Renard Tortue on Aura le Temps

Georges Brassens was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He wrote and sang, with his guitar, more than a hundred of his poems, as well as texts from many others such as Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, or Louis Aragon. In 1967, he received the Grand Prix de Poésie of the Académie française. Between 1952 and 1976, he recorded fourteen albums that include several popular French songs such as Les copains d'abord, Chanson pour l'Auvergnat, La mauvaise réputation, and Mourir pour des idées. Most of his texts are black humour-tinged and often anarchist-minded.

A smart move this on the part of Nemo. La Machine A Remonter Le Temps is a DVD/2Cd package that combines a DVD of a great live show with two Cd's of material spanning their previous six studio albums. As if the DVD alone isn't enough incentive for the already converted to shell out for this, much of the material that makes up the compilation Cd's has been remixed, remastered and even re-recorded in the case of some of the earlier songs. As an added bonus there are also two new unreleased tracks…

MAGMA have influenced quite a number of bands since the 70's. However, if most zeuhl artists tend to focus on this band's martial rhythms and dark moods, MUSIQUE NOISE concentrated on their lighter side. They took shape in 1986 with some ex-ESKATON and AUTOPSIE members, namely two keyboards players, a bassist and a drummer; then came a sax player, a trumpeter and two classically trained female singers…

Michel Corrette was a French organist and composer with a long and prolific career. The two works here were composed 47 years apart, and the earlier Nouveau Livre de Noëls is not even an especially early work of this little-known composer. Despite the time difference, they don't differ sharply in style. The Messe pour le temps de Noël, composed in 1788, shows few traces of Classical-period opera or even of the late Baroque Italian vocal style, even though Corrette wrote a pedagogical work instructing his readers in the fine points of Italian music.

For the 1977 Je Suis le Temps, Capitol sent the group to London to record with Eddie Offord, the engineer responsible for Yes and ELP's classic albums. For a moment, Morse Code believed they had a chance to break out on the international market, what they weren't counting on was prog rock's brutal crash in the late '70s. Dropped by its record company, the group disbanded. It re-formed in 1983 with the same lineup for a tentative comeback as an intelligent pop group with the LP Code Breaker, but this attempt failed rather miserably. In the early '90s, Capitol issued a CD compilation of the three French albums, allowing a new generation of Quebecers to discover a national prog treasure. Capitalizing on the good sales of the CD, the group recorded a new album, 1995's D'Un Autre Monde, and scored a minor campus radio hit with "Le Fils du Grand Dragon," but plans to put a tour together failed and Morse Code disappeared once again.