jason edwards "doldrums"

Dans la folk et le blues, on croise souvent des vies hors-normes, des destins de losers
magnifiques qui font les grandes histoires. Jason Edwards, né de parents anglo-américains,
a donc été déménageur, professeur de piano, gardien de sapin... Il a aussi fait la
manche et pris la route, la guitare sous le bras de Dublin à New York, de Montréal à
Paris. Le genre d’histoire qui semble avoir 50 ans mais qui se passe aujourd’hui, perpétuant
une race de songwriter et la figure de l’artiste vagabond cher à Kerouac.
Fort de ces multiples expériences et d’une vie de rencontres, il écrit et enregistre son
premier album “Ouest”, à huit clos dans son appartement parisien. L’album sort en
octobre 2007 sur le label kill the dj records.
Un succès très largement entretenu par Radio France et Radio Nova (on retrouve
“Codeine”, et “Opium” dans les derniers coffrets Nova, et “Bourbon Ouest” est toujours
en playlist à la radio) et soutenu par la presse: “Une musique aussi simplement
universelle qu’étrangement décalée et inattendue” Magic, “Ouest se révèle un
disque précieux dans lequel on vient autant se réfugier que se perdre” Les Inrocks.
Après deux années de concerts erratiques et une retraite créative méritée, Jason reprend
la route et nous emporte avec lui sur le courant très lent, presque imperceptible, d’un
Bayou boueux du Sud des Etats-Unis. Hanté par Barret et Lennon, et toujours dans une
économie de moyen, il court vers ce qui semble être l’Eden des déracinés pour nous livrer
des chansons mélancoliques et touchantes guidées par sa voix d'ange déchu.
Les angles s’arrondissent, le ciel s’éclaircit, les sons sont plus chauds et les compositions
s’étoffent : le synthétique investit peu à peu la cabane rustique du folk. Une
orientation plus “pop”, donc, qui tranche avec le minimalisme quasi squelettique du
premier album.
“Doldrums” est un album touffu, nerveux et riche qui convoque des instruments qu’on
à pas forcément l'habitude de retrouver dans la musique folk classique et ancestrale
dans laquelle Jason puise pourtant son inspiration : un synthétiseur, de l’harmonium,
de la batterie, de la contrebasse, du trombone, un triangle, une guimbarde... Pour ce
faire, il s’est entouré d’une clique de Jazzistes psychédéliques, des acrobates qui
retombent toujours sur leurs pattes et improvisent à tout va.
Des chansons fragiles, lumineuses et sensibles donc, qui nous font serpenter sur des
eaux marécageuses, entre les amours surannés du poète (Mystic Fandango, Oo, No
name) et son désarroi face à un monde déliquescent (Sun Melt) dans lequel il se met
en quête d'une une source de vie pure (Doldrums). Malgré la débâcle généralisée,
Jason nous rappelle que le soleil se lèvera toujours (Tambourine) et que le monde
vivant est sacré (John Brown).
Après “Ouest”, “Doldrums” est un véritable delirium tremens dans lequel des fleurs
psychédéliques viennent bourgeonner de ça, de là.

a1- BATTANT. "the butcher". marc houle remix
b1- BATTANT. "bruise". mickey moonlight pan remix.
b2 - BATTANT. "the butcher". it's a fine line electronic instrumental.

It's been ages since we've bought out a vinyl ep... times change and BATTANT deserve it no?
At first we wondered who could we ask to remix these rock songs. We didn't look for too long, but simply turned to those who have been with us since a longtime.

Firstly Mickey Moonlight. The London posse. We've compiled his tracks as early as 2000. Remember that he put out records under the name of SONOVAC or Midnight Mike
on his own label - Flesh Records. The sound was rocky and noisy, and through him we discovered the hit by Zongamin "serious trouble". We knew from tha start his remis would be surprising but we didn't expect him to take Battant from the gutters of London to beaches in the tropics. In his own words "science fiction exotica". A lesson in style particularly joyful,
for those whocan take it on board. Subtle, delicate and falsely naïve. Classy stuff.

