Crammed Discs founder Marc Hollander and Honeymoon Killers vocalist Véronique Vincent finally release their trailblazing avant-pop album, recorded and unfinished in… 1980-83! 

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LATEST NEWS: LIVE SHOWS!

After the warm reactions to "Ex-Futur Album", Véronique Vincent and Marc Hollander have started to play live shows, for the first time since the 80s, with a new Aksak Maboul line-up including musicians who weren't even born when the songs were recorded: Sebastiaan van Den Branden (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, to celebrate the release of 16 Visions of Ex-Futur,  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.
 
TOUR DATES : HERE
 
LIVE VIDEOS here
and here
 

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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ABOUT EX-FUTUR ALBUM

This record was never completed. 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.

This most unusual story is far from being the only point of interest of Ex-Futur Album: the songs overflow with memorable melodies, with playful trademark Aksak Maboul instrumental moments and eventful arrangements which all give the album a retrofuturistic, almost timeless aspect, often predating certain hybrid musical trends which may or may not have emerged later on (think pop meets proto-techno, with African, Middle-Eastern, dub, jazz & cinematic French flavours…)

Recorded by M.Hollander & V.Vincent in collaboration with (Aksak Maboul member and Congotronics producer) Vincent Kenis, the album contains 10 tracks, plus 6 bonuses (including wild live versions of some songs), three of which will only come with the download code included in the CD and vinyl LP versions. The first single is Chez les Aborigènes (and its visionary lyrical stabs at the Western world’s exploitative attitude towards world music… this is 1981, remember…). It comes with a new remix by great electronic music duet EΔSY & C.O.U., stalwarts of the Nordic skweee scene (they’re the main –and sole- exponents of the sub-genre called Oriental Skweee…).

CREDITS
 
All songs written between 1980 and 1983 by Véronique Vincent & Marc Hollander, except My Kind of Doll (J.Pearce/V.Vincent).
 
Performed & recorded in 1982/83 by Véronique Vincent (vocals), Marc Hollander (keyboards, woodwind, programming, arrangements, production, etc.) and Vincent Kenis (guitars, bass, engineering, coproduction etc.), plus guests including the other half of The Honeymoon Killers, Alig Fodder, Tuxedomoon’s Blaine Reininger and more. 

Album assembled in 2014 by Marc Hollander, in collaboration with Gregory Bauchau.
 

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 darlings 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