Agar Agar

It's the aim of that song. Or maybe the aim is to get laid if you’re still a virgin.

Clara is a singer and songwriter. Amongst other things she likes playing the Sims 4 and watching movies. Armand likes to compose weird music and ordinary pictures, except when he's playing videogames on his computer. We met in art school a while ago.

It’s not jelly that’s delicious it’s more the ants that love agar agar. Armand used to raise ants in little transparent tubes and Clara would feed them with agar agar and other stuff –it’s just a texture agent. It means that it’s something you use in cooking only for its texture properties – it has no flavour or colour. It says a lot about industrial cooking nowadays, which is close to chemistry and its grandfather, alchemy; it’s analytic. The synthesis of the meal is made with separate components that are used for single properties: texture, taste, flavour, colour, etc.
We can’t say it's directly connected to our way of making music, but it has a lot to do with the way synthesizers work: the sound is made from different specific modules that are not made to work alone. Agar Agar is just the part of meal, like LFO is a part of sound synthesis.

Italodisco in itself is not that irresistible, but we were influenced by music that was itself influenced by that genre – but with more emotions and images into it, like Bernard Fevre (Black Devil Disco Club) or Shit Robot. I think that we passed those first influences. Now we are opening our music to many more different kind of tastes that allow us summon a wider spectrum of emotions and messages.

‘80s dance music was clearly something we could hear a lot in 2010-2015’s DJ sets. It became a fad in Parisian clubs and bars. This wave of nostalgia matched a period where young musicians, interested in electronic music, rediscovered the world of old analogue synthesizers – and Armand was one of them. These machines were a real relief for those who were bored of computers and this cold bureaucratic way of making electronic music. Some of these old keyboards (we bought the cheapest ones three years ago) can almost produce ‘80s dance music by themselves. That’s why we think it is not really interesting to develop that aspect of our music any more. We are looking at a lot of different directions, challenging our synthesizers and drum machines setup.

We write songs by intuition. We first put the machines on, play on them, Clara sings whatever passes through her mind, and then we put a structure over it. That’s why our first songs were influenced by the machines that made them. We think that’s a good way to compose, as it reveals the direct and present context you’re in when you write the song and compose the music, so it’s always very sincere and anchored in your time – even if we are now experimenting with other methods, like cadavre exquis, or the rules of rigorous counterpoint (that are obviously made to be disrespected).

Yes! It took us time to make new songs because we spent most of last year on tour. But we’re back with a new single out the second of March and an album coming in September.

It would definitely be Suspiria or Daisies, or actually any De Palma movie. He is a genius.

A sim-move from the Sims. The one where they make a little cute wave with their hand. It’s a really awkward move.

We wouldn’t try to. It’s way too difficult to speak about something you don’t even see. Maybe we could do it if we played in front of a huge mirror and spent the whole concert watching ourselves but that sounds like an awfully narcissistic idea.

We would say it’s sufficiently rated.

I guess there’s a lot of awesome stuff right now in France in many different genres and scenes. Loto Retina is sick in the experimental field, or Faire in a more electronic punk style. Losange, Musique Chienne, Leo Hoffsaes: a lot of French artists deserve to be known outside our borders. It’s hell worth digging.

Clara can’t stop listening to Smerz. Armand is on the OST by Arcanum. We also like to spend our nights surrounded by dungeon synth.