ZENTONE, Zenzile, and High Tone

A few summers back a few college friends and I made an impromptu visit over the channel to France. We had a kind of hippy convoy of sad-looking vehicles with a couple of assigned drivers (most of us didn’t have our licences). We were all broke and we had no real plan about places to stay.

After a day’s hungover driving we arrived at Saint-Nazaire. We found a beach that stretched for miles near an airfield and raced each other into the water for a twilight swim. We could hear King Tubby blasting from the speakers of a beat-up station wagon. It was a Spanish couple with a young child who’d driven up to see a band none of us had heard of.

That night we went to check out this band, which turned out to be Lyon dub-reggae outfit High Tone at a place called Le Vip. They played a tranced-out kind of dub, with loads of samples and some heavy breakdowns. With a lot of us being used to the drum’n’bass scene in south London, this was a band we all got.

I just bought their latest LP, Ekphron. It’s been on permanent rotation for days and I owe it all to this friendly Spanish couple. If you guys are reading this, shout out and thanks.