“In March of 1978, a handful of European prog rock bands performed at a small music festival in London called Rock in Opposition. The event was conceived by the outsider British band Henry Cow, who had found kindred spirits in avant-prog outfits in countries like Sweden, Belgium, and France, and their slogan was, ‘The music the record companies don’t want you to hear.’ For a couple years, RIO became a quasi-formal anti-establishment collective, and the arty Belgian avant-rock band Aksak Maboul joined its ranks as part of a second-wave expansion. At the time, Aksak Maboul were exploding their experimental ambitions, a charge spearheaded by co-founder Marc Hollander. The weird, tangled sophomore album they released in 1980, Un Peu De L’Âme Des Bandits, is just now receiving its first vinyl reissue on the same pivotal independent label it spawned nearly 40 years ago. …”
Pitchfork (Audio)
W – Un Peu de l’Âme des Bandits
bandcamp (Audio)
YouTube: Un Peu De L’Ame Des Bandits [Full Album]
Category: Aksak Maboul
Recommended Records Sampler (1982)
Wikpedia – “The Recommended Records Sampler is a sampler double album by various artists released by English independent record label Recommended Records on LP in 1982. It contains tracks by musicians and groups on the Recommended Records catalogue at the time. This sampler differed from the traditional record label sampler in that all the pieces here were newly recorded by the artists and, at the time, had never been released elsewhere. (Many of the tracks were later re-released on the artists’ own albums.) In 1985 Recommended Records launched the RēR Quarterly, a ‘quarterly’ sound-magazine, which continued this approach of releasing previously unreleased work on a compilation album.”
Wikipedia
Die Or D.I.Y.?
YouTube: Recommended Records Sampler
Onze danses pour combattre la migraine – Aksak Maboul (1977)
“In the spring of 1977, two young Belgian musicians who call themselves Aksak Maboul (aka Marc Hollander & Vincent Kenis) set out to record an album, ‘Onze danses pour combattre la migraine’, in which they playfully fused and deconstructed all kinds of genres to create their own musical world. Three years later, Hollander founded the Crammed label. Many ingredients came in and out of the Aksak blender : fake jazz, electronics, imaginary African & Balkan music, minimalism… there were even pre-techno aspects such in as Saure Gurke and its characteristic keyboard stab pattern which will mysteriously find its way into many classic Detroit techno tracks some ten years later. Onze Danses became a cult album, and seems retrospectively to have mapped out the way for the various directions which have been explored by Crammed during the next two decades.”
bandcamp (Audio)
W – Onze danses pour combattre la migraine
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Onze danses pour combattre la migraine (Full Album) 50:26
Punk Scrawled Artist 