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Sample Track 1:
"La Marseillaise en creole" from Cinéma el Mundo
Sample Track 2:
"Tout est fragile" from Cinéma el Mundo
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Album Review

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<p> Lo’Jo Celebrates 30 Years of Music From the Margins With “Cinéma El Mundo” Posted by mundovibe on Sunday, September 9, 2012 · Leave a Comment </p>

<p>It’s believed that most creative inspiration comes not from within a culture but from its margins, the place where ideas collide. Much like the boiling lava that brings subterranean nutrients to the surface at the juncture of colliding plates, the music that comes from these edges is often formed by the pressure of cultures smashing into one another. Denis Péan’s band Lo’Jo was born on the margins, in and around Angers, the city that slumbers securely in a crook formed by the Maine and Loire rivers in the west of France. They have stayed on the edges ever since, musically, geographically, philosophically. Péan has molded Lo’Jo from a myriad of influences, travels and dreams. “To live on the margins is just a way of remaining true to one self,” Péan says. “There was a time when it seemed as if it was very hard to exist far from Paris. Right now it only seems like an immense advantage.” Their fecund province, with its gentle skies and rolling hills, its marching vineyards and wide lazy rivers is no prison for vegetative attitudes and small-mindedness.</p>

<p>2012 is Lo’Jo’s thirtieth year of existence, and Cinéma El Mundo is their tenth album. Cinéma el Mundo is a world full of image, color, sound, and story–and a striking group of musical guests, from British rock maverick Robert Wyatt to desert blues guitar master Ibrahim Ag Alhabib (Tinariwen) to avant-global cellist Vincent Segal (Chamber Music). Anjou has bred big dreams in Lo’Jo, dreams that have transported these musical adventurers to every point of the compass, and back. Their trunk full of sounds and instruments is thickly plastered with the labels of their travels; The southern Sahara, where they helped to organize the very first Festival in the Desert in 2001, and subsequently launch the international career of the Touareg poet-guitarists Tinariwen; Tbilisi and the Caucasus, where their Babel Caucase caravan stopped over en route to Chechnya; The Reunion Islands in the southern Indian Ocean, just one of Lo’Jo’s many homes away from home.</p>

<p>From all these horizons, Lo’Jo bring sounds, instruments, experiences and friends back to the blank canvas of their native land. “I come from a region where there is no specific musical culture, no folklore,” Péan says. “So I make fire out of every kind of wood.” The band’s musical DNA is so complex and intertwined that your only reward for trying to sequence it will only be frustration and sterile science. What matters is the living breathing whole. To listen to one of their albums is to travel with the heart open, always fresh to bitter-sweet wonders, not possessing but praising, savouring everything along the way.</p>

<p>The place where Lo’Jo’s strange and other-worldly musical flora is nurtured and grown is a huge rambling former farm house sitting between two noisy expressways, surrounded by fields not far from Angers. It’s called ‘La Fontaine du Mont’ (‘The Fountain on the Mount’). There, outside the kitchen door, under a canopy of sunlit leaves, the table awaits guests from the occident, the orient and all points in between. “It’s a cosmopolitan house,” Péan says without a boast, “made in the image of a dream or a utopia just out of reach. The traveller finds his place of rest, food always on the table, with an organisation based on an ecological perspective, a communal life. It’s a place on which encounters pivot. It’s an open book for children.”</p>

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<p>It’s also where Cinéma el Mundo was captured in its entirety and where, to use one of Péan choicest phrases, “sounds were harvested in their moment of grace,” a process deftly facilitated by producer Jean Lamoot. Brought up in Africa, Lamoot is a name to conjure with in his native France, a man who has mid-wifed albums by a jaw-dropping array of talent from Noir Désir to Alain Bashung, Salif Keita, Nneka, Souad Massi, ONB, Mano Negra and Vanessa Paradis. A deep knowledge of African music, rock and chanson made him an ideal choice of producer for Lo’Jo and able to capture the delicate colours, the fragile shapes and shy intricacies of their music. “He’s very humble, fragile even,” explains Péan, “but totally determined if he sense the moment is right.”</p>

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<p>There at La Fontaine du Mont, in a barn turned studio and musical laboratory attached to the main house, the scenes of Cinéma el Mundo took shape. Collaborators came and went, all welcomed and seduced by atmosphere of Lo’Jo’s home base. Menwar, Gan Guo, Andra Kouyate, Vincent Segal, Stephane Coutable, Ibrahim and Eyadou from Tinariwen, Niaz Diasamidze, Robert Wyatt. Violinist Richard Bourreau was given the freedom of arranging and plotting all that chaotic inspiration. Bassist and double bassist Kham Meslien and drummer Baptiste Brondy nail down polyglot rhythms only to wrench them free again. The Nid El Mourid sisters, Yamina and Nadia, adding vocals. And over the music, Péan painted his words which, to him, are like “the fossils of signs and symbols preserved in the amber of a song.”</p>

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