Playfully mixing and deconstructing various genres to create its own sonic world, the seminal band hasn’t stopped changing shape and form throughout its existence (the only permanent member being its initiator, Crammed Discs boss Marc Hollander). Aksak Maboul now revolves around Hollander & Véronique Vincent.  After a long gap, they’ve written & recorded a brand-new double LP, 'Figures' (out in 2020).

1.
The project started in 1977, when producer Marc Moulin commissioned Hollander to write and record an album for his ephemeral label Kamikaze. MH was soon joined by his friend Vincent Kenis, and the pair proceeded to playfully fuse and deconstruct all kinds of genres to create their own musical world in the Onze danses pour combattre la migraine LP, which soon became a cult album, and seems retrospectively to have mapped out the way for the various directions which have been explored since then by the Crammed label. 

2. 
Released in early 1980, Aksak Maboul's 2nd album Un peu de l'âme des bandits was recorded with an extended line up featuring a.o. Fred Frith and Chris Cutler (of Henry Cow and Art Bears fame). More intense and experimental than Aksak's debut, "Bandits" contains complex written sections, free improv, and a wild variety of elements: drum machines, bassoons, sampling before sampling, Bulgarian voices, tango, Turkish, crypto-punk or pseudo-Varese music... During that period, the band became associated with the RIO (Rock in Opposition) movement, of which this album is still viewed as “a pinnacle” (All Music). The album reached #3 in the NME's top ten European albums of 1980 (alongside Yello, The Nits, Steve Reich and Faust!).

3. 
In '80, Aksak Maboul went through a little-documented avant-No Wave phase after enrolling three members of Brussels band Les Tueurs de la Lune de Miel, as well as vocalist Véronique Vincent. The new line-up then recorded the "Honeymoon Killers" album (1982) and continued performing under that name until 1986. During a long period, Aksak Maboul only made a few appearances under that name (one third of the first Made To Measure volume, original music for fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto's shows), but the spirit lived on, as both of the original protagonists playd a very active role in many Crammed productions, either together or separately.

4.
2014 saw the release of the mythical, 3rd Aksak Maboul album, which was announced ever since Crammed Discs' first catalogue, back in 81. It's the avant-electropop opus now known as "Ex-Futur Album", which was written, recorded and unfinished in 1980-83 by Marc Hollander and Honeymoon Killers vocalist Véronique Vincent in collaboration with Vincent Kenis.  The project had gradually evolved into a strange artefact, closely mingling Véronique's dreamy vocals and deceptively bubbly lyrics with Marc's musical ramblings. Electronic pop music with genre-wrecking leanings. The album was finally assembled/mixed/retrieved from demos & cassettes, was released in late 2014,  with a slight delay of... 30 years (under the name Véronique Vincent & Aksak Maboul), was enthusiastically received by audiences, medias & many young musicians, and was granted a new lease of life with the tribute album "16 Visions of Ex-Futur" (2016), comprising cover versions and remixes by the likes of Flavien Berger, Aquaserge, Laetitia Sadier, Forever Pavot, Burnt Friedmann, Lena Willikens, Hello Skinny,  Jaakko Eino Kalevi etc… as well as two "auto-covers" by the 2016 line-up of Aksak Maboul.

5. 
Meanwhile, the reception of Ex-Futur Album convinced Véronique Vincent & Marc Hollander to form a new live incarnation of Aksak Maboul. They started to play live shows in early 2015, for the first time since the '80s with a new Aksak Maboul line-up including three people who weren't even born when the songs were recorded: Sebastiaan Van den Branden & Christophe Claeys (both from Amatorski) and Faustine Hollander. From 2015 à 2017, they performed 35 shows in several countries around Europe, where they enchanted audiences with a powerful, rich and modern set, drawing freely from the latest five decades in the history of pop music.

They also performed a series of special "AKSAK MABOUL 'REVUE':" shows in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Cologne and London, on which they collaborated onstage with  Laetitia Sadier, Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Julien Gasc & Benjamin Glibert from Aquaserge.  This ephemeral 9-piece band played Aksak Maboul music as well as some of the guests' own material.

6.  
In 2020, Aksak Maboul returned with a brand-new opus entitled Figures, a double album containing 22 tracks, resulting from the flow of creative ideas which arose after such a long gap... Drawing again from the multiple sources which inspire the band (from electronic music and pop to experimentation, jazz, minimalism, contemporary classical etc), Aksak Maboul reconfigures them with its inimitable style. The album was wholly written by Marc Hollander & Véronique Vincent, and features contributions by the band's current live line-up (Faustine Hollander, Lucien Fraipont & Erik Heestermans) and by guests including Fred Frith, Tuxedomoon's Steven Brown, three members of Aquaserge, some former Aksak cohorts and more. Songs from Figures were then reinterpreted by The Notwist, Car Stone, Cate Le Bon, Tolouse Low Trax, Vanishing Twin, Felix Kubin, Matias Aguayo, Kate NV, Hello Skinny (aka Tom Skinner) and more (on two limited-ed vinyl LPs entitled Redrawn Figures 1 & 2).

