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NOUS NON PLUS Nous Non Plus (pronounced 'new non ploo') is a French expression meaning "we neither," and/or "neither do we." It's also a band from New York City that sings mostly in French. The band's lead singer, Céline Dijon, is of Swiss-German/Chinese descent and grew up in Paris. The rest of them hail from various American cities. Most of the band met in NYC in the late 1990's and played for several years as part of the faux-French band Les Sans Culottes. In 2005, hoping to broaden their musical horizons, several of the members of Les Sans Culottes led a coup d'etat--a French tradition, after all. What followed was a truly bizarre couple of days spent in a Federal Court ( oui , Federal Court) with their former band mates, a lawyer, a blind judge, and a seeing-eye dog. Ultimately, it was settled: Nous Non Plus (literally translated to "us no more") was born. The coup was by all account a success. NNP's eponymous first album, which BUST magazine said: "overflows with confident savoir-faire" shot to the top ten of the CMJ charts and remained there for four weeks, peaking at #6. Songs from the album have been featured on Gossip Girls and in a Slovenian mobile phone commercial. The album was produced by Dan Crane, who is widely renowned in the strange world of competitive air guitar as Björn Türoque (co-star of Air Guitar Nation ). The band has a reputation for highly charged, sweat-inducing live shows, and has played in Paris, La Rochelle, London, Ljubljana (Slovenia), Canada, and across the US, occasionally touring with friends/label mates, Hello Stranger. Ménagerie (Aeronaut Records), their second album, also produced by Crane, was recorded over roughly a one-year period in studios and apartments in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Sacramento. The album features many friends who contributed to the sessions. These numerous collaborations led the band to title the album Ménagerie, meaning both a place where a variety of animals are kept and also "a varied mixture." Some of the musicians who worked on the album include LA-based composer/producer Michael Andrews ( Donnie Darko , Me and You and Everyone We Know , Inara George, Metric, Brendan Benson, etc.) and drummer Joachim Cooder ( Buena Vista Social Club , Hello Stranger, Juliette Commagère). On Ménagerie, as Crane writes in the album's liner notes, the band "wanted to dabble in their 60's French pop influences but also explore a new sonic landscape--mixing Moog synthesizers with string sections, horns with distorted guitars. They wished to imagine Gainsbourg and Bardot as indie rockers in 2008." The result: elegant, sexy, chic, bi-lingual, international grand guignol. For more information please contact: |
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