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Album Info
Release Date: 2022-05-01Label: Smeerlappen
Normally the band members of Ellende (friends for over thirty years) would get together in their Cape Town studio (The Plantation MkII) and during a relatively a short period of time intensively work on something that could be released as an album. A theme would be chosen out of the repertoire of work specifically created by Wim Bontjes (a dearly missed founding member of Ellende). Due to the Covid outbreak this release, like the previous release Unintentional Consequences, was recorded by each individual member of Ellende in their own respective home studios in either Cape Town, London and Tokyo.Nostalgia, the Greek word for pain from an old wound, can be a drug for these old men of Ellende. Nostalgia, the yearning for a moment in a distant past is what this release is about. For this album Ellende tried to conjure a few weeks at the French Riviera in 1974 using a methodology discussed with WB one night at the Plantation (MkI, the original poolhouse). We had read in a (probably) photocopied version of Re/Search magazine about William S. Burroughs’ time travelling ideas. It describes how Burroughs would use pictures, notes, news articles and other visuals to re-create a very specific moment in time. At the Plantation that night, being a bit drunk, we started to experiment for a few days into what became the basis for a few albums, some released, some still open to interpretation.
Conceptually, St Tropez, is (like many of Ellende’s previous releases) about a specific moment in the past: a holiday, to the south of France. It evokes, (or tries to conjure) the feeling of a teenage boy travelling with his mother and her German boyfriend to the area of the south of France, specifically, St Tropez in 1974.