Audiopile Review: After a few years laying low, long-running French drone-rockers France return to the physical format with a two-sided behemoth that captures their legendary live energy like never before. For the uninitiated, over the past two decades France has been piling up a totemic discography via dozens of labels and varying formats, channeling the psychedelic drone explorations laid out previously by the likes of Tony Conrad & Faust, early VU, Henry Flynt and Les Rallizes Denudes. The trio, made up of Jeremie Sauvage on electric bass, Mathieu Tilly on drums, and Yann Gourdon on amplified hurdy-gurdy, have become a notorious live act in the European underground, facing each other while playing amidst their audience à la Lightning Bolt and always playing an uninterrupted hour-long set, which their long trail of releases have attempted to capture to varying degrees of success. Recorded in an outdoor amphitheatre (France refuses to record in a studio) via an extensive set of expertly positioned mics, Destino Scifosi is the closest some of us will ever come to the sonic barrage that France has infamously unleashed on stage since inception. With the bass and drums following a rolling, hypnotic path, rarely breaking out of their nodding hypnosis, the hurdy gurdy does much of the heavy lifting here. Gourdon pushes the instrument into unrecognizable forms, undulating between a the sound of a blown-out air raid siren or a wailing set of drones that mimic the grinding of violins as if pushed through a set of overheated amps. It’s an utterly intoxicating skree, an ever-descending tonal bombardment that throbs with its own gravitational mass, which, admittedly, ain’t gonna be for everyone. If you’ve spent time absorbing the preceding legends mentioned above or contemporary acts like Sunn O))), Acid Mothers Temple or Hototogisu, France has got your number, pal. Can’t find any pressing stats for those that need it, but, if it’s like the previous Standard In-Fi pressing, it’s surely a limited run.

“France absolutely engage the body but the spectacle is one for your mind, especially as you start to wonder how much of what you’re hearing is really there.” The Quietus

The legendary hurdy-gurdy-powered kraut/psych/folk/drone band France have announced a new album ‘Destino Scifosi’ – a collaboration between French underground stalwarts Standard In-Fi and Belgian label a1000p.

Half a dozen years ago, sound maestro Mim from the a1000p label promised the band France a taste of his latest cuvée if they visited his sound studio after a show in Bruxelles. After listening to the wide array of in-house productions he proposed a future recording session to the band… who promptly declined any studio work. Both parties then coined the idea of bringing all the studio gear to a concert out in the woods somewhere… someday.

In 2022, Mim partnered with the newly formed Rituale Festival, asking them to set up a France concert close to where his vineyards were situated, namely an outdoor amphitheatre in a valley in St.Roman de Codières (south of France) This would enable him to set up his well-thought-through recording process for the night of the show. From carefully selected mics in front of amps to heavy sound systems deep in the valley, passing through ambient mics ranging at hundreds of meters from the stage, Mim’s astounding sound recording is only matched by his brilliant final mix of the sources.

The result, Destino Scifosi, is to date the only high quality sound recording the band has ever produced, by a long shot. Mind you, if you notch that volume button to where the drums sound like they’re in the room, you’ll have a pretty good idea what the band sounds like live. With the band heavily inebriated, suffocating heatwave weather, Gourdon playing in speedos, amps falling face flat on the ground a couple of times and mic stands pushed around by a rowdy audience, Destino Scifosi comes out as a somewhat miraculous document of that evening.