Dress up a plain white tee.
(Source: classof808)
If you can’t be with the one you love, resent the one you’re with.
You done know.
What I would give to have a piece of this cotton.
(Source: sexy-sweaters)
Rising Doom
At just 24, Mondkopf’s second album ‘Rising Doom’ is ready. Inspired by post-punk, black metal, and with the music of Aphex Twin and Autechre always in his head, the album exhibits a mesmerising force, that so many have tried and failed to demonstrate before him. Merging sound and vision, he has also recently collaborated with multimedia design agency, Trafik, to produce a Live show experience that is both an aural and visual assault; tension immerses, with an almost white noise affectation, igniting the sensation of terrifying squat raves, exorcism and a feeling of some sort of mystical wizardry…
Rising Doom exudes a feeling of both urgency and anguish, an album where light is so rare it almost blinds you with it’s beauty when it glimmers through the jagged rifts. Each song composed as if it were to be the last. A suffocating, intoxicating brew of inky atmosphere that has been squeezed through an industrial grinder and seasoned with an added drum machine and rave-laser function. It’s heavy, it’s bleak and brutal. It’s brilliant.
Having remixed Wolf Gang, Golden Filter and The Teenagers and playing alongside the likes of Four Tet, he has transgressed the typical French electro sound that his peers back in ‘06 are still making, instead embracing a new experimental take on classic electronica and conceiving a new breed of IDM.
Here are a few words with the alluring French enigma, here’s what Mondkopf had to say, about all the stuff…
Moi: Hey, so how did you start out making music?
Mondkopf: I started in my bedroom, working with cheap software when I was in first grade. In highschool i started to get interested in electronic music, I bought more software and spent my life in my bedroom on my own making music.
Woi: You’ve been producing for a while now, what about your sound has changed? How do you feel you have progressed?
Mondkopf: I think I know better what I am able to do with the same old software, even if I still get pleasing surprises. There has definitively been a turn with a more aggressive, noisier sound than before.
Moi: You’ve often been placed amongst ‘French Touch’ artists but your sound seems far from it. Why do you think this is? And what does ‘French Touch’ mean to you?
Mondkopf: I don’t pay too much attention even if I hope it doesn’t create wrong expectations for some people. I got interested in french touch pretty lately, i don’t like everything but Motorbass and I :Cube albums are fascinating to me.
Moi: Where do you hope to take your sound?
Mondkopf: Just forward in playing with tension, but it’s kind of the music itself taking me where it needs to go…
Moi: When do you feel most inspired?
Mondkopf: It’s totally impossible to control, but I get inspired mostly from listen to other people’s music which moves me and makes me want to make more myself, even if it doesn’t really inspire me in a more precise way.
Moi: Which artists would you say most influence your work?
Mondkopf: Autechre, Aphex Twin, Clark and a lot more of early Warp artists, then Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Tim Hecker and more recently Sunn O))) and The Cure.
Moi: What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Mondkopf: Listen to your feelings and don’t be afraid of them.
Moi: What was is like to grow up in Toulouse, and do you think that it has influenced your particular sound?
Mondkopf: It was great, I was living between the country and the city, even if I don’t think it had an influence on my music since I was locked in my bedroom mostly, I think I could have been pretty much anywhere.
Moi: Pet hates?
Mondkopf: Toads
Moi: Biggest fear?
Mondkopf: To lose the people I love.
Moi: Where do you think you would be without the internet?
Mondkopf: Not in front on my computer at the moment obviously.
Moi: And finally (sorry, I had to ask this, because I am lame and predictable), but when was the last day you had a REALLY angry day, what happened, and how did you act?
Mondkopf: Sorry to disappoint but I never manage to get really angry, hence my music being this kind of release…
MIINIMAL TAXONOMY
Magda and comrades Troy Pierce and Marc Houle resurrect their brilliant experimental label Item & Things having found the “beautiful weird sounds” they were looking for.
Magda in a nutshell: born in Poland, grew up in Detroit, resident in Berlin and now an in demand DJ who seems to spend every weekend on a different continent. Given the rise in her profile over the past few years, you might think Magdalena Chojnacka was a relative newcomer to the M_nus minimal sound, but the association actually goes back a long time: Richie Hawtin fixed Magda up with her first residency way back when back in 1997, when Magda came to Europe “and saw the light.” And if you’ve seen Hawtin on tour this century, and you’ve dragged your sorry pilled-up ass to the venue and arrived early, chances are you’ve also more than likely seen Magda.
While recently she’s also been moving more seriously into production to “really get in to your mind and just see what happens,” as well as releasing bouncy, bass-heavy and spine tingling cuts on M_nus, Mobilee and own label. Items & Things. Started in 2006 by essentially Run Stop Restore artists Marc Houle, Troy Pierce and Magda herself, Items & Things is a diminutive boutique label that has put out no more than a handful of 12-inches between 2006 and 2009 from highly regarded artists such as Konrad Black, Click Box and Jimmy Edgar. An impressive stable. But one which, Magda says was easy as they “were all friends and and a pleasure to work with.” Houle says of it: “Why would I want to release on another label when everything I want is here? I would rather work with my friends to take my music forward than just put out stuff on whatever labels seen to be hot at the (particular) moment.” The label was created as an outlet for the weird, experimental and beautiful sounds the trio often come across on their travels and the intonations that reminded them of their youth.
The Items & Things label requires open-minded musicians with a desire to break the boundaries of traditional dance music models. With a back catalogue of influences - bands like Fad Gadget, Tones on Tail, esg, Kraftwerk, and Prince being name-checked alongside Danzig, The Cult, Plastikman, Dan Bell, Giorgio Moroder, Depeche Mode and Iron Maiden, it’s easy to understand the meticulously, particular and peculiar soundscape the three wish to obtain and stay true too within their Items Alias.
Over the past few years, the collective project has been on hiatus - reportedly because the founders had a hard time finding artists to fit the label’s distinctively idiosyncratic sound and a “combination of hectic schedules, us releasing personal albums last year plus the fact there wasn’t so much great music that needed a home (with us).” It’s not for lack of demos though, but rather, they’ve been searching for something with that particular Items & Things vibe. Tracks rich with “weird, experimental and beautiful sounds.”
Whatever it was they were searching for they’ve found it in the form of Italian producer Madato, who has given them cause to re-ignite the label again. The forthcoming EP Speak of the She Devil will be Items and Things first in release in two years, and is stark as it is rich, a minefield of meticulous and ambitious sounds coming together. For some reason, which is really quite hard to explain, it works. Madato offers the listener something crisp and unique, and most importantly, where so many others have failed, it’s compelling and you, need even, to carry on and listen more.
Their pocket universe of sound clashes of minimal techno, house, synth pop, and electro, along with a dash of disco all combined with Madato’s beautifully unique, almost warped sound make for a well-suited and refreshingly exciting cumulative in an industry that can sometimes become saturated with the stale and mundane. And with further releases due later on this year from Danny Benedetti, Hearthrob, and possibly Function and Bruno Pronsato, it looks like Items & Things will be providing the good-tech-loving folk of the glob with a more than healthy serving of newfangled resonance for the foreseeable future.
Long Live The New Flesh
F O X Y
