*100 copies limited edition* "The idea came to us during a drunken conversation in a South London pub with Philippe from the Tapeworm label," says François Kirmann Gamaury aka Franz Kirmann aka Dj Salinger - a French producer who has been based in London for over twenty years. "Voyage voyage voyage" is a mixtape. But not in the traditional sense of the word. Kirmann calls it a subjective mixtape, where the tracks are not played as they are, but presented as they are felt by the artist. A little like DJ Vladimir Ivkovic, who slows down certain tracks on his turntables to reveal a different aspect, Kirmann zooms into the very fabric of the recordings, stretching notes and sounds to infinity, to uncover a hidden meaning, altering our perception of these songs that can sometimes seem a little outdated. Here, they are transformed into ghostly, bewitching layers that evoke a memory of a period in his life, a sonic trace of a somewhat naive era, which returns today in the form of an echo, a nostalgic music soaked in reverb and distortion.
Kirmann grew up in Senegal in the 80s, and remembers the summers he spent at his grandparents', listening to songs on the radio, on the day-care center bus, in a Prisunic in the Dordogne, or at a camping party in Alsace: Catherine Lara, Elsa, Veronique Jeannot and of course Desireless and her famous hit "Voyage voyage". The songs selected for the cassette all have in common a desire to leave home, a search for somewhere else, a lost love, a memory - the preferred themes of a certain type of French pop known as variété. These ideas of escape are accentuated here by the sound treatment applied to them. The songs are paralyzed in time, frozen in sound, as if certain passages had been underlined in a novel to detach them from the full text. Distortion, echo, reverberation and other effects are applied, giving the music and sound a dreamy, distant quality. Some recognizable passages reveal themselves and emerge from the sonic haze, revealing themselves more clearly, while others are drowned in an imprecise fog, a music akin to ambient that envelops the listener.
Kirmann: "Each track is based on a French variété song from the '80s, and I wanted to re-create an impression of distance, something far away. The tracks become tapestries of sound, but the essence of the original song is still present. There's a novel by Patrick Modiano where the characters send out wanted notices for France from a radio station in a faraway country. The sound is muffled, the voices muffled. I kind of had this idea in mind of doing something similar, as if the songs were heard on an old radio set but emitted from a distant station from another time." The result is a nostalgic voyage, an ambient, nebulous music fashioned from 80's synthetic hits. Imagine Fennesz or My Bloody Valentine playing Laurent Voulzy covers and you're almost there...
Loveless no, Desireless yes!
