Artist: Roméo Poirier
Title: Living Room
Cat#: faitiche 28
Release: Oct 7th 2022
Format: LP/DL

Living Room (faitiche 28) is the third solo album by Roméo Poirier and, following his much praised Hotel Nota, his debut for Faitiche. The French musician and producer transforms the layering of different times into a free-flowing pulse that sounds both nostalgic and mysteriously ahistorical.

Poirier takes music seriously as a time-based art – not just in the sense of duration, but also in the way time is refracted into autobiographical experience, historical dimensions and stages of evolution. By immersing and reflecting himself in these different layers, he creates a succession of new balances between various tempos, iterations and developments. 

Poirier’s music emerges from a continual questioning and reformulation of his own oeuvre and thus of his own past, drawing on an ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops. “I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process,” he explains: “The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented.”

Originally a drummer, Poirier connects his various sources almost without a clearly identifiable beat. He prefers an organic pulse, mutable like the human sense of time and its fluidity. The aquatic feel of certain tracks on Living Room is no coincidence: among other devices, he uses a waterproof loudspeaker and a hydrophone to play back and rerecord tracks in the bathtub.

Drawing on a sample collection assembled by his father, also a musician, the human voice enters Poirier’s music for the first time. But it remains free of overly unambiguous signifiers. Besides its link to time, the fascinating thing about music is that it has meaning without needing to be decoded. Living Room goes back to the private but universal origin of human experience: “I liked the idea that a possible quest for a musician could be echoing the first encounter we had with language, in a prenatal state: its prosody, melody and tones, without being cluttered with meaning.”


Written and produced by Roméo Poirier
Design by Tim Tetzner
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi
Text (back cover) by Lamiral Poirier
Thanks to Jan Jelinek, Tim Tetzner, Anna De Smet, Lamiral Poirier, Sylviane Poirier, Octave Moritz, Will Boyd, Guy Tournay, Antoine Pasqualini, Fabien Leclerc, Rutger De Brabander, Frans Robert, Anna Wery, Vittorie Degli Innocenti, Lucas Kraft, Léna Burger, Christophe Le Poëc, Augustin Gigleux, Daphné Vagegne, Jonathan Soskin

Roméo Poirier: Muscle de sable - Jan Jelinek Remix (remixed by Roméo Poirier)

Produced slowly and meticulously over the last 12
months, these seven tracks are the closet thing we've
had to a new album from Andy Stott since the release
of his debut full-length Merciless five years ago.
Taking influence from an array of seemingly incoherent
noises, from the indefinable and unforgettable mindtricks
of Arthur Russell to the slowhouse of Kassem
Mosse, from the alternate VHS realities of James
Ferraro and Jamal Moss to the Linn Drum classics of the
vintage Prince era - these seven tracks create their own
pace and agenda, largely shying away from the
dancefloor in favour of something more complex and
hard to define.
Following on from the tribal malfunctions of opening
intro Signature, New Ground heads into a chasm of
layered loops, creating a decimated and re-wired funk
template coloured in with frayed percussion and
dislodged vocal samples. North To South starts off from
similar ground but adds a shuffling vibe at a deceptively
intoxicated 110 bpm.
Intermittent is something altogether different, taking
perfectly formed Boogie templates and screwing with
them until nothing quite fits, brittle elements floating in
and out of time yet somehow keeping it together,
before Dark Details delivers the most dancefloor
compatible six minute stretch of the set, all clanging
stabs and dense percussion, somewhere between
Shackleton and Bam Bam.
Execution and Passed Me By end things off on a slowed
down tip, the former deploying an anaesthetised and
padded 4/4 template sunk deeper into the abyss by
deformed, time-stretched vocals, the latter ending off
proceedings with a more delicate palette, letting go of
all that pent-up emotion with nothing but that rumbling
low-end and some strings for company.

Dark Details

Dark ambient soundscapes for your pleasure, relax, chillout and enjoy.

DARK AMBIENT -  SHANTARA'EI

Verschiedene Geräusche und Klangfarben, beim Wandern durch Wald Wiesen und Felder.

