RADIOMENTALE
The Landscape Melts Into Itself
Release date : end of october 2021
(Irradiant Hologram/Idol)
Tracklisting :
Track 1 : « Trees Are Multiplying feat. Wild Anima » 19’28
Track 2 : « Wind Bells », 16’15
Track 3 : « Enveloppe Echo » 21’59
Track 4 : « Les arbres se multiplient » 19’28
Cover photo : François Fleury
Artwork : Tom Uferas/Studio République
RadioMentale : a narrative ambient music, dedicated to the imagination
The new album of RadioMentale gathers four musical compositions, at the crossroads of ambient, sound art and radio art. However, the ambient music as envisaged by the two members of RadioMentale does not designate so much a serene and relaxing music, but rather a form of immersive sound creation, dedicated to the mental and immobile journey, based on poetic and fragmented narratives, which can remind the art of cinematographic montage and sound design.
Four tracks, between travel, fiction and soundscape
The album opens with « Trees Are Multiplying », a long composition in the form of fiction and soundscape, whose text, signed by Eric Pajot, is spoken by the Berlin musician Wild Anima. A kind of strange and nocturnal tale, in which two lascivious teenagers, hidden in a car in the heart of a forest, forget for a moment the world’s march and its anxiety-provoking, even dystopian, current events, broadcasted through the waves of their car radio. The album closes with the original french version of the song, « Les Arbres Se Multiplient », interpreted in a deeper and more mysterious voice by the author.
« Wind Bells » and « Enveloppe Echo », the two following tracks, are inspired by the live performances, partly improvised, that the duo has realized over the last ten years in different events, museums, galleries or festivals, as well as various sound design works realized for long-feature movies. Developed over a long period of time, the tracks mix electronic layers, drones, loops, textures, frequencies, stridencies, found sounds and field recordings, with fragments of voice, narrative or dialogue, which often function as a trigger for the listener’s imagination.
Far from a polished electronic aesthetic and digital processing, RadioMentale’s music, in addition to its spoken or whispered voices, is composed from living, flickering, unstable sounds, close to analog, recorded during their daily life, excerpts from films or documentaries, or inspired by their travels around the world. Each of the tracks, often built around several movements, settles in over time and requires listening that is both open and attentive, in order to give free rein to the drifting of one’s mind. An art of collage, editing and mixing, in which one can guess or discover surprising and singular samples, extracted from movies, medias or archives.
Biography and influences
Jean-Yves Leloup and Éric Pajot started their career in 1992, with their cult radio show, Radio Mentale, broadcasted then on Radio FG in Paris, as well as on Couleur 3 in Switzerland and Shibuya FM in Tokyo, while mixing in the first chill-out of the french rave scene. Two mixed CD were released at the time, The Slow Room and The Cut-Up Scenario.
At the time, if their practice of sampling and collage evokes the new ambient wave which appears at the beginning of the 1990s, with English formations like The Orb or Future Sound Of London, their music also draws its influences from the cinema of David Lynch, the practice of field recording and audio-naturalists, the first works of Brian Eno, the industrial and experimental underground of the 1980s, the electronica or the oldest concrete music.
From the 2000’s onwards, their work developed around musical and sound creations realized in the world of art, radio, cinema or luxury, in the form of compositions, performances, cine-concerts, audiovisual installations or commissioned works of sound illustration and sound-design. They returned to music production with the album I-Land (2012) and the three albums of Eric Pajot’s solo project, Human By Billions (Human By Billions, 2015, Sacred Fields, 2019 and Solar, 2020).
RadioMentale’s selected discography :
I-Land Redux (2020, Irradiant Hologram) & I-Land (2012, F4T)
Traumavision (2010, Stembogen, with Pierre La Police)
I Could Never Make That Music Again (2007, Sub Rosa, with L-R)
The Cut-Up Scenario (2004, MK2 Music)
The Slow Room (1997, In-Out)
RadioMentale 