Marc Houle is a long way from the tropics. The most rock'n'roll of the producers at Minus, a connaisseur and collectioneur of minimal wave, who has been following Chloé Raunet for a longtime. His remix is a hallucination of druggy darkness, originality and efficacity. We wonder what his dreams are like, but in a slick conformist world, Marc Houle appears to be the one to inject a little ill-intentioned madness needed to free us.

At last It's a fine line. Ivan Smaghe & Tim Paris. The producers of the album, who through a contemporary skinned down sound suceeded in revealing the intensity and urgency of battant's songs. The Butcher is one iof our favourite songs with a cadavre like flute, an obsessive rhythm, stretched to the extreme for a ghostlike instrumental.

We've said it before nightmare are often more revolutionary than dreams.

battant "no head"
firts battant album produced by ivan smagghe and tim paris is out this week ! (feb 23th)

"un groupe de rock cinglant qui joue en toute urgence avec la volonté d'aller à l'essentiel" TSUGI / Alexis Bernier

"No Head suinte un punk-rock décharné et puissant [...] Battant vibre d"une tension inédite" TSUGI /benoit carretier

"nos chouchous rock de l'année 2009" TRAX / patrick thevenin

"impréssionnant premier album du trio anglais postpunk" VOLUME

"le premier album de Battant suinte la crase des trottoirs de l'est londonien. Il ecrase accessoirement le dernier album des Kills comme un cafard. TECHNIKART / olivier tesquet

"les fées se sont sans doute penchées sur le berceau de ces Anglais[...] Il suffit d'écouter un titre pour
comprendre que la new-wave telle qu'imaginée jadis par Suicide, The Cure ou Siouxsie pourrait bien
plonger dans les ténèbres ce XXIème siècle naissant." MAGIC

"quelque part entre Suicide et Siouxsie and the Banshees, ces anglais électrisent tout ce qui bouge"
MODZIK

remote "hardstick" ep feat la horse rmx

[ivan smagghe & danton eeprom]

la horse remix will be included in the tiefschwarz mix for mix mag uk and here are the first feedbacks :
laurent garnier : J'aime beaucoyup A1 & A2 - bien acid trippy head fuck - direct dans mes caisses.
jennifer cardini : i really love la horse remix ! i started with this track last time i played and i gave an intense groove to my dj set ! thank you kill the dj ...
miss kittin: J' adore le Hardstick, original. Il y a une belle tension et progression.
george issakidis : i love this record!!! my cup of tea, from start to end! excellent stuff! can't wait for the album!
geoffroy hi-phen : la horse rmx is the one for me.... very niiiiiiiiice...
romain bno : cool - joué ! j aime a1 et b2 et les gens aussi. support!
get the curse : ça défonce ! bravo pour cette future sortie!

remote "dark enough" lp

Dark Enough is about techno and disco meeting on a same dancefloor, something one feels in the guts. A certain roughness, anchored in the ghetto sound of Detroit and Carpenter is not far off. a voluntary opaqueness, against the tide of trendiness, they play it heavy and slow, the exact opposite of the light fluffy minimalist clouds. This is a storm we are talking about.

REMOTE actually explain it very clearly: “We tried to make a techno that is contemporary, but which doesn’t leave behind its acid house and techno roots, while not giving in to the easy void sound design or minimal flourishes. Dark but not cold. Hard but not insensitive.”

if you cannot wait, you can download right now the album here

battant . "kevin (1989)"
feat andrew weatherall rmx

in that little micro novelty trendy market of ours, what have we got in terms of "heavy trends" (aka death) ??
as they say: the flashy electric neon chair of nu-rave or the painless death by minimal injection: dance, feel nothing, fall asleep, never wake-up... Of course, any conformism puts pressure on you to make a choice when you do not have to. Dig a bit : there are a lot of other things around...
All this rubbish has not been keen to our long-lasting love affair between rock and electronics (nu-rave is not a love affair, it's bad sex). There has been a few flashes of light: Whitey, Joakim, some of the Metronomy stuff, Asja auf Capri, the swamp funk of Two Lone Swordsmen... Not enough though...

