LATEST NEWS: AKSAK MABOUL 'REVUE'      

To celebrate the release of the "16 Visions of Ex-Futur" tribute album, Véronique Vincent & Aksak Maboul played a series of special shows in Oct/Nov 2016, entitled Aksak Maboul ‘Revue’, for which they were joined onstage by some of the album’s contributors, including Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Laetitia Sadier and Aquaserge. This ephemeral 9-piece band performed Aksak Maboul music as well as some of the guests' own material. 
 
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Ex-Futur Album is...

A floating pop dream (The Quietus, UK) 
Adorably unfinished and delightfully imperfect (Vogue, DE)
Too avant-garde at the time, perfect for today (Les Inrockuptibles, FR) 
So ahead of the curve (The Crack, UK)
Brilliant, bouncy, astonishingly modern (Libération, FR)
Hijacking pop codes… effervescent… (Focus/Le Vif, BE)

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At the end of 2014, Crammed Discs founder Marc Hollander and Honeymoon Killers vocalist Véronique Vincent finally released Ex-Futur Album, their trailblazing avant-pop album recorded and unfinished in… 1980-83!

This is a record which was never completed at the time. What was originally intended to become the third album by Aksak Maboul (the seminal band formed by Marc Hollander) had gradually evolved into a strange artefact, closely mingling (iconic Honeymoon Killers chanteuse) Véronique Vincent's dreamy vocals and deceptively bubbly lyrics with Hollander's musical ramblings. Electronic pop music with genre-wrecking leanings. But the project (too pop to be experimental? too quirky for early '80s pop?) was dropped at some point, and life went on.

When they were 'rediscovered' three decades later, it seemed obvious that the songs had aged delightfully well, and that they probably make a lot more sense now than they did then… So here's that Ex-Future Album, collated from demos and rough mixes (some of them on cassette tapes), and brought to you in its original glorious unfinished state, with a slight delay of 30 years. 

Recorded by M.Hollander & V.Vincent in collaboration with (future Congotronics producer) Vincent Kenis, the album contains 10 tracks, plus 6 bonuses (including wild live versions of some songs), three of which only come with the download code included in the CD and vinyl LP versions.

Following the warm reactions to "Ex-Futur Album", Véronique Vincent and Marc Hollander formed a new Aksak Maboul line-up in order to take to the stage for the first time since the mid-80s, with musicians who weren't even born when the songs were recorded: Sebastiaan Van den Branden (from Amatorski) or Lucien Fraipont (Robbing Millions), Faustine Hollander and Erik Heestermans. They've played around 30 shows in 2015/2016, around France, Germany, the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland, enchanting audiences with a powerful, rich and modern set, drawing freely from the latest five decades in the history of pop music.

In the autumn of 2016 came 16 Visions of Ex-Futur, a full album containing reinterpretations (covers and reworks) created by Jaakko Eino Kalevi, Aquaserge, Laetitia Sadier, Forever Pavot, Flavien Berger, Nite Jewel, Bullion, Burnt Friedman, Hello Skinny, Marc Collin, Bérangère Maximin, Lena Willikens etc, as well as two "self-covers" recorded by the new line-up of Aksak Maboul (with guest apperances by the guitarists from Aquaserge and Kasai Allstars).

To celebrate the release, Véronique Vincent & Aksak Maboul performed a string of exclusive shows in Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt, Cologne and London, featuring Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab, UK), Jaakko Eino Kalevi (Domino Recs, FI) and Aquaserge (FR). On these special concerts (dubbed AKSAK MABOUL 'REVUE'), this ephemeral 9-piece band played Aksak Maboul music as well as some of the guests' own material.

Mini-biogs

Véronique Vincent was the female lead singer with Brussels band The Honeymoon Killers, which created quite a sensation in the early '80s, and managed the rare feat of becoming the darling of the music press in the UK (Véronique remains one of the only francophone vocalists to have appeared on the cover of the NME, photographed by Anton Corbijn, incidentally), whilst appearing on mainstream pop shows on French TV.
 
Marc Hollander founded Aksak Maboul and the Crammed Discs label, which he runs and A&Rs to this day (and which has released around 350 albums since 1981).

Vincent Kenis was part of Aksak Maboul and The Honeymoon Killers. He's a record producer (Congotronics, Taraf de Haïdouks, Konono No.1, Staff Benda Bilili, Kasai Allstars & many more).

Aksak Maboul released two albums: Onze danses pour combattre la migraine (1977), which leapfrogged over style & genre boundaries and can be viewed as a manifesto for the Crammed aesthetics, and the more avantgarde Un peu de l'âme des bandits (1980), often associated with the RIO movement. Ex-Futur Album fearlessly explores the pop end of Aksak Maboul's broad musical spectrum