Venue magazine,"The People to Forget" album launch at the Cube Cinema, 24th feb 2006. By Kristen Gryewski.

Mid-way through his set celebrating the launch of his new album "The People to Forget", Frànçois began singing a song in time with film footage projected behind him of various people whistling, playing Casios in apartments and spueezing accordions. They were all humming and squeaking out the same simple melody. Then the other nine members who comprises the Atlas Mountains ensemblekicked onstage to back up Frànçois as those people, one by one, opened their front doors on the screen. Bristol musicians, friends,all saying "Welcome" and smiling as Frànçois and we , the audience, were asked to come in.

When Frànçois's english fails, his songs switch to french; when his hands and feet and words aren't enough, he borrows others. By asking and knocking, he enlisted the musical talents of some of Bristol's best - Rachael Dadd, Tom "Knowledge Of" Bugs, Rozi Plain, members of Crescent, Movietone and more- and rounded up the playful sonic joie de vivre of the city's music-maker community. And in this case it sounds like percussive toys, 'babas, clarinets, harp, melodica, and melodies that sneaks in, snake round, build and delight. To hear his songs once is to hum them for days.

The evening support began with Sleeping States, adventurous lo-fi recalling early 90s American indie, featuring a casually lovely voice and ingenious sampling trickery. They were followed by your favourite noisy neighbours, The Corey O's, whose shrill singer caused the mic to keep wilting away from his voice, and whose guitar sounded like the dogs got it, but whose energy is genuinely inspiring.

Encore over, and LPs sell out fast. Everyone's wants a souvenir of the sound of friend coming round to play.

Article from Norwich "the Entertainer", june 2006

Three years ago a mysterious agent arrived in `bristol from Saintes, France. He recorded a solo album then subsquently decided he needed more friends. He placed an ad in his window, called his mate in from France and the rest is musical history.
Released on own label "stitch-stitch" his albums recorded with his live band , The Atlas Mountains, defy all convention and description and have a sparkled interest among the independant music scene throughout England. Devoid of any labelling or categorising, Frànçois rebels against the current overflow of generic indie bands and takes little interest in the exclamation mark!
Prefering to base his music around atmospheres he declares to not be swayed by modern influences " I never go and see modern indie bands. Though I am influenced a lot by Camera Obscura". Perhaps the reason why Frànçois's music is so refreshing is that it is without the British culture context which is flooding the somewjat stale indie scene at the moment. "We prefer to write about a way of life or the feelings around the music " he explains, "We write in french and english to properly convey what we want to say".
There are not enough groups around at the moment who write in multi languages or have recorder as a core instrument. And even even if there were, none of them could detract from Frànçois and the Atlas Mountains' unique hidden-treasure magic.

Gig review in Venue magazine, 23 june 2006

As usual the roster is drawn from the marginalia of the Great Book of Pop, but like an ornate medieval gospel, the swirl and embellishments on display are more fascinating than the main text. Take expat francophone Frànçois, for instance, who appeared to have assembled a multi-instrumental troupe on the sole of purity of heart, which may or may not explain the impossibly fresh-faced appearance of some band members. What it does explain is an attachment to melody pared back to its bare essentials and then anointed lovingly with touches of saxophone, trombone, organ and melodica. Sure, it makes Belle and Sebastian sound like Cradle of Filth, but there are hints of melancholy in Frànçois's vocals and lyrics which save it from suspicion of contrived unworldliness.

Review of 'The people to forget' in The Fly, april 2006, by t.berry.

"If you've been feeling a little jaded with music lately, fed up with its ordinariness, its souless polish, then try this. Filled with laughter, this beautifully packaged LP has an organic and real feel to it, with sweat songs and chirpy beats that caresses away sadness as softly as rain washes away litter. This is an album of diamonds that may make music sparkle for you again"

Gallic musician and artist Frànçois swaps life in La Rochelle for like-minded musos in Bristol. John Stevens finds out why.

Easily debunked clichés, part one: ‘A change is as good as a rest’. No it’s not. It’s better. Just ask Frànçois. Feeling stifled by life in his native La
Rochelle on the western coast of France, September 2003 saw the young musician and artist switching sides of the channel, the riverbound pastures of Bristol his destination. His move, it seems, could scarcely have been wiser. ‘I wanted to come here because I knew it had a good reputation for musical creativity. I used to listen to bands like Crescent (lesser-spotted jazz-rock troupe, best band in Bristol?) and Minotaur Shock in France’. Truly, arrivals don’t get much more auspicious than this: almost immediately Frànçois struck a rapport with one of those previously admired westcountry outfits. ‘Within three weeks I was playing trumpet on tour with Crescent. It was magical. I also met the people from the Here Shop (Stokes Croft’s amiable epicentre of DIY art and craft), people like Aaron from Stitch Stitch and Michal Local Kid, who gave me my first opportunities to play my solo stuff live. What was liberating was that these people were making very simple, honest music that wasn’t trying to sound like anything else. I could get truthful feedback on the songs I was writing, even if it wasn’t always perfect, and it was all purely or fun. In France it’s a bit less natural, more about copying the style of others’.