So BATTANT then...
A proper band, proper songs, and proper electronics; female vocals and electro beats... Some will say "nothing really new", but no dreams at getting a 3 inches square pics in I.D either, just the fusion clonking together perfectly out of the studio they share with the Two Lone Swordsmen and Boardroom crew.
Andrew Weatherall being an obvious paternal figure if they (we) need one, it's himself who deliver the remix of Kevin, in his words, "stadium dub version".

yeah, Kevin now...
First time we heard it, we honestly though it: booty bubblegum punk vs lyrics that would never make it to the BBC.
oh, yes, the rumour is true, Chloé, BATTANT's lead singer wrote the lyrics after finding a dusty diary by this Kevin in her new flat...charming. this very peculiar alliance of raw pop energy and mentalillness is backed by Blah which is... hmmmm... more of the same.

the battant album will be out on kill the dj during 2008 !

Talking about « The Waiting Room », Chloés first album, is not an easy matter for us. Too early maybe. We would willingly get rid of the idea of a first album of electronic music as being a real difficulty. The gulf exists, certain fell in it, others not …. Chloé however is not even on the road that runs parallel to the gulf. What touches us about Chloé is that we don’t really know on which highway she’s riding.

Several milestones however ……. The Pulp and the Djing of course. Or the story of a discreet girl naturally imposing herself, and from the beginning showing herself to advantage and a sure value on the international electronic scene. A happy tale ……. It’s not very often that fragility and sincerity are “under the spotlights”. Not particularly ambitious, Chloé is just being herself, a disarming exposition of her weaknesses, which became in fact her force. How can doubt be a driving power ? Lets stop a minute on this story of doubt….. Chloé’s first productions on the Karat label for example. It was necessary to doubt for a rising DJ to produce a record like Erosoft. Wobbly, fragile, pop and poetic, practically going towards the danger of everything that may seem necessary, success for idiots. And yet, Chloé obtained immediate recognition from her equals : best clubs, biggest festivals.

One could easily think the her fragile music compensates the hard career of being a DJ. The solitude of hotel rooms, the coldness of airports, the intrinsic weariness. As if two Chloés existed : the international DJ, sure of herself, and the producer, expressing her interior fragility. But Chloé goes even further : DJ, producer, she also studies at the Academy of Music (Conservatoire), writes electro-acoustic music that she mixes, and composes music for choreographies.

In constant search of stability, fragile, among so many things : harmony/dissonance, repetition/rupture, complexity/spontaneity, body (dance)/spirit (dances also but…) je ne comprends pas la précédente phrase dans les parentheses electronic/acoustic …
Questions that not enough producers ask. Maybe we can consider in “The Waiting Room” as being the beginning of replies to questions, fragments (the word is too weak) . The record is first of all a solution to the equation , dear to us all : the maximum distance from the classical structures of dance clubs with infinite dance floors.

And Chloé also talks of things more intimate than they seem : love, with a big or small a, of the fantoms that haunt us, of finding happiness as time goes by, “Around the Clock” , death or far away countries. The text is the less erudite possible. Chloé wants to be touching and most of all not intimidate people. If she plays, mixes and diverts, it’s to avoid what actually touches nobody anymore : the forced experimentations of a hermetic electronic sound, the style of commercial pop dance music.

So we’re talking about emotions, but emotions that are shared with her public. One again, Chloé the discreet, risks revealing herself. An intimate album for a large public, it had to be done. We take our hats off to you Chloé.

chloé. "suspended"
feat mattias aguayo and roccness" broke rmx.

