Lil Ronin - Comme des Mots

Surprise debut album by Paris underground veteran, Lil' Ronin (promoter, DJ...) offering a rather unexpected French take on a very British verse of music. Under the influence of Modern Love, TTT, Helm, DJ Trystero, Perko and other Boomkat alumni, the Parisian producer wards off the all-too stiffling ghosts of French Touch and Filter House with a mazy and intricate LP of post-club electronics. Lush and complexe Comme des Mots is the product of hundreds of hours spent between the nicotine-stained walls of a windowless self-built studio. Superbly produced/mixed/mastered and hard to pin-down music, released in a beautiful screen-printed sleeve.

In a post-club, post-techno - post-everything - music world, one can not, in all seriousness, wish to spread a clear message. It will necessarily bath in static, referential haze and other unspeakable interferences. Rather than fight it, Lil' Ronin, embraces this state of deliquescence by cobbling together his own electronic ruins with cracked VSTs, shattered synths, precarioulsy recorded voices (his own, mostly) and some miraculously strong compressors. Comme des mots is mumble club music, incidentally recalling the post-war poetry of Lettristes and the Beat Generation, and actually produced by someone who's been heavily consuming mumble rap, cloud rap and other highly codeine fulled productions.

There's something monstrous in Lil' Ronin's music, a feeling of dubiousness emanating from the bastardized fruit of his geeky love for UK dance music, gimmicky early 21st century songs and all sorts of experimental sounds from the past 30 years. That's precisely that monstrosity that makes Comme des Mots memorable, distinguishing itself from the lot of highly codified (and thus stylized) shoegaze / progressive house / hyperpop releases flooding streaming platforms. It's a set of songs so direct, so unceremoniously bringing poetry back into the music, in unexpected ways (cut-up fragments of text read by Lil Ronin, again, vaguely recalling poetic iconoclasts of the mid 20th Century) that it feels at odds with a time when everything needs to be labeled and easily identified (even experimental music, but do we need to recall how conservative these scenes can be?). That's the beauty of unfiltered self-released music. Bare and idiosyncratic electronic music, the kind of records will be happy to dig in 20 years. (M/M - wholesale: shops, contact us)