The Japanese House. I don’t know, it’s hard to wrap your head around. I mean, is she a space alien from an advanced culture that has achieved the platonic ideal of music? Is she a time traveler from our own distant future where the slow and deliberate action of time has polished music into a perfect sphere of transcendence? I await a reply from Science. In fairness, the sounds we perceive from these tracks could be captured transmissions from an advanced culture or signals bent back in time from our own planet; the artist we know as Amber Bain may be a hologram The Government created as a cover. I did see her play live once though and I felt like she was a corporeal presence. Assume nothing, question everything.
I’m gonna keep it simple on this one. First, hot knowledge bomb for you. Her name is not Christine. It’s Héloïse Letissier, which may be the most French name I’ve ever seen, and I keep pronouncing it in a truly awful French accent in my head over and over. I’m talking Steve Martin in The Pink Panther bad, here.
But never mind that. Brass tacks: “Tilted” is one of the best songs I’ve heard in a long, long time. Thick and round and warm and then she does the spoken word in French and…::sigh:: I want to wrap myself up in this song and stay there. It’s synth-y heaven. “Paradis Perdus” I love for the Kanye “sample”. She really does justice to it and since she sings the rest of the song in French, of course I adore it even though I have no idea what it means. I understand the lyrics are from a ’70s French song of the same title, but I wouldn’t understand it any better on the original recording, so this is just gonna be a CatQ song for me.
So, I don’t know how listening to music works for all of you. Everyone kind of ingests and internalizes these things differently. For me in particular and in service of this particular narrative, I’ve got this one little alcove in my mental musical taste pavilion set aside especially for a certain kind of electronica that I cannot trivially define with a genre boundary. This Department of Lovely Electronica, it has a kind of continuously listening spidey-sense steadfastly monitoring the musics that enter into my ears ever vigilant for the undefinable hallmarks of what it needs. The things that tie these artists and songs together is some nebulous thread determined entirely by this abstract processor but when I find new ones, I know I’ve found them, and a little figurative bell rings and I am compelled to listen to them on repeat for a month. Lights and her most recent record, Little Machines: ding. Ding ding ding. Ding.