A video I found a while back of Porn.Darsteller & La Seduction Des Innocents (aka Le Syndicat Electronique) live in Bordeau, France, recorded in 2004. Two of my favorite electronic musicians — I would kill to see a show like this live.

These guys were very influential in introducing the ‘minimal wave’ sound into the electro scene, and for me personally it was thanks to Invasion Planéte that I discovered artists like In Aeternam Vale, Echo West and Bakterielle Infektion, which opened up the doors to this whole new (to me) genre.

Porn.Darsteller and La Seduction Des Innocents Live set tracklisting:

Porn.Darsteller:
L’Ingénue
Holocaust
Wedding Day

La Seduction Des Innocents:
Le Menteur Étendu
Strawberry Flower

Two of my favorite writers on some hardcore street level bombing shit with a soundtrack from one of my favorite electro musicians. Best thing I have seen on Youtube in a long long while!

Le Syndicat Electronique – The Men Who Killed The Beat

Horfe & Tomek getting teenage kicks

Copenhagen Trains – Vandal Tactics (A3)

So I think I must have watched this trailer about a hundred times by now. Copenhagen Trains: Vandal Tactics is a soon to be released graffiti movie documenting the train scene in Danish capital city Copenhagen, and in particular a tribute to the 2nd generation S-Trains of Copenhagen, those infamous red steel monsters that were the object of desire for generations of writers all across Europe and the world, the last of which was retired from service in 2007.

Nearly 10 years in the making, Vandal Tactics is the fourth and final edition of the Copenhagen Trains series, which started out on VHS tape in the mid 90s. The series has featured all the greats of the Dansk graffiti scene as well as countless guests from all over Europe and the world.

As well as fucking dope Dansk graffiti footage, Vandal Tactics also has an amazing electro soundtrack produced by some of my homeboys in CPH. The soundtrack was written and produced especially for the Copenhagen Trains DVD, consisting of 10 tracks of dark and heavy analogue electro. The drums are raw and lo-fi, and all synth parts are hand played giving it a tense and edgy feeling which perfectly capture the atmosphere; tracks “so fat you can almost smell the rusty tracks and feel your fingers stick to the cap”.

Copenhagen Trains: Vandal Tactics OST 12″ on Cytown Records. From my collection

The soundtrack was released as a 12″ on Copenhagen electro label Cytown Records (who also released an AMAZING Nancy Fortune track produced by The Seducers along with several other great 12″s)

The DVD will be released soon, I for one am hanging out for my copy! A little bird also tells me that I will soon be interviewing Copenhagen graffiti God Cave for Cold Crush. So you know the motherfucking scope, stay tuned for the rawness baby!

Official Site: www.copenhagentrains.com

Copenhagen Trains – Vandal Tactics (A3)

Les Invalides – Au Revoir

A couple of weeks back my homeboy Alex Nôrinh sent me some tracks from a new 12″ he had picked up, C’est Passé by Les Invalides. It was released earlier in the year on obscure Polish/German label Automatik-Datamatik as a super limited single sided 12″ of only 77 copies (including 22 extra special white vinyl editions, one of which I am dying to get hold of!)

C’est Passé instantly caught my ear — three electro-wave tracks with an unmistakeably warm analogue sound, minimal but well-written step sequenced bass and drum machine rhythms with some possibly hand-played synthesizer parts layered on top. I was already enjoying the first two songs but the third, Au Revoir really grabbed me. A bare CR78 drum pattern backing a slow, romantic and melancholic synthesizer track. Beautiful.

Once we got over talking about how great the tracks were, Alex and my discussion instantly turned to who these ‘Les Invalides’ could be! Our first guess was that it must have something to do with Invasion Planéte. It fit the bill perfectly — minimal analogue electro/wave tracks, pressed on a limited 12″ with little to no information existing on the artist. The Invasion Planéte music and newer releases on Musamore and Zusammen are always shrouded in as much mystery as possible, but of course a little hunting around the net couldn’t confirm this either way.

I got in touch with Interfunk, who runs the Automatik-Datamatik label — but typically, predictably, as it was always going to be, he wasn’t able to tell me much more:
“Les Invalides are a forgotten Parisian synthesizer group started in the early 80s. They sent me these tracks from a recently discovered tape which had never seen the light before. It’s also a mystery for me…. I don’t know if there is more stuff still existing. I was told that a vocal version of Diable Danse has been recorded back in the old days, but I have never heard it… they tell me a lot of tapes with the old recordings are lost, so can’t say if there will be discovered one day to release another 12″…”

Sooo, the mystery remains unsolved for now. In fact the most I can tell you about this record is the impressive list of vintage analogue gear that was used in producing the tracks, boasting:
Roland: CR-78, Jupiter 4, Juno 60
Promars: System 100M, System 100 (Model 101 & 104)
Moog: Minimoog, Prodigy, Satellite
Arp: Sequencer, Odyssey, Axxe

You can buy the 12″ (a few copies left on black vinyl) directly from Automatik Datamatik. They are a completely independent and not-for-profit label working without a distributor, so show some support for great underground music and pick up a copy.