Not that our beloved Brizzle is without its share of style-apers, of course, but in Frànçois’ case he appears to have been rolling with very much the right crowd from the off. Such was the inspirational boon of discovering this ready-established community of empathetic souls (musically, philosophically, even a shared passion for tea and cake) that Frànçois’ first album proper, ‘Les Anciennes Falaises’ (‘The Old Cliffs’) was swiftly dispatched within nine months of his UK tenure. Released by Stitch Stitch, it’s a gracefully skewed, tumbledown treasure of a pop record, one clearly informed by the scruffy charm of his new surroundings. ‘Being in Bristol changed a lot of things. It was good to totally abandon the French language when I got to England, and to therefore concentrate more on sounds as I developed my English vocabulary. My tools were very stripped down: Sam from Movietone lent me his 4-track machine, which was all I really had to record on. I wanted to feel limited so I could adapt my sound to the means I had’. Thus finding him in the noble company of oft-crowned local ‘bedroom polymaths’ such as War Against Sleep, SJ Esau and (at least until recently) Gravenhurst, perhaps without quite yet scaling such heights of budget-free aplomb.

Wilfully flawed yet rounded, naïve yet strangely learned, steeped in playful 60s French pop melodicism yet ululating with a grubby analogue sound born of his love for shitty old keyboards and car boot cast-offs, ‘Les Anciennes Falaises’ is a curious, contradictory thing indeed;
a scrapheap in bloom.

Bristol’s wide-knit musical community has been swift to recognize its potential, with the last Frànçois live outing seeing scores of local collaborators (including Tom ‘Knowledge Of’ Bugs and Rachael Dadd) augmenting his songs via arrangements of guitar, brass, glockenspiel, clarinet and harp. Is this the grand band plan rolling into action, an early incarnation of the piece de resistance? ‘At the
moment it’s just happening naturally. I’ve got to the point where I’m a little bored of playing music alone, so it’s really satisfying to find people who are willing to follow my musical direction and help me to develop it. My next album will have a fuller sound, I think, to convey a sense of the energy of the music when played live’.

Frànçois’ live form is dictated, he suggests, by whether he is able to utilise his endearing self-drawn projections, another facet of his admirable artistic repertoire that is also manifest in the lovingly assembled handmade packaging of ‘Les Anciennes Falaises’ as well as his illustrated diaries. ‘Sometimes I don’t quite feel confident enough about what I’m doing with my music, so I need to keep doing something else to balance out all the time I spend on it. I combined the two naturally when I had the idea to do these animations. I think having it running when I play live makes things richer: it’s more like telling a story’. His broader ruminations on playing live, meanwhile, throw up some interesting ideas regarding the performance persona, or, as Frànçois would have it, how much one is prepared to play ‘the game’. ‘RLF (sadly departed trombone-wielding Bristol stalwart) told me once that when he puts on his suit and gets on stage he adopts an entirely different persona. You have to play with that I think, to make an effort for the audience. I openly play up to the role of ‘Kid Frànçois’. It’s not a deliberate thing but I’m aware of it…you know, the French kid playing his Casio keyboards, wearing his yellow cardigan…you have to be careful not to take it too seriously. It’s a game’.

Glasgow Metro (07/01/05)
by Nadine Mcbay

If a cd decorated with spidery sketches of exploding planes, rain clouds and sullen girls even fimd its way into your possesion, you would be advised to take note- the sender is either some sort of crank or a possible genius. If that disc is Les Anciennes Falaises (The Old Cliffs) by French bedroom-pop alchemist Frànçois (pictured), listen immediatly.
"You know La Rochelle from your school textbooks and probably nothing else," says musician and part-time French teacher Frànçois. "That's why I came to Bristol."
Recorded at home using a vast assortment of instruments procured from car boot sales, Les Anciennes Falaise was realeased last september by Stitch-Stitch, the Bristol imprint which also ditributes copies of Frànçois's monthly illustrated journals, some of which will be available at the gigs.
Like handwriting by Canadian boy-wonder Khonnor, in "Les Anciennes Falaises" Frànçois creates his own intensely personal and fragile world. It sounds as beautiful as Françoise Hardy messing about in the bathroom with a box full of wonky child's toys.
Frànçois has already made bonds in Glasgow. Les Anciennes Falaises features a track dedicated to the singer with local legends The Pastels and another is entitled Byres Road. "It's about when I met this girl in Byres Road and my English was so bad I couldn't express myself to her", he explains. "I might be better this time."

