Sequence Collective

Third LP of Cabaret Contemporain, French band (featuring Fabrizio Rat on keys) who use acoustic instruments (piano, guitar, bass, drums, contrabass) to produce a "hand-crafted" club music infused with techno. Inspired by Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, or Drexciya, the five members already had a career on classical scene; their idea is not to replay classical techno tunes but to create a new path for the electronic music. Two tracks feature Blackstrobe Records label boss, Arnaud Rebotini. "Ballaro", which opens Cabaret Contemporain's third album, begins with light percussions, which seem to turn on themselves, while being conveyed by reverberations close to dub. After a few minutes of convolutions, the piece gets out of hand, transporting the listener into a rich form of pulsating trance, irrigated by a soaring melody and punctuated by persistent piano tones. "La Selva"; more subdued, has the same energy, the track ending in an even more powerful way, a kind of paroxysm. Finally, the strangest and most minimal "Cactus", features a singular groove, which evokes the most brutal house from Chicago, or the sometimes obsessive techno from Detroit. Just like other tracks such as "Transistor" or "TGV", fueled by sweat and trance, Séquence Collective bears all the intensity of a techno cut for clubs' dancefloors. The only difference being that their music is not played with synths, drum machines, or software, but with acoustic instruments. The band is composed of five musicians and a sound engineer: Fabrizio Rat on piano, Giani Caserotto on guitar, Julien Loutelier on drums, Ronan Courty and Simon Drappier on double bass, and of course Pierre Favrez on console. They met at the prestigious Paris Conservatoire in the late 2000s. Through classical or contemporary music, jazz and improvisation, rock and experimentation, they share a common passion for the original and futuristic techno of the 1990s, that of Jeff Mills, Robert Hood or Drexciya, which they have decided to reinvent and further in their own way. Not as a simple stylistic exercise practiced by virtuoso musicians, but rather as a new path for modern music, and for their generation. "The original idea" they say, "was to make club music by hand, like craftsmen. Like in the early days of jazz, our band managed to transform itself into a kind of dancing machine."