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Monster Melodies

XALPH - S/T

"The story begins in the city of Bordeaux in 1964. Captivated by Hank Marvin's guitar-playing, Jean Pierre Daran teaches himself to play Shadows tunes, working out their intricacies by the unusual method of slowing 45RPM singles down to 33RPM. Jean Pierre joins forces with Yvan Blanl?il, Jean Jacques Pouget, and Serge Blachère to form the band Les Franglais. In 1971, a new musical project takes shape when Jean Pierre and Yvan form Lucie Dans le Ciel with three other students: Francis Ferrer, Christian Lassalle, and André Lesgouarres. The music is influenced by '60s beat and Frank Zappa's freakiness. After playing some local gigs, Lucie Dans le Ciel score the support for Magma, when they went through Bordeaux in April '72. At that show, Christian Vander and his band were won over by the madness of the Bordelais musicians, who closed their set with a big battle of cream pie. A friendship grows, and contact is established between Magma's professional musicians and the Bordeaux amateurs. However, Yvan Blanloeil is now more excited by theatre than by music, and he quickly sucks the life out of Lucie Dans le Ciel by wanting to restrict it to providing musical accompaniment to theater shows. The other musicians, no longer feeling that they are expressing themselves, don't hide their dissatisfaction. Yvan continued his theater career alone. In the meantime the musicians around Jean Pierre Daran formed a new group: Amélie la Sèche. As none of the musicians can read music, everything is worked out through discussion; the strong sense of unity this creates yields a number of highly-collaborative musical sketches recorded on a Teac 3300 reel-to-reel recorder. On these recordings Jean Pierre creates his own universe on the guitar, and Christian Lassalle, Francis Ferrer, André Lesgouarres, and new bass-player Jean Pierre Alcaïne add their own contributions. After clarinetist and saxophonist Christian Faure joins, Amélie la Sèche play a number of concerts, but never outside the Bordeaux area. The band's most creative period begins in July '74, while the group (now renamed Xalph) is rehearsing in a house in Pondaurat, a small village in the Gironde. Recordings of accomplished pieces of "dense music full of rhythmic and harmonic twists and turns" are made by the group, with the bass overdubbed onto a reel-to-reel Sony and the ever-present Teac 3300. Clear vinyl; Includes poster and insert; Edition of 1000 (numbered)." - Monster Melodies.
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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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