.Venue Magazine (Bath & Bristol),15/01/05.
Extract from Live review: The Girls/Desdemonia/Frànçois by Tamar Newton

January isn't the best month to see a band. You're fat, cold, skint and trying to cut down on fags/pints/pasties. Frànçois however, know we feel like this and warms us up in a big snuggly comfort blanket of quirky indie pop. A two-piece, comprising a french?/bristolian singer and a friend, it's cute, lovely, yet non-twee. Meandering lyrics revolve around non-unpleasant things to the accompaniment of a Casio keyboard set to 'Rave' and possibly 'Love'.

Gig review published in the Stool Pigeon, nov 2004.  by Theo Berry

"Francois & the Atlas Mountain Ensemble, Rachael Dadd, SJ Esau, Jar/The Folkhouse Bristol

This gig was Bristol to a tea: shining solo talents and collective brilliance, beginning serial collaborators Jar, a captivating husky voiced piano virtuoso, and SJ Esau playing solo. For a man renowned for his live looping and sumptuous, glitchy, sound-scapes constructed before your ears, SJ Esau does a damn fine job of entertaining us with just his acoustic guitar, easily capturing the room's attention with the ringing hammers of his strums. When you've lyrics that tickle the wit like the line "I swapped belligerence for a nervous tick, and now I've turned, into a worthless prick" your set will not want for highlights. His rhythm and cadence is spot on; a new song, a wry pastiche of melodic blues rock, brings as much warm applause as the old stock. His preposterously elaborate verbosity climaxes on "new indie pop song" I am a human, annoyed before descending to childish simplicity on cat track : "the cat, sat on the mat, he has no balls..." confirming that this one man band doesn't need to wheel out the dictionary to dazzle us, when he can simply can change our view, if only momentarily, for a second or two, with the ordinary. A precious talent, but this isn't a precious scene. If you are prepared to give yourself, experiment and involve, then Bristol's audience will treasure you and take you and keep you close and maybe even, as occurred later, join you.

For the meantime though, they were more than content to listen to Winchester expat Rachael Dadd, another precious, not to mention precocious, talent. In amongst her set of perfect pop songs she plays Sweetest in the Land , a song she more usually performs as part of Whalebone Polly, who have Glastonbury, Shambala and Truck Festival appearances ahead of them. Rachael has her own plans; a September tour and her own album, out on Cleaner Records. Hopefully this LP will be filled with the same kind of magical, bewitching tunes as Føroyar , with vocal hooks that send thrilling shivers sprinting across your nerve endings and sink you into those hot joyful flushes that only come with the experience of something quite unique. She's a busy girl, so as Francois and the Atlas Mountain Ensemble rearranged the room Rachael might have been forgiven for heading to the bar. "...er, Rachael..."
"Oh, sorry! Do I play on this?"
"Yes, you play the coconuts."

She also contributed clarinet, glockenspiel and melodeon to this Bristol super group featuring Movietone, Headfall, Knowledge of Bugs and War Against Sleep members playing piano, trombone, harp, sax, double bass, recorder, harmonica and guitar. Francois's sweet sing-song bi-lingual doting ditties of happy love and charming escapades led a set endearing in the extreme. The final number saw Francois wandering the room encouraging members of the audience to join in on the instrumental sections, chanting a wordless refrain, involving everyone in the venue in the soft magical whimsy of his compositions. So very Bristol."

The Pulse, (Brighton) Autumn 2004.
by Ben Knight

"Review: Live, Stitch Stitch records: General giddiness about great music."

I've never seen Bristol but I've heard a small part of it in my bedroom. Stitch Stitch records are the helm of an exiting lo-fi bedroom resistance. A few weeks ago these kids brokr free from their quilts and ambled down to Brighton to show us their pictures and play us a few song; this gig must have been the only time I've seen an asymetrical haircut weep.

...Next up, came the handsome melancholy electronica of Frànçois. Blending bedroom electronic squeaks and understated guitar, his songs quietly whisper in your ear and comfort your head....

Stitch stitch is vital to anyone who is in love with the Punk diy ethic of Jeffrey Lewis and the naive honesty of Daniel Johnston. They have a compilation comingout called Saw & Tell with all the bands I have been gushing about and more.

Decode Magazine, feb-march 2005
by Theo Berry

Gentle electro beat ditties for cool kids and bi-linguists. French and bass skip over and under samples, guitars and trumpets in a light hearted but never flippant manner leading to crazy arm dancing. Other are even quirkier instrumentals and ballads, full of original ideas and continental charm.