Marylise Frecheville - percussion & voice / Eric Boros - guitar & voice

Vialka hail from deepest France, via everywhere and nowhere. They are a devilishly high-spirited guitar/drums duo who tour hard and fast across the world. Their music skips joyfully across borders, channeling desert blues, Chinese folk songs, scatter rock and European gypsy song dynamics in a whirlwind of dervish energy. Their endless gypsy punk folk rock tales, hard hitting poly-rhythms and yelps and howls make for a danceable and intoxicating brew. Like A Hawk And A Hacksaw or The Ex their openness to new sounds and cultures makes you feel alive and shows that 'world punk rock' need not be a dirty phrase.

The dynamic duo of Marylise Frecheville and Eric Boros have been lugging their nomadic turbo folk sound and modus vivendi all over the planet since the turn of the century, originally as the rhythm section of the performance striptease jazz-punk trio NNY, and since 2002 as Vialka. They have resided in Switzerland, Slovenia, Canada, and are currently calling a remote village in France their home between tours. Deriving its influences from traditional and modern underground music from around the globe, Vialka's music is based on the frenetic interaction between Marylise's syncopated drumming and singing and Eric's orchestral guitar playing - and is delivered with ecstatic energy, humor, lust for life, and a sophisticated musical language and subliminal connection all their own.

After releasing their first two albums "Tonight I Show You Fuck" (2002) and "Republic Of The Bored & Boring" (2003) on the mysterious Manufracture label, they founded the "VIA" nonprofit cooperative for the production and promotion of working artists (officially the Vialka Association 1901) and henceforth began releasing their own material: "Everywhere And Nowhere" (2004), a video documenting their work together over the first five years; "Curiosities Of Popular Customs" (2005), their first full-length recording; a split disc with the Israeli "klezmercore" combo Kruzenshtern I Parohod (2006 - co-released with Auris Media in Israel); "Plus Vite Que La Musique" (2007); and their latest album "Succès Planétaire International" (2009 - co-released with Dual Plover in Australia) - their third recording with Bob Drake.

Vialka is not just a musical project, but a social scientific experiment, attempting to meet, communicate and work with extraordinary and little known musicians and artists from everywhere and nowhere - with particular interest in polluted dictatorships, bleak colonies, and monarchic democracies. They have toured extensively in over fifty  countries (100+ concerts per year) across Europe, Africa, North America and Asia, and have collaborated with Chinese musician Xiao He, French mbira player/drummer Andrew Dymond, Italian saxophonist Jacopo Andreini, Macedonian artist collective OPA, Swiss cinematographer Sébastien Riond, French eco-designer Cédric Carles, the legendary former-CAN singer Damo Suzuki, and New Zealand drummer Kieran Monaghan.

Eric Boros (Erik Boroš) began his musical career as a school fanfare trumpetist at a early age. Since then he has performed numerous times in many different nation states around the world, and has participated in a plethora of phonographic recordings - despite having crumpled his trumpet long ago in a fit of rage. Self-taught composer and improviser, he plays baritone and standard acoustic and electric guitars, jaw harp, and is notorious for his dissonant vocal crooning and caterwauling. Although he claims to live without electricity or any modern appliances (other than his solar-powered shortwave radio and guitar amplification devices), he is an atavistic electrician, and has used this unskill to construct electronic gadgets to generate accompaniment frequencies to his symphonic pieces. Boros is reputed to be living in seclusion on an island (or is it a mountain?), but travels regularly by kayak, bicycle, train, and various other forms of public transportation for Vialka repetitions and tours. He is a proud parent, breath-air-ian, book reader, practicing pacifist, and tea-drinker.

Marylise Frecheville was put on stage when she was three years old and became addicted to it. After questioning her academic training in dance, drama and piano, she joined her first "rebel-without-a-cause" teenage garage band in 1993 - playing keyboards, singing out-of-tune, and eventually beating the skins. After delving in Art-Nouveau architecture (with a degree from Lille Régions Nord University of Architecture, France), running after rabbits, and boozing until brain failure, she returned to the stage on drums and classical percussion (studies at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, Canada) - constantly pushing insanity and constipation further away. Frecheville suffers from an acutely selective memory, but this this has yet to prevent her from being extremely prolific; composing music, writing lyrics, rehearsing, improvising, and performing her lurid dances, intricate drum beats, and bewitching serenades with Vialka on a near daily basis. Marylise is also a proud parent, enjoys cooking with cream, and is an avid walker.