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CD
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QS 123CD
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"Mathias 'Lena' Delplanque's adventure began in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), in 1973. Rocked by the sounds of disco, reggae, Zouk and Congolese rumba, he began his music studies (organ and piano) at a very young age. In an atypical way, his musical horizons open up radically: Tom Waits, Art of Noise, Public Enemy, Pierre Henry, Edgar Varèse, Stockhausen...His first compositions were born out of tape recorders, using makeshift overdubbing. His stumbling upon Faukner's writings, especially Light of August gave birth to Lena, an alias inspired by the wanderings of one character, Lena Grove. The debut album Lane (Quatermass QS132) came out in 2002 and featured a mix of deep digital dub, primitive art (Tom Waits), and something close to the German minimal techno-dub sound. Now, in 2004: Floating Roots, Lena's second opus. Strikes of melodies inherited from Scientist and Augustus Pablo spurt over more impressive rhythms (binary or wobbly). With the help of Black Sifichi and Tablloyd, assuming the roles of MCs, Lena has transformed into a hi-fi sound system. At the crossroads of the various influences he has absorbed since his African childhood, Mathias Delplanque reinvents dub by crossing Lee Perry with Pole, giving life to a hybrid monster of sorts."
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LP
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QS 132LP
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CD
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QS 132CD
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"A great Neo-Dub/Electronica album from Lena is going to be released on the highly acclaimed Quatermass label. The ghost in Lena's machine has possessed it's share of echo chambers and mixing boards -- it was there long ago during the delirious sessions at The Ark, where Monsieur Lee 'Scratch' Perry would taunt it's spirit with a fearless and life-affirming Caribbean insouciance; it's been there when Adrian Sherwood would unexpectedly lunge toward the console and let fly with a slide of the volume fader; it's been a vital element in the steaming, bubbly, concotions found in the Mad Professor's laboratory, and more recently, it's inhabited the tiny slivers of runoff vinyl that regroup and metamporhasize into Pole's macro/microcosmic wallowings. Mathias Delplanque (aka Lena, Bidlo, DJ Jecho, Konstanz, Paul Shade) has given in to the more radical side of his Bidlo audio persona, emerging from some very haunted studio sessions as Lena -- a sort of idiot savant twin to Bidlo -- more intuitive and viscerally receptive to the dub ghost than Bidlo. The centre of Lena's universe of sound is a sonic black hole of infra-bass from which sound particles manage to frenetically escape, spiraling off into the cosmos in a frenetic rhythm, leaving trails of white light and buzzing noises which soar past the listener. On this new record Lena pairs thing down to the sweet minimalism and groovy melancholy of deep space, whilst remaining ever mindful of the universal constant that African music taps into. Suffice to say, it's complex, despite it's sonic immediacy."
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