Repress!

The short, mysterious career of the female French duo Deux Filles is bookended by tragedy. Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule met as teenagers at a holiday pilgrimage to Lourdes, during which Coule's mother died of an incurable lung disease, and Forque's mother was killed and her father paralyzed in an auto accident. The two teens bonded over their shared grief and worked through their bereavement with music. However, after recording two critically acclaimed albums and playing throughout Europe and North America, Forque and Coule disappeared without a trace in North Africa in 1984 during a trip to visit Algiers. The short and terribly unhappy lives of Forque and Coule are at the root of the small but fervent cult following the mysterious duo have gained since their disappearance, not least because the placid, largely instrumental music on the duo's albums betrays no hint of the sorrow that framed their personal lives.

This would be a terribly sad story if a word of it were true. In reality, Deux Filles were Simon Fisher Turner, former child star/teen idol and future soundtrack composer, and his mate Colin Lloyd Tucker. Turner and Tucker left an early incarnation of The The in 1981 to pursue another musical direction. Turner claims that the idea of Deux Filles came to him in a dream, and he and Tucker strictly maintained the fiction throughout the duo's career. Not only did they pose in drag for the album covers, the duo once even played live without the audience realizing that the tragic French girls on-stage were actually a pair of blokes from south London. Deux Filles released two albums through Turner and Tucker's Papier Mache label, 1982's “Silence & Wisdom” and 1983's “Double Happiness”. Both albums are included here,
and blend watery piano, ghostly vocals, sheets of synthesizers, processed guitars, and the barest minimum of percussion. Drifting and wistful, they’re a pair of lost ambient gems from a time when the genre had yet to mature, an excellent example of post-Eno, pre-Orb ambient music.

All songs have been remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The vinyl comes housed in gatefold sleeve with original front covers of both albums, and a centerfold of archive images and the original liner notes. “Like an early French film soundtrack with melodramatic overtones, the sound is jagged and disjointed but never harsh. Lilting guitars and ample use of echo smack of Vini Reilly, relying on the hypnotic qualities of the sound rather than abrasive noise" (Sounds, 03/1983)

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Deux Filles was not, in fact, two girls despite what the group name and its elaborate hoax of a backstory suggest. No, they were not Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule, French women who met as teenagers under tragic circumstances and became fast friends, recording two albums together before disappearing into the ether. In reality, Deux Filles was Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker, a UK duo who first worked together in an early incarnation of The The.

Straddling the line between experimental and pop, Turner was an actor and teen singing star who later composed soundtracks for the iconic queer filmmaker Derek Jarman while Tucker’s career began as an engineer for the famed UK library music studio, De Wolfe, before forming experimental wave group The Gadgets. In Deux Filles, the duo found an outlet for their least commercial tendencies, combining lo-fi proto-dream-pop instrumentals with samples, tape experiments, ambient textures, and drum machines. Even in the vibrant, seemingly endless well of UK DIY, Deux Filles stand out.

Silence & Wisdom – the duo’s 1982 debut – is a series of musical vignettes, like the score of an unrealized arthouse film. Blending processed guitars, sheets of synthesizers, echoey pianos, and washed-out vocal snippets to surprisingly varied effect, the album is recommended for fans of Durutti Column and Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.

Tracklist:

A1 - The Letter
A2 - L’intrigué
A3 - Drinking At A Stream
A4 - Oakwood Green
A5 - Children Of Clay
A6 - Sur La Plage
A7 - Her Masters Voice
B1 - The Draw In Room
B2 - She Slides
B3 - Fleurs Dolls
B4 - Mortuary
B5 - The City Sleeps
B6 - Birds
B7 - Silence & Wisdom
B8 - Festival

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

Deux Filles was not, in fact, two girls despite what the group name and its elaborate hoax of a backstory suggest. No, they were not Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule, French women who met as teenagers under tragic circumstances and became fast friends, recording two albums together before disappearing into the ether. In reality, Deux Filles was Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker, a UK duo who first worked together in an early incarnation of The The.