"suspended" is quite appropriate... yes we are there, in between, floating and awaiting. hopefully you are too. Our own Chloé will release her first album on kill the DJ in october. God knows this is a scary moment (in scary times), the first album... so here we are, her and us "suspended" (the term does also imply tension in a way). we will not talk for now about the lp, it would be spoiling what is already our most important release. She is about to jump.
and "suspended" then... well, as ever, Chloé is too. Walking along on the fine line (razor edge?) of club music and experimentation. She is not like one of those minimal funambulists whose perfect sense of balance ruins all the attractiveness of imperfection... she may stumble (that is a quality in our world) but she will not fall (another beautiful word though).
"suspended" she says.
a nd yeah, words sometimes come handy. Matthias Aguayo called some of his remixes (including this one), "broke", reloading our weapon of non-equilibrium, adding pitching and blur to Chloé's suspension. Thanks to him for understanding her precious wobbliness.
seize that micro moment now, even if there are no chance Chloé will let it freeze in conformism.

good flight. speak soon.

jason edwards . codeine
feat tigertiming & tim paris reworks

here is the first extract from ouest, jason edwards' album released on kill the dj. and yes, codeine it is. had to be after all the buzz and fuzz that came from its inclusion on the dysfunctional family cd.
many conservative minds will tell you that jason's pitched down laudanum folk could not be remixed. the same who did not get codeine on the mixed cd, the same who did not get the cd sleeve, the same always the same.yeah, in a way, jason's music does not need remixes as the idea of slow couple dancing on downers is appealing in itself but, hey, here at kill the dj, we are trying to be faithful to our truth. even if it is gonna hurt a few people, truth always does. so,ooooh yeeeah, jason can dance!

he can thanks to the heroes in making of TIGER TIMING. TT are johnny burnip, legendary purveyor of quality music at the London Sounds of the Universe emporium (and home to the excellent Soul Jazz label-check his capracara stuff!!!!), and radovan scasacia, the man behind the uber cool projects secondo and am/pm. obscure??? not for long guys if we judge by the quality of this mix (god knows if that was a hard one to do, jason original recording having been made at home on a four track). a note: to all the boys and girls who will fall in love with the stoner chick sample at the end of the mix, it is not from any movie, but johnny's girlfriend herself.

jason can also dance thanks to our old friend TIM PARIS. Tim is now ivan's neighbour in London (expect future collaborations on kill the dj, including a remix of INK AND NEEDLE, but we'll come back to that...). honestly, we think this is tim's best yet. he managed to stripped everything down to a minimal groove that jives like a berliner on mother's little helpers. a proper remix, true to jason and true to that murky edge we love and cherish.

jose manuel "il giardino dei tarocchi"

a1: il giardini dei tarocchi
b1: the end of the story.

we are searching, searching, searching... and sometimes, others find us. classic history, a demo mailed, a crappy mp3 through our web site. and  sometimes it hits us. a rare gem. like jose manuel, italian guy with a spannish name. strange... 
when we received the tracks it was a perfect timing (most of the time it's also a question of chance), we were stuck in the A.A.K music (Anonymous Ableton Kafe Musik), the despare search for minimalism ending up in a hollowneness....  
here, we always love weird disco, too long tracks, twisted structures.... in one words, " some kind of idea of non effitienty" . let's dare it, the dirty words : spychedelism. like jason edwards sometimes... 
but we are not alone: from "the Emperor Machine to Das Etwas, from the too productive lindstom to  fuck up Ink & Needle ( we will come back to them soon)  jose manuel looks like  alone, lost  into his small  world. let's hope he will be trapped there for a long long time ... 

KRIKOR : ROCK HARD IN A FUNKY PLACE EP
a1 . Krikor . “Rock hard in a funky place”
a2 . Krikor . “94 east genius edit”
B1 . George Issakidis dzir rmx.

So the story goes...
We can not believe this tracks finally comes out... krikor gave it to Ivan probably about four years ago (a few of you may have it on cd, he thought that it was so cool that he could not keep it for himself), an for years mean a century ago, before the world turned into, as lord sabre said, "klaus van tinkle tankle's kingdom", big clicks and deep crackles, but small ideas.

