Progressive Rock

Cuneiform Records · 27 February 2026

What runs this tape is the bass. Gregory TeJeDOR plays it with zeuhl logic, low and repetitive and pushed well forward in the mix, and over the top of it float his brother Olivier’s Mellotrons and synthesisers. “Nova Express”, eight forty-five, gave its name to the band’s 2002 album; here it arrives with a sax motif the colour of early King Crimson and an ending of chopped riffs.

“ReDRuM”, ten thirty-four, is the long piece of the night and the one that shifts pace most: it canters, it stops, it gallops. Halfway through you can hear somebody in the band shout, and in one of the quasi-melodic passages guitar textures surface in the manner of Frippertronics.

The recording was made on 23 August 2007 at the Nexus Kunsthaus Café in Saalfelden, during the Austrian jazz festival, and it was the last concert NeBeLNeST ever gave. That year the French quintet had played Rock in Opposition and NEARFest, and the Saalfelden fee was the largest they had ever been paid: it obliged them to file the first tax return of their lives. On guitar was Matthieu Sassier, with Julien Wack also handling sax, flute and a second guitar here — Cyril Malderez had left in 2003 and the band went through several replacements before arriving at this solution, which adds to the repertoire a wind instrument the three studio albums never had.

Cuneiform has issued the tape exactly as it sounded, and that includes opening the record with “Announcement”, a minute and thirty-four of stage introduction before the first note. Of everything in these fifty-two minutes, that minute and a half of speech is the only thing you couldn’t hear somewhere else: the set comes entirely from the three studio albums. Olivier TeJeDOR recorded, mixed and mastered the tape himself. The album came out on 27 February, eighteen and a half years after that night. Four of those years the band spent trying to make a fourth record they never finished.

Rating: 7.5/10

Text by Guillem Cardós