Oh yeah, if anybody can shed some light on Les Invalides or has some music for me to listen to, hit me up!

Les Invalides – Au Revoir

Émilie Simon – Desert

Émilie Simon – Rainbow

Forget about love at first sight… that shit is played out. This post is about love at first listen, aka me and Émilie Simon.

The year was 05, maybe 06, and I was prowling Myspace for a vocalist to collaborate with (this was back in the day when it was still actually useful for this kinda shit). After wading through crap singer after crap singer, I stumbled across a profile for Émilie. Cute photo, I am thinking to myself, hoping she can sing as well when Desert started playing out of my speakers; right from that moment I knew it was love baby. By the time the second track on the player, Secrets was playing, my heart was well and truly stolen by that soft, silky voice. I also knew I’d found my vocalist, and typed her out a message with a link to my track explaining who I was and asking, not unhopefully, whether she would be interested in singing on my instrumental.

Of course as it turns out, I soon discovered that the Myspace profile was a f*ke set up by some adoring fan, Émilie was already signed to Universal Music and her self titled album Émilie Simon had been in the French charts ever since it’s release in 2003. My hopes of working with her were quickly dashed, but not all was lost as I ended up working with Beta Evers and the resulting song Eternal (soon to be released on 7″ vinyl through my label Zerohour Doom & Glamour) is nothing short of perfect to my ears, I can’t imagine it possibly sounding any different. Not one to hold a grudge I have been a big fan of Émilie’s ever since. I even managed to track down (and shell out a small fortune for) her extremely rare transparent red vinyl LP — anybody who says music doesn’t sound better on vinyl doesn’t know what’s up.

She was often referred to as ‘the french Björk’, but to me this really just doesn’t do her justice. While I can see the comparison, to leave Émilie in the shadow of another (even one so large as that of Björk) is an injustice to her lyrical talent, experimentation and musicianship. Her music is electro-pop (a term that would normally make me want to kill) done properly, an effortless blend of electronic and live instruments with influences of rock, classical, trip hop and electro music.

In 2007 I got the chance to see Émilie sing live in Sydney with fellow Frenchies Nouvelle Vague, and for the second time she really blew me away. That soft and sometimes tiny voice came with a huge stage presence that was enough to put a packed house at the Metro in a trance, as she performed a mix of songs from all 3 of her albums, Émilie Simon, La Marche de l’Empereur & Végétal. More than just her incredible voice and stage presence though, what really stood out to me was her musical creativity. She played a mix of piano, synth and guitar, with backing from a combination of live drumming, drum machine tracks and synthesizer played by her band. Her voice was filtered, controlled and manipulated by the custom made ‘Brissot’ on her arm, a streampunk inspired kind of wristband covered in knobs and switches (check the photo). And my curiosity was sparked by what the hell a goldfish bowl was doing in the middle of the stage — was it part of the show? Would she dunk her head in and sing underwater? As it turns out, it was used for just one song, as her drummer came out to mid-stage to slap a beat on the surface of the water, which through contact mics (and I daresay considerable filtering) came a beautiful organic rhythm.

Jump forward a few years to 2009 and we had the release of Émilie’s most recent album The Big Machine. This album is, to me, a change of direction. To my ears a less experimental and more straight-forward pop tracks. Unlike her previous albums, all the songs are sung in English instead of a mix of English and French, and musically too it is more straight down the line pop, with a bigger and more accessible electronic sound, and sounding much more produced than her previous works. Her voice too sounds larger than it ever has before, gone is the silky, sometimes wistful feeling and lyrics and in their place a stronger, more powerful voice which takes advantage of the full range of her voice. This time around. the album has drawn more comparisons to Kate Bush and Tori Amos than Björk. I later found out Émilie has moved from Montpellier to New York, which to me, made the change in her sound make much more sense. Rainbow is the standout song of the album for me, a dramatic, uptempo pop number with a plenty of brass, a big beat and Émilie’s slightly dark edged lyrics. Impressively, Émilie has managed to maintain an original and unique sound, managing to make her music more accessible without selling out to mass-produced trash for commercial radio. Which is good, ‘cos otherwise I couldn’t love her anymore.

Anyway, the point of all this is that Émilie is playing again in Sydney tonight and I’ll be there, swooning somewhere up the front row and I am pretty excited about it.

