philip sherburne

Paris, July 2003.

In Octet, the French have gotten their revenge on the Brits. The duo's (don't ask me how they get eight out of two; je n'sais pas) "Hey Bonus" takes the adamantine harpsichord twitter and pelican's swallow strings of an imaginary Magical Mystery Tour and the syrupy, heavy-lidded croon of a faux-McCartney and proceeds to chop it all hither and thither; over a perfectly tubular walking bass line, with rat-a-tatting timestretched snares and garish electric guitars, and hacking out syllables until our Englishman's spitting nonsense, they take 60s psychedelic pop and turn it into this strange new thing. It sounds almost like an Avalanches cover project, if that makes any sense, with laptoppers recreating every nostalgic sample pixel by rutted pixel.

Krikor's remix, in the meantime, proves that the Parisians (Krikor and the Karat/Katapult/Circus Company crew of co-conspirators like Ark, Kean, and Cabanne [ak ak ak ak ak]) are making a kind of techno like no other on the planet right now. Krikor chops the vocal into little gelatin chunks and proceeds to batter it with all kinds of percussive outbursts. Overblown handclaps and roughed-up harpsichord stabs swipe back and forth like sandpapered buffers in a car wash. The bass that he uses is index-fingered, jabbing more like an electro (or maybe eskibeat) riff, and it's weirdly detuned at that, so that instead of grounding the song with a cozy pedal tone, it slides askew and gives everything the feeling of being stuck inside an elevator car that's just had its cable cut.

By the time he slides into a slaloming schaffel groove midway through the track, you just want to hand him the keys and say, "You can HAVE the car, I wasn't going anywhere anyway" -- and sign over the deed while you're at it. Dude is owning techno right now anyway, and repaving the Autobahn while he drives.