exhilarating and brutally economical burst of industrial rap, cramming in 14 distortion-caked tracks in under 27 minutes and featuring a horde of French and international guests. Once you’re strapped in for seething opener ‘Battle Royale’, with its rapid-fire contributions from Squid Land, Baby Fatt and Japanese rapper Loota, there isn’t a moment to catch your breath; it crashes straight into the equally dense ‘23’, which brings Kenyan producer Slikback and French hyperpop artist Helen Island on board. The shock and awe continues through the chunky breaks of ‘Shadow Spin City’ (with New Yorker Trippjones and Sébastien Forrester) and possibly peaks with the piston beat and pinging snare of ‘Wow’, on which Rogé teams up – not for the first time – with Nutso Thugn and compatriot Qoso. 

The third album from London-based March, following the stripped-back lockdown recordings on Songs Of Resilience, is a multi-textured, multi-lingual affair that accommodates a cast of collaborators including Alabaster DePlume, Naima Bock, Dana Gavanski and Katy J Pearson. Its considerable appeal lies in this sense of community – a “tipsy choir” of friends closes out concluding track ‘The Power Of Your Dreams’ – as well as March’s open-hearted lyricism and  ability to pack Brazilian sophistication, folk, jazz and chanson into a scuffed indie/post punk pop parcel. There’s stirring folk pop on ‘After The Solstice’ and her Brazilian side shines through on ‘Lixo Sentimental’ and the lovely, string-laden French-language ballad ‘Le Temps Qu’il Faut Bien’. March also employs her native language on the reflective, Annie Ernaux-inspired ‘Les Années’, and perky tribute to her niece, ‘Lucie’. The ‘Powder Keg’ of the album title (and the title track) refers to a line in Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’; the album, in part, finds her observing her own case of ‘amour fou’ with humour and self-compassion, as on the chugging, 90s indie rock-styled ‘Upheaval’ and ‘Fireworks’, a duet with Evelyn Gray that takes a late-period Orange Juice approach to its disco influences. 

Kartmann has been Un Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi’s go-to guy for mastering almost since the label’s inception, but this is the first time he’s put out an album under his own name. Reading that it’s exclusively composed using modular synth and field recordings might not fill one with optimism but there is zero aimless noodling to be heard on Totem Flotté. It’s a hugely characterful, colourful release, pulsing with energy and eccentric charm. After low-key welcome of ‘Fi~’, the toymaker’s workshop comes to life on ‘Totem’, with sproinking pulses and clacking percussion, as well as some kind of bird or insect noise, cohering around a lively, bobbing bassline. The field recordings are used judiciously, to contribute to the feeling of tiptoeing through forests full of strange fauna, while the shifting, shuffling rhythms on tracks like ‘Imbau’ suggest Willy Wonka’s factory machinery, and the rapidly rolling drum-like sounds on ‘Machu’ connect you to a lost ancient civilisation. 

Releases on Belgian label Okraïna don’t come thick and fast – this is the first since January 2025’s splendid Tartine De Clous album – but they’re always worth the wait. This collaboration between Mauricio Amarante of Radikal Satan, the Argentinian ‘tango doom’ group transplanted to southwestern France, and writer, dancer and cultural activist Marine Debilly, is billed as being, most likely, a one-off. Which could be viewed as a marketing hook, but I think it’s sincere. In fact I hope they change their minds, because this is an exceedingly lovely record. It’s also a more exotic bird than it might first appear. The initial impression is of something spare and fairly live-sounding -–just acoustic guitar, a little percussion and Debilly’s voice, a sparse chanson-folk backing for poetic lyrics: “je suis allée au rythme de l’oubli, j’en ai fait mon ami” (“I went at the speed of forgetting, I’ve made it my friend”. And that would have still been beautiful; Amarante’s acoustic playing is deft and sweet, and Debilly’s vocals are soft without being winsome. But, in keeping with the acknowledged influence of Brigitte Fontaine and Areski – the dusty, droning ‘Parfois’ would fit nicely into the recently released ‘lost’ album from the pair, Baraka 1980 – Amarante-Cerisier has a psychedelic glow, thanks to the shimmery reverb and double tracking, the distorted keyboards and swirling vocal effects that are layered through the mix. Again, I’d love for there to be une autre, but if this is all we’re getting it’s still plenty.