Straddling the line between experimental and pop, Turner was an actor and teen singing star who later composed soundtracks for the iconic queer filmmaker Derek Jarman while Tucker’s career began as an engineer for the famed UK library music studio, De Wolfe, before forming experimental wave group The Gadgets. In Deux Filles, the duo found an outlet for their least commercial tendencies, combining lo-fi proto-dream-pop instrumentals with samples, tape experiments, ambient textures, and drum machines. Even in the vibrant, seemingly endless well of UK DIY, Deux Filles stand out.

Silence & Wisdom – the duo’s 1982 debut – is a series of musical vignettes, like the score of an unrealized arthouse film. Blending processed guitars, sheets of synthesizers, echoey pianos, and washed-out vocal snippets to surprisingly varied effect, the album is recommended for fans of Durutti Column and Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.

Tracklist:

A1 - The Letter
A2 - L’intrigué
A3 - Drinking At A Stream
A4 - Oakwood Green
A5 - Children Of Clay
A6 - Sur La Plage
A7 - Her Masters Voice
B1 - The Draw In Room
B2 - She Slides
B3 - Fleurs Dolls
B4 - Mortuary
B5 - The City Sleeps
B6 - Birds
B7 - Silence & Wisdom
B8 - Festival

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

Our Swimmer is pleased to present the first official vinyl reissue of The Hilversum Session in over thirty years.

Jazz iconoclast Albert Ayler took the experimental leanings of contemporaries like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman as a starting point and then blasted them to stratospheric extremes, creating some of the most polarizing and brilliant music of the 20th Century. In particular, 1964 was a pivotal – and well documented – year in the free jazz artist’s career. After returning to New York, Ayler assembled a brilliant group with Sunny Murray on drums and Gary Peacock on bass, recording Spiritual Unity, Ayler’s first record for the legendary ESP-Disk’ label, that summer.

Soon after that session, Ayler took his trio to Europe where they were joined by cornetist Don Cherry for a tour of The Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. The Hilversum Session is a live radio session recorded on November 9th, 1964. At that point the quartet was months into its European tour and the interplay is extraordinary. On classic Ayler compositions like “Spirits” and “Ghosts” the band absolutely rip, with a kind of intuition and connectivity rarely heard, creating some of the most untethered and undeniably powerful music in the history of free jazz.

Tracklist:

A1 - Angels
A2 - C.A.C.
A3 - Ghosts
B1 - Infant Happiness
B2 - Spirits
B3 - No Name

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Germany
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English singer-songwriter Bridget St. John grew up in a musical family in Surrey, beginning on piano, viola and trumpet before picking up the guitar in high school. In the late 1960s she met the brilliant John Martyn who quickly became a fan and brought her music to a larger audience, which included the legendary DJ John Peel, for whose label Dandelion St. John recorded her first three albums. Our Swimmer is pleased to present this first-ever vinyl reissue from a UK songwriting hero.

Jumble Queen, St. John’s fourth album, was originally released in 1974 on Chrysalis, following the dissolution of Peel's label. Featuring help from members of Jethro Tull, King Crimson alum Michael Giles, American guitarist Stefan Grossman, and, most surprisingly, founding Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden, the album is heady, dreamy folk-rock that stands up alongside the singer’s more well-known Dandelion albums.

St. John’s voice – best described as a more refined Nico – is the focal point here. Her breathy, earthen tones perfectly complement the lovelorn lyrical content. With a more subdued sound than the rock-heavy backing group might suggest, Jumble Queen is an essential bit of UK folk-rock and singer-songwriter brilliance. After this album, St. John moved to the States and all but left the music business, not releasing another album for more than twenty years.

Tracklist:

A1 - Sparrowpit
A2 - Song For The Waterden Widow
A3 - I Don't Know If I Can Take It
A4 - Some Kind Of Beautiful
A5 - Last Goodnight
B1 - Curious & Wooly
B2 - Want To Be With You
B3 - Jumble Queen
B4 - Sweet Painted Lady
B5 - Long Long Time

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More