Eric Chenaux on his favourite Constellation releases
To accompany the release of Say Laura, Eric Chenaux's 7th album for Constellation, we asked our very own 'troubadour extraordinaire' to select his favourite releases from the Constellation catalog. The pictures below were taken in Eric's home in the south of France.
Sandro Perri – Tiny Mirrors
"Ok, I played on this record and that is most certainly not why it is on the list. I love Sandro Perri’s songs and here on this record, we get to hear them in full force. Sweet and fried arrangements inhabited by great melodies, beautiful singing, cloudy nylon-string guitar and some buoyant improvisation. This record is chock full of great songs but "Double Suicide" is worth a mention. Bloody beautiful."
Land Of Kush – Sand Enigma
"Oh I love Sam Shalabi. One of my favourite guitar players of all time and a pervert of the first order. Don’t get flustered, I mean pervert in the definitive sense, or the first two defintive senses: to distort or corrupt the original course, meaning or state of (something) and to lead (someone) away from what is considered natural or acceptable. Voila! Sam Shalabi. And all of his music lives deeply in the psychedelic; rich in hallucinations clear and real. And Sand Enigma is psychedelic in every sense. Nothing here makes sense but it produces senses, wild and beaming."
Joni Void – Selfless
"This strange beast has so many different musics in it it is hard to talk about in a short paragraph. Selfless warped montage. In that way it is cinematic. Not in the way we usually use that term to describe music. Here we have something much more strange, and makes me think of Jean Luc Godard’s experiments in montage and sound. This record is hard to hold, hard to peg, but listening is not holding and Selfless (it's all in the name) is an encounter with listening beyond ourselves, beyond our comprehension and desire to understand. When I listen to this record I truly have no idea what is going on. Laissez-aller."
Jerusalem In My Heart – Mo7it Al Mo7it
"Radwan Moumneh has a killer voice and I chose this record for that reason. He sings with so much power and tenderness and rigorous detail. And the instrumental tracks unfold like the weather. I secretly wish (well, not so secretly now) that he’d make an acapella record one day). I just came back from a week in Cairo and every night at 4am, when the prayers blasted out of the mosques in all of their reverbed psychedelic glory and bounced off of the buildings, well, I thought of "3anzah Jarbanah" from this record. A steaming bath of human voice."
Fly Pan Am – Ca Va Cogner
"This wonder, part-fried imaginary Italian disco and part Robert Ashley is a record I listen to a lot. It is damn fun. Stephen de Oliveira, Jonathan Parant, Luc Paradis, and Alexandre St-Onge have all made great stuff on their own or in other bands and in other art forms. I love the group voices; they have me thinking of the pure joy of Jorge Ben’s A Tabua De Esmeralda and there is a similar social space to Ca Va Cogner even as it shares an equally fried reflective space and soundworld with some of Robert Ashley’s psychedelic operas. I feel like this record may have slipped through the cracks, possibly because the band broke up before this record was released. Go down to the cracks (there’s a sweet stereo down there), and revel in this reverie. Ca Va Cogner!"