Here at kill the dj, we always put krikor aside from the new minimal conformism (we'd better, he lives in our basement), that even if he helped shaping its momentum. "Rock Hard in a Funky Place" proved, and still proves (how many tracks still sound fresh after all this time?) how much Krikor is free-spirited. Like us, he tries not to belong anywhere. And all together: shaaaake your chains!!!!!

the big rocker (the eponymous track by A.E may have been one of the reason the treasure was kept buried-it's all forgotten now) is complemented by two furious interpretations:

The 94 east genius edit by Krikor himself, shows another sparkling side to his personality. In a way closer to his France Copland works, it operate a ghetto switch: from booty Detroit to Jackin Chicago. and the wind blows hard, believe us...

George Issakidis, formerly of The Micronauts, one of the unsung hero of the french scene , provides us with a fierce slow industrial mix which will please all from Ewan Pearson to Manu le Malin. the new nu-beat indeed...

this was an easy prece of wrinting. yeah, for once, the title says it all.

chloé: around/overhead (out now)

A1 : "around "  : "you can't see nobody" is it  too dark in the club? the lights too bright in your eyes? where are your  friends? are you having fun? feeling a little scared? what are you really  doing here? Should you be here ? A little worried?   Ghostly thoughts  in a ghostly club. When Chloé says "you" does she really mean "I"?   No  stable thoughts. just flashes. the beat. too loud to think. everything else:  simple, like this. right here. right now.

B1 : " overhead "   : the eternal murky waters. the inbetween where we  always stand, "feet in the mud, head in the clouds" if we were younger. feet  in the gutter, head in the stars he told me  the other day that "if you're not on the edge, you're taking up too much  room".   god he was so  right. that fine line. opening/closing. twelve or six. the best of both  worlds.

you will not hear chloé leave. as  usual. she may bring the album next  time.

kill the dj introducing: the dysfuntional family.


A guy in a lesbian club, a tough girl in a boy's world... we are proud not only to confuse others (confusion after all, has become a fashion accessory) but moreover, to be confused . clenched fist raised, hair down. same thing.
in the language of love, the same word is used for "genre" and "gender"; angle sorted for the cd then. "what is the genre of this cd? " asks you neighbour, "what is your gender?" asks your mum. genre, gender, genre, genre, gender, genre...
And what about your family, what is their "genre"? more: who the fuck is your family? normal-not normal? whatever. we probably all reconstructed ourselves here, in this "dysfunctional family", the one who fucks genders and genres.
anyway, at kill the dj, straight genre and gender have been longtime dead and buried. an absence shard by all of us in a dark and seedy club, where  blondes wear a moustache with elegance, where the lady toilet attendant is a guy in mini skirt, where the sweaty run down white vest is the flag of our personal revolution.

no style is style. no gender is gender.
We are all dynsfunctional

track listing ...
1- Planning to Rock: death dream. Le titre, tout est dans le titre... Un de nos espoirs, Cabaret on nasty speed...
2-Dapayk: close your eyes. The Funk. The Punk Funk. Mais non, pas ce genre là, non...
3-Enik: why do you love me ? (broke rmx). Matthias Aguayo et son petit copain pour un rayon de soleil. Non, on rigole.
4- 2000 & one: get down (shinedoe rmx). « Down, down, down... » dit l'autre. « Up, up, up » we say.
5- Egoexpress: the fool of the new city. Le plus proche d'un manifeste ?
6- Musiccargo: one way ticket. My girlfriend is a biker. She drives fast fast fast...
7- Jason Edwards: codeine. Album à venir sur Kill the DJ. Hero-folk et héros folk.
8- Botox: hummer party. Cosmo Vitelli vs Tekel : Slow is the new fast. Yeah yeeaaah yeaaaoooooooooww... (the sound of a record stopping)
9- Louderbach: Grace (anxiety). a definition of our lives.
10- Whignomy Brothers: wombat . A club in the clouds.
11- Waterlilly: dissidance (thomas anderson rmx). La redescente, c'est la moitié du plaisir chérie...
12- Remote: teaser. Kills the Dj. Mascara overdose.
13- Point B: after burns. Le soleil noir brûle sévère...
14- Billy Childish & Holly Golightly: let me know you. On vous avait dit, et on y pense encore, « real heroes never die »... The punkest couple on the planet.