7.
Aksak Maboul's fifth album is Une Aventure de VV (Songspiel), a song cycle consisting of fifteen songs around an enigmatic tale written by Véronique Vincent, unfolding through monologues and dialogues spoken & sung by a series of characters. The album can be described as an experimental audio play, and features appearances by Alig Fodder, Audrey Ginestet & Benjamin Glibert from Aquaserge, Laetitia Sadier, Don The Tiger and Blaine L. Reininger, alongside Véronique, who plays the protagonist VV. The music was written & performed by Marc Hollander, with contributions from the members of the band's current live line-up, Faustine Hollander, Lucien Fraipont & Erik Heestermans.

Outro:

As summed up in 2017 by writer Mikey IQ Jones, “the roots of Aksak Maboul's appeal and longevity lie within the collective's shapeshifting lineup and their chameleonic aesthetic abilities; the group's ever-mutating sound is akin to a sonic möbius strip, always digesting and recontextualizing itself, where seams and edges show but continually fold in upon themselves as the madness evolves. The best part? That evolution hasn't yet ceased.”

Reissues:

Onze danses pour combattre la migraine was reissued on vinyl in 2015, in its original, 1977 artwork, with extensive, revised liner notes and three downloadable bonus tracks. 

Un peu de l'âme des bandits was reissued on vinyl in January 2018, with a large booklet including documents & notes by all participants, as we as a bonus album (CD & digital) containing 78 minutes of unreleased live & demo recordings by 17 of the bands successive members and collaborators. 

Aksak Maboul in the press:   

The Belgian experimental group Aksak Maboul were - and are - out there on their own… revelatory" (The Quietus, UK)     

On the reissue of Onze danses pour combattre la migraine:

A significant record… way ahead of its time (Gilles Peterson)

A truly extraordinary thing, prescient yet off-piste (The Arts Desk, UK)

One of the most beguiling albums released during the post-punk era… bafflingly timeless (FACT, UK)

A stew of imaginary world music, rock, electronics and proto-techno (MOJO, UK)    

On the reissue of Un peu de l’âme des bandits:

As if Pere Ubu got together with Faust to cover Igor Stravinsky (Byte FM, DE)

Eclectic, inventive, inquisitively playful and surreal… simply indispensable (The Wire, UK)

Jazz meets avant-classical, while brittle electronics spray delirious nonsense into the air (Uncut, UK)

The Belgian art-rockers [in] a knotty experiment that freely slams together the sounds of contemporary classical music and free jazz (Pitchfork, USA)      

On Ex-Futur Album:

A floating pop dream (The Quietus, UK)   

An electropop miracle... Too avant-garde at the time, perfect for today (les Inrockuptibles, FR)

Adorably unfinished and delightfully imperfect (Vogue, DE)

So ahead of the curve it sounds like it was recorded yesterday (The Crack, UK).  

On recent live shows:

A miracle: the resurrected Aksak Maboul unfolds a brand of synthetic, fleshy pop, with fat, enchanting grooves, sparkling melodies and lyrics. Between echoes of Brigitte Fontaine circa 'Comme à la radio' and strains of Tom Tom Club. (Télérama, FR)   

The pop immediacy of the songs gets enriched by experimental tangents, between electronic music, krautrock and jazz, which raise the bar to unexpected heights (Le Soir, BE)   

On the Figures album 

The long-running Belgian avant-garde band explore complicated gender dynamics on their ambitious new double album. (Pitchfork, US).  

Belgian avant-rockers Aksak Maboul bring their stylized shapeshifting to the 21st century... uniting a fascinating beam of novel sounds in thought-provoking ways (Pop Matters, US)  

Véronique Vincent’s lyrics are among the finest you’ll encounter anywhere, wry, allusive, entertaining and sophisticated, [with] conceptual subtelties and verbal scenarios which are unequivocally her own. Hollander’s inventive arrangements and programming make Aksak Maboul’s music so exhilarating and durable. Mischievous and purposefully eclectic… wide-ranging appeal… (The Wire, UK)   

First album in four decades from the Belgian experimental pop pioneers, making up for lost time with 75 minutes of scampering, genre-agnostic fun… Aksak’s questing spirit is very much intact… heralds a new start (Uncut, UK)   

Aksak Maboul return with what could be their finest work, and the best album of 2020 to date. Totally pop, yet psychedelic… the pop and avant elements perfectly complement one another... You can also dance to it (The Quietus, UK)   

A masterful lesson in contemporary pop. Across 22 tracks, Figures jumps from the craziest experimentations to irresistible pop songs, with joyful ease (Les Inrockuptibles, FR)  

The rebirth of a band which escapes all categories… a unique weaving of pop and mischievous, poetic songs (Le Monde, FR)  

Inspiring and exhaling more music and more poetic figures in 22 tracks than most people do in 22 albums - if not 22 lives. Figures is a very free, dense and sophisticated agglomerate, as playful, exploratory and facetious as ever (Libération, FR)

Get/stream Aksak Maboul releases HERE

 
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