Carrageenan & Christophe Clébard (B)

Carrageenan
is the solo electronic project of Matthieu Levet, combining industrial textures, dubbed-out rhythms, noise and hypnotic repetition. His latest LP, Dry Signal, was recently released on Brussels-based label Nose Job.

Carrageenan unleashes 'Dry Signal', a minimal and disquieting album. He breaks down the whole random universe of the industrial age into cryptic fragments, and of urban disaster into cracked concrete. The concept of deviance is key, he's on the edge. The marriage of reason and nightmare that's dominating our world has only turned out to be ever more ambiguous. The magnification of sound to the point where it becomes unsettling is a central theme, literally blowing up the sound, until it becomes explosive. Arousal results from the repetition and impact. Compulsively the white heat of its images seems to burn off the record, and the white light of its landscapes lingers on in the mind. Obsession quickly spirals out of control.

Christophe Clébard
is a solo electronic / synth-punk project recalling the hypnotic groove of Suicide, minimal wave and DIY electronics. His latest album, Le futur c'est la drogue, was recently released on Moli Del Tro.

He describes himself as follows: “Clébard is brutalism.” The term suggests a raw, undecorated frontal approach, yet his work may be better situated on the side of art brut, through a practice without mediation or filter.

His writing, often in French (which is not his mother tongue), is free, stripped of any syntactic rigidity. It goes straight to the point: repeated words strike like balls against a wall, revealing the darker zones of his mind where guilt, fear, and existential anxiety coexist.

The sound composition, equally minimal, sustains a dense and obsessive mental space, a vortex in which trance appears as the only escape. Driving drum machines, relentlessly hammered electronic loops, and a battered synthesizer, his music acts as an outlet and unfolds within a physical, strangely hypnotic synth-punk aesthetic that hits viscerally.
Here, the title,

Le Futur c’est la drogue, which should here be translated as The Future Is the Drug, is not to be read as a promise, but as a statement of fact. The present is no longer an experience, but pure consumption. Life itself has taken the form of a dependency.

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