South Of No North

South Of No North was born in 2003, it was instigated by Cédric Stevens whose musical evolution led him to the need to form an ensemble in order to develop more further his musical language who became increasingly influenced by the free-jazz dialogue. The first incarnation of the band was called 'Drifting Bears Collective', the three founding members are Jeanri Rigo (Guitar), David Meunier (Drums) & Cédric (Prepared Guitar, Analogue Modular System & Keys). They quickly began to compose a bunch of tracks that they rapidly played live and a creative process was set in motion, the goal being the making of a full-length. Loren Delforge (Bass) joined the band at the end of the recording sessions of the album called "South of no North" that was released in 2007 in co-production by 'Le Bonheur Media' & Cédric's own structure 'Subliminal Toy Crash'. This album was reviewed in numerous paper or online magazines such as 'The Wire' (#282 August 2007, reviewed by Keith Moliné), 'Foxy Digitalis', 'RifRaf' (the one & only Belgian pop/rock mag) etc... with much critical acclaim. For the second LP the band wanted to take a totally different approach of composition & recording as well as extending their sound palette with the addition of a fifth player: Laurent Baudoux (Farfisa & other Keyboards), whose work, mainly released on the Sonig imprint, had always been an inspiration for the avant-garde belgian scene. The new line-up gave the band a much stronger cohesion and assurance, the engineering skills of Loren allowed the sound of the new recordings to be a lot more professional without erasing the specificity of it; two separate sessions of a couple of days each were organized during which ideas were discussed and then rapidly sonically translated in various improvisations. After letting a few weeks pass to allow the band the necessary distance to have an objective listening to the result, it was obvious that some of those recordings were incredibly well structured and full of pure magical inspiration with an underlying instinctive organic logic and dialogue; it was quite a shock to feel how complete some of those improvs were, so they decided to release the two most significant pieces without editing or overdubbing those at all, the idea being to let the listener live those improvs as they were played. The result is "Octopussies Liquor Store" who already received high praised in the columns of the September 2011 issue of 'RifRaf'. As Laurent Baudoux decided to become a full time member and as their 'Drifting Bears Collective' moniker became to sound annoying to their ears due mainly to the extensive use of the word "Bear" in so many new pop/rock bands (between 2003 and today, the number of bands including "bear" in their name went from 3 to something like 30, being without a doubt the most used word in the indie band monikers during this last decade), they opted for a new name and naturally used their first album title 'South Of No North', obviously to make a connection between the two albums, but more importantly because they felt that this new name defines them even more better than the original one.