I’m not a fan of favouritism, contrary to the stereotype of people who write music and film blogs I don’t spend a lot of time mulling over questions like “Who was the best Keytar player of the 80’s?” or “In which film was Jack Nicholson’s face most manic?” There are however a special few artists I revere above all the others; Pepe Bradock is one such artist.
For me, Pepe Bradock (real name Julien Auger) is to French music what Jean-Pierre Jeunet is to French film-making. His work is imbued with an oddball eccentricity and, much like Jeunet captures the world through a lens tinted with the peculiarity of his own personality, Bradock’s refreshingly experimental and haphazard take on house music is like no other.
One frustrating aspect of Pepe Bradock’s work however, is its scarcity. He only releases one or two limited 12” ep’s a year, so that often just as you’ve given up hope of hearing something new from him, he catches you unawares with a new release. This only adds to his enigmatic character though and his records are generally well worth the wait.
He’s come a long way from tracks like ‘Deep Burnt’ and ‘Life’, released around the turn of the millennium, and now considered classics of the deep house genre. His music has become increasingly more experimental in recent years as he seems to want to push house music as an art form in itself, seeing how far can test his audience. Fan’s of Sven Vath will remember that his favourite tune to finish his sets with a couple of years ago was Bradock’s ‘Rhapsody in Pain’, a decidedly odd soundscape of voices seemingly torn between torture and ecstasy, all the while backed up by a monotonous, plodding beat. Although this may not be to everyone’s tastes some of his other recent offerings still show his roots in jazz, funk and hip hop remain, albeit now contorted into something new, strange and beautiful. ‘Intriguing Feathered Creature’, for example, sounds like a drunken jazz house take on John Cage’s pieces for prepared piano, in a good way!
Apart from the odd ep here and there, it had been a long time since his last album Synthese was released in 1998, so you can imagine my excitement then when out of the blue (as his releases often are) Pepe Bradock released Confiote de Bits, a compilation of his past remixes. His canon of remix work is as sporadic but perhaps a little less surprising than that of his own original work. Not counting his contributions to the remix projects of musical legends Roy Ayers and Cesaria Evora, which are included here, his remixes have generally been for his fellow French and deep house contemporaries, such as Alex Gopher and Chateau Flight. Classic remixes, like his completely accapella reworking of ‘Mouth’ by Iz & Diz are here as well as some examples of his more recent sound: the bleep- boogie Remix of Namlook’s ‘Subharmonic Atoms’ and an edit of his minimal-inflected collaboration with Jackson and his Computer Band under the moniker Panash’. There are a few remixes I would have liked to have seen included here, like one of his remixes for Candi Staton, which are frankly nuts, but it’s best not to look a gift cheval in the mouth as finally Pepe has given us a tangible CD, a compiled selection of his remix work and a good way into his music which can be handed to friends so they too can be enchanted by it. Spread the love.