Ps Émilie when you stumble across this page and undoubtedly think, “hey, I should really do a song with this guy”, don’t be shy, hit me up!
Pss don’t worry readers, I’ll be back to writing about street electro, rugged hip hop and fuzz metal in no time. Got some new mixes and music on the way too!

Émilie Simon – Desert

Émilie Simon – Rainbow

N.W.A – Dopeman

Yo, I will be spinning some tracks at Shake That Monkey at the Burdekin Saturday the 10th of April, along with Typhonic (from Databass Records), Ryzer & G-Mo.

The party is promising a mashup of styles from ghetto tech, booty, dubstep, electro, techno and hip hop, and I’m gonna be setting shit off from 9 till 10:30. Entry is a cool $5 if you get there before 10 so you know what to do.

N.W.A – Dopeman

Xeno & Oaklander – Blue Flower (Live at Wierd)

Minimal wave, or minimal synth music has been around since the late 70s and early 80s, but until finding a revival over the last few years was a very obscure and underground genre. While there were some LP releases at the time, it was more common for minimal wave artists to go the punk/DIY ethic – self-pressed and distributed 7″s and especially releases on cassette tape, meaning that as you can imagine digging up these old treasures can be next to impossible now over 30 years later, and it’s safe to say that there is probably a whole wealth of music out there that might never see the light of day again.

Thanks to labels like New York based Minimal Wave, run by Veronica Vasicka who is dedicated to digging up these old treasures and remastering and re-releasing them on vinyl and as digital downloads (with artists permission of course) the minimal sound has been really making waves — pun possibly intended — in the underground electronic scene and it’s not hard to see why. With it’s punk ethic, lo-fi drummachine rhythms, romantic analogue synthesizer melodies – often played as live instruments instead of being sequenced (midi is a rarity, and even shunned by many as being too rigid), deep lyrics and passionate but often cold and distant vocals, it makes for beautiful listening though being in Sydney I don’t have the pleasure to see this stuff being played live or played at clubs.

The minimal wave sound has also had a huge influence on the electro scene over the past few years, you only need to listen to songs like Novamen – Lies, or check out record labels like Le Syndicat Electronique’s new label Musamore, or German Das Drehmoment.

My own introduction to minimal synth was through French electro label Invasion Planéte. The Invasion Planéte sound was very electro for the first few releases but quickly started becoming more and more sparse and minimal. I’ve always been a huge fan of Beta Evers, who’s sound is heavily inspired by vintage German New Wave and EBM, as well as old 80s industrial like early Ministry and listening to Front 242, Nitzer Ebb etc so I guess I had already been warmed up to the sound, but by about halfway through it’s lifetime, Invasion Planéte was concentrating almost exclusively on minimal wave music, and as i’d been following closely the Invasion Planéte releases it first really caught my attention, hearing artists like Silent Signals (aka Echo West) and Bakterielle Infektion from Germany, and of course Le Syndicat Electronique’s own music along with fellow label mate Porn.Darsteller.
It was electro, but not like i’d ever heard it before…apart from the prominence of vocals, something about it was raw and different, and I had to hear more. Before long, I found labels like Enfant Terrible from Holland and Wierd from New York and from there things spiralled out as I discovered there was a whole scene to this minimal wave music, with artists both now and ranging back right to the 1970s.

Xeno & Oaklander are from Brooklyn, and just released their masterpiece first full length album Sentinelle on Wierd Records. Members Sean McBride; well known for his solo project Martial Canterel and visual artist/filmmaker/fashion photographer Liz Wendelbo, who has also collaborated with Miami based Staccato Du Mal and New York trio Three To Forgotten (Xeno & Oaklander with Epee Du Bois) have a strict set of rules for their music — exclusively analogue synthesizers (no soft-synths, no midi and no digital, a bold move in this day and age of click and drag producers and DJs that have never touched a turntable in their lives), and one take recordings played as live as possible.

Sentinelle is a deep and richly layered album, with lyrics from both Liz and Sean, paranoia and disaffection, tales of underwater cities, the industrial revolution and a world of shadow combined and seamlessly changing from English to French, sometimes in the same song. The music itself ranges from slow synth pop style tracks to tense high-BPM synth-punk and from deep and romantic to at times aggressive.

This song, Blue Flower is from Xeno & Oaklander’s first EP Vigils — a self released CDr on Martial Canterel’s label Xanten, and also appeared on the second Wierd Compilation from Wierd Records, though both versions are different from each other, and different again to this version, which was played and recorded live at a Wierd party in New York in 2008.

I really love the original version from Vigils and for me it’s hard to beat. Tender synth melodies and haunting vocals from Liz Wendelbo, from the first time I heard it I found it amazing. But this live version is beautiful. The long and atmospheric intro and added depth of Martial Canterel’s vocals add a whole new layer of tension which I find just incredible.

Xeno & Oaklander – Blue Flower (Live at Wierd)