Wax Tailor, AKA JC le Saout, made a remarkable impact worldwide with his debut, Tales of the Forgotten Melodies – a sweeping, cinematic hip hop album that had critics citing similarities to DJ Shadow, RJD2 and Portishead. Tales… propelled this Frenchman to stardom in his home country and his debut was heralded as Radio Nova's album of the year. Stateside, Tales… spent 28 straight weeks in the iTunes Top Electronic Albums and remains there to date. The album topped the CMJ Hip Hop and RPM charts (16 and 13 weeks in the top 20, respectively) and tastemaker radio station, KEXP in Seattle, deemed it one of the best albums of 2006. The breakout single, Our Dance, was heralded as one of the best singles of the year in Playboy Magazine as well as iTunes.
– DECON MEDIA

FORGOTTEN MELODIES
The year 2007 could well become yet another top year for Wax Tailor, AKA JC le Saout. After his first two EPs – Lost the Way and Que Sera/Where’s my Heart At – and the massive overseas success of his debut album, Tales of the Forgotten Melodies, this Frenchman is gearing up to take Australia by storm with the long awaited release of Tales… on blend corp.

Tales of the Forgotten Melodies – an album that has sold more than 30,000 units to date, and spent eight months in the official French Sales Charts – takes you on a 52-minute journey into the alluring depths of Wax Tailor’s cinematic hip hop. The filmic nature of Tailor’s music comes to the forefront throughout the 18 tracks on offer where Tailor employs the use of movie samples. It is with these samples that he unravels a story told in music – much in the way a director uses actors.

Tales of the Forgotten Melodies is conceived as an orchestral movie between hip hop and downtempo where Tailor hijacks “the forgotten melodies” and tells a story of his own through the sequence tracks. In this large patchwork of numerous influences and multiple references to the seventh art, major names of the twentieth century music – Doris Day, Nina Simone, Bjork – could get a chance to meet Stanly Kubrick, Woody Allen or Alfred Hitchcock.

As for today’s artists, the US hip hop band, The Others (Third Earth Music) appear on the record to offer a tribute to the hip hop culture in which Tailor has been involved for 20 years. We also get a chance to rediscover Charlotte Savary from the French band Clover; already appearing on Tailor’s EP Lost the Way, Savary provides vocals for Tales… track, Our Dance. Finally, Marina Quaisse’s cello runs throughout the entire album and delicately colours it with darker shades of melancholy that intensify the overall coherence of the album.

TRACKLIST
01. Behind the Curtain 'Opening' 
02. Que Sera 
03. Unglodly Fruit 
04. Between Fellows 
05. Hypnosis Theme (feat. Marina Quaisse) 
06. Damn that Music Made my Day 
07. Where my Heart's At (feat. The Others) 
08. Birth of a struggle 
09. Am I Free
10. Ringing Score 
11. I don't Know 
12. Our Dance (feat. Charlotte Savary) 
13. Stay Tuned 
14. Walk the Line (feat. The Others) 
15. A Woman's Voice 
16. Don't You Remember
17. How I Feel 
18. Behind the Disguise 'Closing' (feat. Marina Quaisse) 

THE BACKGROUND
Wax Tailor has had a long running passion for music; his initial involvement stems back to the early nineties when he began to fiddle with sounds and words in the land of radio. As the radio presenter of the hip hop program on Droit de Cité Radio in Mantes la Jolie, he began to connect with his first audience. From there he continued on with French hip hop outfit, La Formule.

La Formule, originally NSA, is the band in which Tailor spring-boarded in to the French, hip-hop-world’s eye. It was with them that Tailor became well known for his activism as a rapper, a composer, a producer and a manager. La Formule performed repeatedly at festivals such as Logik Hip Hop in Marseille, Energ’hip hop in Nantes and radio broadcasts on France Inter, Nova, Skyrock and Radio Campus.

The years passed and in 1998 Tailor took his passion a step further and founded the Lab’oratoire label. Lab’oratoire was set in motion to produce different projects including La Formule as well as the breakbeat series of Breaking the Wave.

It wasn’t until the new millennium that Tailor began to branch out of France. In 2001, fed up with the decay of French hip hop, Tailor started the Breathing Under Water project with Swedish Band Looptroop. The main idea of this project was to put together the international actors of the hip hop circle with the independents who were “breathing under water” in the ocean of the great capital, under the same banner. In 2002 the first EP of the project was released in France with Looptroop. At the same time Tailor started producing on his newest idea – the Wax Tailor project...

The “Wax Tailor” stage name, originated in 2004 with the release of his EP Lost The Way. Tailor subsequently released his first full-length album, Tales of the Forgotten Melodies, completely on his own.

Next on his agenda was to take his show live with a four-piece band, and find a way to translate the cinematic feel of his music through the use of video. Building on the solid foundation in France, Wax Tailor branched out to Australia. In 2006 Tailor licensed Tales of the Forgotten Melodies to blend corp. for Australian distribution and continued touring across the globe, playing with the likes of Aceyalone, Busdriver and RJD2.
 
The perfectionist Wax Tailor is delivering his debut album on blend corp.; he’ll play with our collective memory and present us with the soundtrack to a movie that everybody can watch in his or her very own way.

VIDEO
Our Dance – by Laurent King (The Life Aquatic)
Hypnosis Theme – by Hugo Arcier (Amélie)
Lost The Way – by Seamus Haley