LABEL:     EMI
WEBSITE: www.saiansupacrew.com
MUSIC:    MySpace
VIDEO:    Angela Video
              Jacko Video
AGENT:    Joost Kamp

BIOGRAPHY:
PLANET HIP HOP PREDICTED TO HEAT UP IN LATE 2005.
EXPERTS ARE UNANIMOUS : THE SAÏAN SUPA CREW
IS ON ITS WAY BACK.

In the light of their devastating two previous albums KLR (1999) &
X RAISONS (2001), specialists predict a shockwave of unprecedented force; seismographers worldwide are on alert.
The first shocks hit in the summer 2005 with a tour of European
festivals.

31 OCTOBER 2005 IS WHEN THE STATE OF ALERT WILL BE
AT ITS HIGHEST, TO COINCIDE WITH THE RELEASE OF THE
THIRD SAÏAN ALBUM HOLD UP

Flashback: the first tremors date back to 1997. The epicenter of this aggregation of hip hop warriors: Nomad studios, led by DJ Fun.
Scientific name: Saïan Supa Crew.
Members: Sir Samuel, Sly, Feniksi, Vicelow, Leeroy & Specta.
Threat: to overturn the small world of French rap.

THE SAÏAN PHENOMENON
1999: their first opus, KLR, is named after a crew member who
didn’t make it. Shock and awe. The album lands on planet hip hop like a UFO. As dedicated avant-gardists, the crew in yellow don’t do anything like others do. Nurtured on a diet of reggae, soul, ragga, r&b, soul and zouk, the Saïan melting-pot won admirers for its eclecticism, breathing new life into French rap.
Their overriding aim was to serve up challenging ideas married to
supa-slick lyrics. They perform a type of twin-tier rap, mixing
straight-up demands with a dose of healthy derision. Masters of the
human beatbox style, they brought one of hip hop’s founding
disciplines bang up to date. The unstoppable success of the single Angela drove them to the top of the charts; it was a hit that echoed around the world. 700,000 singles sold — over 400,000 albums.
The Saïan crew then threw themselves into an avalanche of
concerts. Their shows were perfection, establishing an iron-like
bond with their audience. The yellow wave seethed across France
and Europe, leaving unbridled audiences in its unprecedented
wake!

INTERNATIONAL IMPACT
After almost two years spent on the road, and with 300-odd gigs to
their credit, the crew finally returned to the studio. The result was
X-RAISONS, an ambitious second album that won the hip hop album of the year award at the 2002 Victoire de la Musique ceremony. Hailed by French press and public alike, this second oeuvre also signaled their triumph internationally. Their label, Virgin, shifted 200,000 units, 60,000 of them outside France.
It was an unprecedented phenomenon: Germany, the UK,
Scandinavia and Canada, among others, were submerged by the
Saïan flood. This level of recognition gave them the chance to
appear as headliners at some of Europe’s biggest festivals
(Glastonbury, Vieilles Charrues, Splash, Paléo, Eurockéennes, etc.)
and to collaborate with artists of the stature of the Wu Tang Clan,
Kimany Marley, Alpha Blondy, Rahzel, Asian Dub Foundation, Roots
Manuva and others.

BACK TO THEIR ROOTS
At the peak of their success, the crew decided to take a symbolic
time-out to allow them to spend time in their original line-ups.
Féniksi & Vicelow, who, with KLR, used to be known as OFX,
produced ROOTS, an intimate album relating a musical odyssey
between France, Africa and the Caribbean. Leeroy & Specta, who was by now no longer a member of SSC, reformed as Explicit Samouraï, releasing the savage RAP. Master human beatbox Sly released his stunning, all-mouth, first EP in collaboration with Wildchild; at the same time he accompanied the staggeringly gifted Camille on her tour. As for Sir Samuel, he chose to walk the pure roots path, releasing VIZÉ PLI O, a harmonious reggae album suffused with positive vibrations.

STORM WARNING FOR YOUR SPEAKERS.
Back together once again, the force that is the Saïan Supa Crew is
determined to hit the festival season with maximum impact.
Resolute in its desire to shock all who hear it, this is a natural
phenomenon that spares no one.

