Stranded Horse – Grand Rodeo (LP, Ici D’ailleurs)

Limited double vinyl with 4 bonus tracks! Stranded Horse is a well-travelled French band centered around composer, songwriter and instrument maker Yann Tambour. Tabour has a penchant for unusual musical marriages that take him to the frontiers of Creole music, the syncretism of which he reveres, or to those unlikely reinterpretations of Western music from the four corners of the world, either picked up on the go or through re-releases from pioneers such as Discovered Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers or Awesome Tapes from Africa. When asked about the album’s influences, Yann Tabour names Franco’s Tout Puissant Ok Jazz, Linda Perhac’s or Tim Buckley’s contemplative wanderings, the powerful kora of the great Malian masters that bounced off the great Mississippi bluesers, or the time when Senegal was afro -became Cuban, with Super Diamono, with the Star Band de Dakar, with Idrissa Diop, the Ivorian Logobi, Southeast Asia, Iran or the strange psych pop of Turkey, the voodoo of Haiti or the island’s Kabar trance and dance reunion. But Stranded Horse doesn’t forget to draw on the independent(pop) spirit, which is also very present. So nothing stops 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 the belief in chance encounters, the belief that renewal is born out of chaos. They strive to sidestep conventions and labels, merging unexpected genres, paths and the familiar in an album of erratic wandering. The singles “Towards a Waning Glow” and “Rumba Du Trepas/Stroke Me With A Deadly Arrow” are the first examples that merge dance and trance with irresistible charm.