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Freedom To Spend

UMAN - Chaleur Humaine

"UMAN’s Chaleur Humaine, the debut album from the French duo of musicians and siblings Danielle and Didier Jean, resurfaces for the first time since its original release in 1992. While history, both private and public, is scattered with creative relationships between siblings that simply “did not work,” UMAN’s story is uniquely different and defined by this bond, and a shared journey impressing footprints along an adventurous musical terrain.

Prior to Chaleur Humaine, Danielle and Didier recorded two albums of pop songs met mostly with ambivalence, inspiring them to escape the expectations of the French music industry and build their own studio in Orsay, a suburb south of Paris. Chaleur Humaine was a modus operandi for their new, liberated perspective and space: freedom to develop ideas independently; to cross-pollinate genres and abandon them altogether; to improvise and experiment in new musical configurations.
Within their recording sanctuary, Danielle and Didier embraced cutting edge consumer music technology to inform the album’s esoteric, textural characteristics. This is especially notable in the processing of Danielle’s voice, inventively sampled, shifted and processed, and then woven through Didier’s dream worlds. This interpretation of technology and economy of sound, gives Chaleur Humaine a soft and impressionistic sense of surrealism, guided by a human sincerity and sublimated into a landscape that feels pastoral yet universal.

UMAN, the name which binds Danielle and Didier musically, resembles “human” in many Romance languages but signals a spirit from a deeper earth force. Similarly, UMAN reinvents language in a postmodern way to create a harmony and truth that exists within and beyond human recognition. A poem, at once a theme and mantra, recurs throughout Chaleur Humaine: “It’s this force, almost animal, warm, like a kiss, fresh like the morning dew, that we call human warmth.” Dispatched across multiple languages over abstract melodic motifs, the message radiates from a place of meditated intent.


Chaleur Humaine was released on Buda Musique during the French record label’s rise to prominence showcasing global sound, with several tracks plucked from the album and reaching an international audience through various New Age / “Chillout” compilations. Yet the album shares more in common with Piero Milesi and Daniel Bacalov’s work for stage and theater on La Camera Astratta, the introspective world building of Nuno Canavarro on Plux Quba, and the formless vocalism and ethereality of Cocteau Twins or Enya.

While Danielle and Didier admit an affinity for some of these artists, UMAN were driven by their own invention, performing with local and fringe artists, and ultimately at ease in their secluded musical world. Even as the music of UMAN ricochets off the walls of their safe haven in so many directions, the artists’ interplay of reference and abstraction of sound retains the intimacy of a wildly imaginative conversation between siblings." - Freedom To Spend.

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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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