EXTENDED PLAY
Cosmic Analogue Ensemble
Les Grandes Vacances
Lebanese music producer Charif Megarbane is an ultra-prolific shapeshifter who, over the last decade, has released 100 albums on his own independent label and digital platform Hisstology, recorded in various locations – Beirut, Nairobi, Paris, Lisbon – and appearing under various names, but mostly all his own work. In 2020 alone he uploaded 10 albums using this particular banner, each featuring a discrete instrumental style. “It’s a very spontaneous, playful, diary-like approach,” he says. “I trust my instinct because instinct is based on experience.” On Les Grandes Vacances (also available in physical formats through Jakarta Records) he offers up a neat distillation of the Ensemble’s aesthetic across 18 tracks beamed in from Paris in the ’60s, so we get John Barry-like melodies, baba-da vocals, squidgy Moogs, melodicas, fuzzy guitar, haunted strings, rusty dulcimers and tiny mono drums, geared to appeal to fans of obscure library albums and classic French movies that exist only in the mind.