Mambo Nassau

Digitally remastered and expanded edition of this album from the genre-hopping French artist including six bonus tracks. After 1979's Press Color, Lizzy Mercier Descloux went tropical. Mambo Nassau, released in 1981 on Philips Records, saw the vagabond Parisian poet, artist and musician decamp from New York to the Bahamas with her manager and sometime lover, Michel Esteban. The effect on her music was not as expected. Press Color had been an album of dissonant, distorted disco influenced by the New York no wave scene, but Chris Blackwell's Compass Point Studios provided a hermetically sealed environment into which the island's relaxed atmosphere did not seep. Instead, music from within those four walls - made by Tom Tom Club and Grace Jones - had the effect of a feedback loop. The album, meanwhile, reflected the growing confidence of Descloux as a musician, an increasing interest in African music and the input of two new collaborators: synthesizer innovator Wally Badarou and Jamaican engineer Steve Stanley, the album's de facto producer.