Back to Mine with Strapontin

Brigitte Fontaine – Après La Guerre

A slowly burning song made by the craziest french singer. The atmosphere is warm and heavy as a summer wind, she’s singing like she’ll tell you a secret and you are stuck to her surrealistic poetry. Strange, absurd but so powerfully honest. I just sit down, listen and accept to be taken somewhere between beauty and non-sense.

Maurice Ravel – Concerto Pour La Main Gauche, Andante

I discovered Ravel in my breakbeat teenage-hood. This got me. All this concerto is an intense adventure through different cinematographic pictures, it is strongly moving and epic. It actually sounded quite electronic to me, in a way !  But it definitly made me realize that all music have a same human base, past or present.

Akron/Family – Ed Is A Portal

This is about a place where people are having real and innocent fun, singing loud and yelling, sharing and growing a transe together. I’m listening to this when I need my faith in humanity to be restored ahah.

Venetian Snares – Öngyilkos Vasárnap

The most « accessible » song of one of Venetian Snare’s album. The whole album is an intense journey through dramatic schizophrenic feelings, but this song is the only one with a nice combination of warmness, melancholy and anger. The disharmony and the unstable rhythm makes Billie Holiday’s appearance strangely touching.

Anbb – One

A surprisingly sweet and smooth cover of Three Dog Night by 2 unforgettable genius of the contemporary scene. Blixa Bargeld and Carsten Nicolaï are a perfect combination of what I like in music. A radical and precise sound and a taste for weirdness and absurd fun.

Plastikman – Disconnect

« Where does he want to go with that sound ? » Big question I asked myself all along the album. Then the album ended and I realized I was totally under pressure the whole album: so it worked, he got me! I’m amazed by the tension he can create and how he can force us to wait for a beat, or need a bass, the spaces he can take, this sexy/ ridiculous pitched-down voice and those brainy bleeps… This album made me realize that I don’t need a lot of things to build an atmosphere and tell a story with it.

Björk – Where Is The Line ?

One of my favorite spooky song from the Icelandic poetess. It was hard to choose, I love the whole album, but this one got an epic composition, it’s surprising, the voices are scary and she sounds mad (like always). Beauty.

Aswefall – Ride

It’s not a really surprising song, it’s actually quite classical in the composition and the setting up but it got something magic that makes listen to it really often. It sounds like a band of melancholic rockers leaded by a charming disenchanted singer, playing like they don’t give a shit. For me it’s working on the EP as a duet with the following druggy remix of Der Schmeisser. Opposite, then perfect combination.

Keith Jarett – La Scala

The recorded concert of a man in a trance made by his own music. He is building his themes more and more, improvising on his own material. It’s like you are outside of something, watching somebody talking to himself, laughing, complaining, screaming, and you are just behind him, witness of a real intimate moment.

Hardrock striker – Motorik Life (DJ Sprinkles’ Mountain Of Despair)

DJ Sprinkles is fascinating me for a long time now, she’s able to combine political themes like queer thoughts or identity and transgender questions with house music, and the result is simply beautiful. I also love the fact that she’s only making amazingly long to slowly build the groove , for me it’s quite brave to give so much space to music today. This track is a journey through cosmic house music, lost in time and space between tribal trance, dramatic ambient echoes and -as she called it, fagjazz music.

Strapontin – Pedigree (La Belle Records)

Parisian label La Belle Records returns with a stellar new EP from electronic producer Strapontin, featuring four cuts of brooding & twisted dark disco to house and a remix by Golden Bug.
Strapontin is the moniker of Belgium based, French producer Patrick Belmont, a musical talent who arrived on the scene last year and has been builidng a solid reputation since with his personal take on the sounds of the underground. Releases on Germany’s I’m Single and a self released record, the ‘Carbon EP’ were both extremely well received and laid the groundwork for this, his debut on the ever excellent La Belle imprint.
The EP opens with the wonky, slo-mo strains of ‘Offbeat’, a spacious and hypnotic chugger that sees sweeping synths and an incessant morse code like stab pattern provide the base for some ghostly and discordant vocals. The tempo lifts for ‘It’s a Trap’ as Strapontin journeys into techier and housier territory on this floorfilling affair. Vocal contributions from Josell add to the tracks heady intensity as the record slowly builds though its six and a half minute duration, quality stuff.
Title track ‘Pedigree’ is a short but memorable exploration into the outer realms of pulsing machine made electronica. Brooding vocals, metallic hits and churning bass all combine to bring this cut to life with a real sense of menace. Penultimate offering, ‘Les Yeux de la Tete’ is a nine minute plus workout of crunchy drums, bleeps, squeaks and percussive hits peppered with obscure melodic refrains and spoken vocals. Finally we have the Golden Bug remix of opener ‘Offbeat’ which see the French remixer bring his own ethereal and melodic take on things. Live bass, heavy tape delay and swirling FX all seal the deal as this mix works its way under your skin.

Strapontin – Pedigree (La Belle Records Release) Cat. No. LAB31 out now.