- There's something in the Evian down in Nimes - part ecstasy, part sugar if this album is any indication. Home to a growing number of producers including Delon & Dalcan, Florent, 22 Crew and Paul Nazca, it's a town currently revelling in rave-y euphoria. Matzak, aka Nicolas Matuszczak, is also from Nimes and his debut LP 'Life Beginnings' is a concept album of sorts. Dedicated to the birth of his daughter, it combines the distinctly adult sounds of his earlier Kickboxer 12" 'Might is Right' - noisy Cologne techno praised and played by DJ Koze and Dominik Eulberg - with bright, naive tones and spiralling nursery-rhyme melodies. It's a strange blend which doesn't always work, a bit like handing drugs to children, or fobbing sweets off on clubbers.
While the notion 'techno for minors' might seem suspect, 'Life Beginnings' is not all late-night hedonism. The abrasive opener 'La Muerte', with its cumbersome hip-hop rhythms stumbling over a looped obscene vocal, is deceptive, as are the click beats and lazy skip of 'Harmony', a subtlety soon crushed by wailing house-diva histrionics. The final 'Daddaughter' spins lush circles of keyboard tones and bubbling arpeggios into a motorik psychedelic mobile, like Stereolab making 'Soothing Sounds for Babies', until disparate rock drums barge in, causing tantrums.
The rest all follow the same pattern: percussive, minimal beginnings opening into grand, overblown, trance-hued gushing. Even the most inauspicious start ends up bloated: tiny glitches are reverbed into caverns in 'Girl in Water', the hi-hats becoming hissing vipers. 'French Pop' follows a similar trajectory to Nazca's 'Svell', stealing his woodblocks but sending his skewed tone patterns to kindergarten. The same fate befalls 'Real Fusion', where a bleak low-end drone and portentous pads are sweetened with twinkling music box chimes, and 'The Burglar', where the arpeggios pile on until we're drowning in a blur of sparkles and glitter.
'Life Beginnings' is therefore frustrating: Matzak sets up some thrilling beginnings, where everything seems certain to evolve into the tough, dizzying banging of a Eulberg set, only for them to become clogged with sugary syrup. I can't speak for younger listeners, but I'm sure they'd non-plussed with trance creeping into their bedtime stories.
Lista de títulos1. La Muerte
2. Girls in Water
3. French Pop
4. Algo Star
5. Harmony
6. Physical
7. The Burglar
8. Real Fusion
9. Puzzle Bubble
10. Daddaughter