The man from Check Morris and Antinote discusses his creative passions in a rare interview with Tony Poland.
Design for records from Antinote, Whities, Dark Entries, Proibito, Paralaxe Editions all make the grade this month.
The Italian producer will release his debut album, Previsto, on the cult Paris label next month.
Antinote has many facets to its aims as a label, but there are definitely times when it seems Zaltan and co. are keen to champion a very French kind of electronic music. Nationality-based musical definitions can be cringeworthy at best, calling to mind the right wing jack-boot of British Oi! punk or German oom-pah band pastiche, but you can’t deny that electronic music from France has often had a personality that could not come from anywhere else. In Antinote’s case, sometimes the artists don’t even have to be French to fit this bill. Just listen to Latvia’s finest, Domenique Dumont, with their bright and breezy Gallic pop. Syracuse too ooze Parisian lounge lizard sophistication, and Geena’s chunky hardware house movements sports a special kind of flair.
An impeccable hour of music encompassing funk, boogie, house and techno from the Antinote mainstay.
Like many of electronic music’s most interesting labels, Antinote has always been comfortable embracing the contrast between dark and light. The Parisian label has managed to find a balance between moody, murky electronic darkness – see the releases by Stephane Laporte, Albinos, and some of Iueke and Geena’s more robust moments – and releases that reach-out towards the afternoon sun with all the hazy enthusiasm of a newborn child. In fact, many of these more obviously picturesque moments – particularly D.K’s wonderful album, Drop, and Domenique Dumont’s stunning mini-album, Comme Ça – could be considered among the imprint’s finest releases to date.
The Italian producer gets cut to wax for the first time with Menti Singole.
Soak up the Antinote regular’s latest batch of psychedelic box jams for the Parisian label.
The press release for Paki-Visnadi’s Imaginary Choreography, out on the eclectically elegant Antinote, alerts us to the mythical discovery of these recordings that seems to hail from the years when markets still yielded jewels. Filmmaker Johanna Heather Anselmo, partner to Antinote’s Iueke and a cultured hand at rummaging through boxes of old tapes, found a BASF tape in a Parisian flea market, but instead of it containing some yé-yé rehearsal of upper class teenagers it was something really quite exceptional.
There’s something a little maddening about the slow emergence of Iueke material from Gwen Jamois via his friend Quentin Vandewalle’s Antinote label. With all these tracks made back in the early ‘90s, one can’t help but feeling a little flustered as to why they sat unreleased for so long, with not so much as a whisper coming out of whichever Parisian attic they were crafted in. Between the three records already released and this latest trio of tracks there is a consistent level of sophistication that deserves to have been recognised back in the time when they were created. It hardly matters to the quality of the sounds, but one wonders what might have happened if the music had found its way to the surface back when it was made.
The unheraled work of Venetian pair Paki Zennaro and Gianni Visnadi has been uncovered by the Paris label.
Some of electronic music’s most consistent labels of recent years have traded on the interplay between dark and light, alternating between releases that chill the blood, dumb the senses and soothe the soul. Top of the list is arguably Quentin Vandewalle’s Antinote, whose releases are getting increasingly hard to predict. On one hand, you have the murky, industrial-influenced electronics of Nico Motte, the spaced-out synthesizer experiments of Stephane Laporte and the murky techno rhythms of Iueke; on the other, the humid, tribal-influenced tropical compositions of Albino and the shimmering, rave-era rush of Geena. It’s as if Vandewalle is a man of schizophrenic tastes; half of him wants to embrace misery, the other half run down Parisian streets naked, while feeling the love-for-all effects of particularly strong MDMA.
You can experience the refinement and class of the Frenchman’s latest record in full here.
The Parisian will return to Antinote with a new record due next month.
The Antinote train keeps on rolling as a one-stop shop for some of the most essential unearthed gems from the fertile underground of French techno and electro curiosities, and once again an unfamiliar name is presented to us in the shape of Panoptique. With but a couple of obscure compilation releases behind him, Bordeaux-based Panoptique makes a debut release here that more than steps up to the other shamanistic machine mantras that the label has dealt in thus far.
Stream a blinding 12-minute techno cut recorded straight to tape by the new Antinote artist.