HOLD UP NEW ALBUM
Four years have already gone by: the last time Saïan Supa Crew
produced a new recording was in October 2001, when the group
released its second album, X RAISONS. At the same time, it went on tour and attracted a fan base which, following its first album, the
superb KLR (and its hit Angela, released in October 1999), was
increasing visibly. But for most artists, four years in the world of hiphop is a lifetime, and can encompass an entire career. So what
happened to this group, whom many people undoubtedly associated, starting in the late 1990s, with the very future of French rap music, that it was absent from the hip-hop scene for so long?
Firstly, the members of Saïan went back to work on their initial solo
projects: Leeroy and Specta under the name of Explicit Samuraï,
Vicelow and Feniksi under the pseudonym OFX, Sly on the beatbox,
and then Sir Samuel on its own reggae project ‘Vize pli’O’ released
in 2004. Then Specta, one of the six original MCs, left the crew. And Sir Samuel, Vicelow, Feniksi, Sly the Mic buddah and Leeroy Kesiah asked themselves: should we continue? The answer to this question arrived of its own accord: it was a definite ‘YES.’ This group was much more than the mere sum of its members, and the fact that one member had left didn't take anything away from the spirit of the whole.
It was then that Saïan Supa Crew made the logical decision to make a new album. The group gathered in a studio in December 2004 and spent nearly six months there, on and off. Very quickly over the course of the sessions, the members really got back to their roots, but this time with a specific project in mind: they wanted to make an album that, compared with their past recordings, would be more personal, more direct, more explicit, and with fewer allusions.
The result, a surprising mix of fierceness and passion, is entitled
HOLD UP, after one of the album’s most remarkable tracks. This
album, which immediately strikes its listeners like a bomb that goes off over and over, may very well be the group’s most powerful. And the most enthusiastic as well. It maintains the eclecticism and diversity, the richness and profusion of the group's previous albums.
Its 18 tracks aggressively reinvent the repertoire of the group,
which proves it is at the height of its form, practice, and skill: the
writing is increasingly sharp, the flows are deliciously smooth, and
the instrumentals are more and more precise. The group itself
admits that since the first album, it has inevitably grown up and
matured, and it wanted to add some difficult arrangements and
insert guitars in certain places. And for the first time, it invited some other artists to participate in the recording. And so reggae singer Patrice appears on 96 Degreez and, on Si J’avais Su, the
wonderfully eclectic & talented Camille (who’s one of the voices
behind the Nouvelle Vague project as well as one of France’s
breakthrough artist of 2005), and there is also an instrumental
offered to the group by Oh No, an American hip-hop producer
affiliated with the narrowly-specialized Californian label Stones
Throw (label of Peanut Butter Wolf and Madlib).
On the album’s other tracks, all equally excellent and compelling,
the group excels in what it does best, which involves bringing
together the most opposite extremes in a consistently precise and
biting polyphony. On Feceps, Saïan develops a hilarious anatomical
exploration, set to subtly surrealistic music and based on a hypnotic rhythm. Later on the album, Malgré les galères changes the tone of the disk: this haunting track is a modern urban ballad that very perceptively dissects the daily relations of a couple, the risks of a love that wavers on the edge of routine, and the strength that is required to overcome bitterness. More minimalist and short, Tanakasound mentions Woody Allen, Bill Gates and nunchaku: it sounds like a sort of cross between a condensed Tarantino film and the WuTang Clan! Originales is a song about sex and borders on smuttiness. Funny and exaggerated, it speaks of “fesses de 200 hectares” (a 200-hectare bottom) and is completely anti-cliché and antipolitically correct.
HOLD UP is so good to listen to that it’s as if the album were none
other than that of an extremely striking stylistic revival, and it will
likely stand out in the group’s career and in the evolution of French
rap music itself. In any case, one thing hasn’t changed: the album,
like its two predecessors, will be released in October. Like a minor,
pleasantly touching superstition, this is the one routine that this
iconoclastic group has allowed itself to keep.

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