STRANDED HORSE
GRAND RODEO (BLACK VINYL) (ICI D'AILLEURS)
Stranded Horse is a French touring machine centered around composer, songwriter and instrument maker Yann Tambour.
Tabour is fond of unusual stylistic marriages, leading him to the confines of creole music whose syncretism he reveres, or those improbable revisitations of western music from the four corners of the world that he either gleaned on the road, or discovered through re-releases by pioneers such as Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers or Awesome Tapes from Africa to name a few.
When asked about the album's influences, Yann Tabour mentions Franco's Tout Puissant Ok Jazz, Linda Perhacs or Tim Buckley's contemplative wanderings, the mighty kora of the great Malian masters which bounced off the great Mississipi bluesmen or that time when Senegal became Afro-Cuban, with Super Diamono, with Star Band de Dakar, with Idrissa Diop, Ivoirian logobi, South-East Asia, Iran or Turkey's strange psych pop, Haïti's Voodoo or Reunion island's Kabar transe and dance.
But Stranded Horse doesn't forget to draw on the indie heritage that is very much present too e.g.
showing in terms of repertoire, there is nothing to stop the band from covering Joy Division, The Smiths or even Jackson C.
Frank and the moving "My Name is Carnival ". Behind the band Stranded Horse lies a faith in chance encounters, a belief that renewal is born out of chaos.
They strive to skirt conventions and labels and wed together unexpected genres, rules and habits in an album of erratic wanderings.
Singles "Towards a Waning Glow" and "Rumba Du Trépas/Stroke Me With A Deadly Arrow" are the first outings, which propose dance and trance to irresistible charms.