Idref Wald und Wiesen Spaziergang

'We Stay Together' is a brand new doublepack from Andy Stott, a companion piece of sorts to the radical inversions of the 'Passed Me By' EP released earlier this year. Its predecessor left many heads dazed upon impact - in the best possible sense - and these six tracks, produced in its wake, amp the pressure to throttling degrees. Entering the digital compression chamber of 'Submission' you become a willing participant, before the lights are cut and you're forced to adjust to the humid atmosphere and bruising, muscle-contracting darkroom throb of 'Posers'. Suitably initiated, the EP's fearless centrepiece 'Bad Wires' plunges into full on mud-party mode, dropping the tempo while intensifying the kinaesthetic funk with slow, clusterf*cked syncopation until you're drowning in synthesized oil and crushed-glass textures. Fully submerged by 'We Stay Together (Part One)' time becomes elasticated like worn VHS tape, calling to mind Jamal Moss and James Ferraro soundtracking a rave in a sodden, flooded sauna, before inescapably tumbling into the sheer black hole of 'Cherry Eye' and left to the slompy jack of 'Cracked'. Blatantly, we rate this record massively, and although it's not for everyone, those looking for a more visceral, intense form of dancefloor pressure would do very well to check in

Submission

Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties

Banteay Srey

Stabil

Sub.Res

Ghettoville

Taken from 'It Should Be Us', Andy Stott’s first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011 - a doublepack of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded this year and following a series of releases that started with ‘Passed Me By’ and ‘We Stay Together’ early this decade. 

There’ll be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one’s for dancing..

It Should Be Us

Andy Stott - Versi

Following on from a pair of Extended Players released in 2011 ("Passed Me By" / "We Stay Together") Andy Stott returns to Modern Love with 'Luxury Problems', an 8 track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of Alison Skidmore, Andy's onetime Piano teacher whom he hadnt seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened - but after almost a year of studio work the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before. 'Numb' opens the album with Alison's voice; layered and looped but essentially left bare and exposed, tumbling into a dense shuffle, sort of somewhere between Theo Parrish and Sade, but more f*cked. 'Lost and Found' follows and deploys a growling rave bassline and a disturbed vocal, the beat assembling itself around a squashed Linndrum like a submerged Prince/Cameo production, haunted and impenetrable, but full of funk. 'Sleepless' started life as an African drum edit that sooner or later succumbed to Stott's intense rhythmic shifts. It's a sound that's been imitated countless times since the release of 'Passed Me By', here re-tooled and re-built for its next evolutionary phase. 'Hatch The Plan' ends the first half of the album with some heavily treated location recordings and a low end grind that probably doesnt quite prepare you for the vocal arrangements that follow - it's just a beautifuly inverted pop song. The second half opens with 'Expecting', the most recognisably 'Stott' moment on the album: a wrecked, deliriously knocked-out 4/4 shuffle deployed at halfspeed; those heavy kickdrums sucking in everything around them. 'Luxury Problems' is next and offers up the album's most quietly euphoric and open 5 minutes; conventional arrangements and drumloops disrupted by sharp disco bursts that mess with what you know: it's straight and beautiful and unbalanced and damaged, somehow all at once. "Up the box" switches up the narrative and goes somewhere else entirely, an extended intro that seems to build continuously for 3 minutes before breaking off into a slowed-down Amen edit, creating a kind of narcotic Jungle variant that fragments everything and ends just at the point you think it's going to go off, before "Leaving" finishes the album with an almost unbareably beautiful arrangement of voice and synth and a final key-change that takes you from joyful to forlorn in an instant.

06-Luxury problems

track from an audio book by @perila 
"tracking stones within four walls/ air of spring in lungs"
support artists if you feel like:
https://perilazone.bandcamp.com/album/tracking-stones-within-four-walls-air-of-spring-in-lungs

i think we all feel something similar something different these days
everyone experiences unique experience
everybody is affected
future is scary and unpredictable but longing and full of hope
this is an audio book kinda full of these emotions smoothy
hopefully it may support you too by knowing that we all feel these hard to explain things
perila mood blanket update

"cut door and windows
to make a room
where the room isn't
there's a room for you"

Submission

modernlove