Category: Music

Rodolphe Burger: “Good because it’s the feeling I had at the end of this album” 

Former Kat Onoma leader recently released “Good”, a new solo album

You started the guitar at 9 years old. Where did you get the desire for this instrument? The sound of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar? The radios of American bases in Germany that you captured in Alsace? 

“Both ! Hendrix at the time he was on RTL. It was this radio before, we were listening to amazing things. This is another era … There was the first phenomenon of globalization almost, on a fairly dazzling scale. The entire planet was quickly electrified by sound. It’s impressive in the years 67/68, the number of great albums that were made in record time and were broadcast in a massive way. It was not at all a formatted, commercial music.”

Can you tell me briefly about Kat Onoma’s story and why this adventure ended? At the time you did not enter any box, that’s what blocked you? 

“Kat Onoma has been a very long story, 20 years. To compare, the Beatles, it’s just 4 years old. We started in the early 80s and stopped in 2003. I did not think we would have had such a long history.” [ . . . ]

Read Full Interview: Rodolphe Burger: “Good because it’s the feeling I had at the end of this album”.

La Mer de Debussy by the Orchester national de France and piano with Francesco Piemontesi

Live from the Auditorium, Debussy’s Sea, so marvelous and mysterious, brings to light the elusive nature of air and water. Upstream the pianist Francesco Piemontesi, whom we will receive at intermission, mingles with softness and virtuosity to the Orchester national de France.
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French electronic duo Her find immortality in their music

“We choose the way we’ll be remembered.” The first song Simon Carpentier and Victor Solf wrote as French electronic duo Her opens their self-titled debut album with those words. Both of them were afraid of the future at the time and needed to make a song about how they should be the ones to decide how they are remembered. No one else could decide.

“We Choose” was released after Carpentier’s death from cancer, aged 27, in August 2017. He and Solf had met over a decade ago at their school in the medieval town of Rennes, north France, forming Her in 2015 after their first band, electro-pop band The Popopopops, split two years earlier.

Knowing their time was limited, they mapped out how they wanted their debut album to sound, and how the entire project would be presented to the world. You’d be hard-pushed to find a record or another band to compare it to, and it’s not what you might expect from a French electronic act.

“Making this album was a very intense part of our life,” Solf says. He’s sat, in an orange roll-neck sweater and black trousers – handsome in a particularly French way, with a strong jaw and dark, close-cropped hair – at a venue in Paris where the first part of a documentary about Her will be shown, along with a live performance by him and his band members.

 

“It was really important for us to be able to produce our songs, to be really focused on the whole project,” he continues. “But it was also important to trust people and bring them in; we’d been working with our sound engineer for five years, even before Her, and he really helped us a lot on the production and the mixing.

“Sometimes you can’t see anymore what’s wrong with a song, so someone a little bit outside can help. It was the same with the musicians, Simon could play the guitar and the bass and I could play the keyboard and some drums, so we could have recorded it ourselves if we’d really wanted, but it’s not how we think about music. We started to work with three other musicians – without computers – in the studio, and it was really nice to have different opinions.” Continue reading “French electronic duo Her find immortality in their music” →