Deepest Burnt - 5 more tracks to appreciate the genius of Pepe Bradock
Plus JASSS, Modern Nature, Water From Your Eyes and more
Is French producer Pepe Bradock the least compromised artist in musical history? The least sold out? The most true to his instincts and faithful to his muse?
When was the last time that Pepe Bradock had to do anything he didn’t want to do artistically? He lives so much in the shadows that it is hard to be sure. Maybe Bradock has to make compromises every single day of his musical life. But I doubt it: he releases records as and when he wants, largely on his own label, with absolutely no limitations on his sound. Sometimes, if he’s in the mood, Bradock does remixes. He used to DJ a bit - but Resident Advisor suggests he hasn’t done so since 2017.
Sometimes Bradock is quite prolific. Between 2018 and 2023 he released two albums (and a remix album) as Brigitte Barbu, as well as the What a Mess! album under his own name, eight Pepe Bradock 12 inches and one twelve inch as Gordon Bass. Since then, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t released anything and his Atavisme label no longer has a website. (It does, however, have a Bandcamp.)
These releases come largely as vinyl-only; there’s no CD and no streaming, you can either pay out €14 for the vinyl or hope someone uploads them to YouTube. And if one of those records is a re-release of Bradock’s greatest hit, Deep Burnt, with barely perceptible edits, then so be it. (There are exceptions: the Brigitte Barbu material is all on streaming, as is the 2013 EP Lifting Weights.)
No one likes to talk about money. But I would really like to talk about money with Pepe Bradock. Did Julian Auger - for it is he - earn so much cash from Deep Burnt that he never has to do another stroke of work in his life? Is he independently wealthy? A senior copywriter? The son of legendary French singer Dani? None of this really matters and yet it fascinates me. How does someone get so entirely, utterly free in what they do?
If there is a downside to this, it is that Pepe Bradock probably isn’t as well known as he should be. Yes, he’s a legend and Deep Burnt an all-time classic. But people often don’t know much beyond that. I consider myself a massive fan but I miss some of the music that Bradock releases, if I’m not paying attention right at that specific time. Some of it shows up on YouTube; some of it doesn’t.
And so, having already written Deeper Burnt: five tracks to go further into Pepe Bradock in 2015 and Even Deeper Burnt - Five more songs to go further into Pepe Bradock in 2023, today I bring you the third part of the trilogy: Deepest Burnt - 5 more tracks to appreciate the genius of Pepe Bradock.
(In part one I wrote about Atom Funk, Peer Pressure, Intrusion, Rhapsody In Pain and Candi Staton’s Do You Duty (Pepe Bradock remix); in part two Life; Iz and Diz - Mouth (Brad Peep’s remix for friends); Intriguing Feathered Creature; Grandgousier and Brigitte Barbu’s Mistori. So don’t go asking where they are.)
And once again, I struggled to limit my selection to just five. So I am sure part four - Burnt to a Crisp - will eventually come along. Until then, enjoy this selection and let me know your own favourites.
Cesária Évora - Angola (Get Down Dub By Pepe Bradock) (2003)
Angola is first on the list, chronologically, but it was the last song to be chosen because I really struggled over which Pepe Bradock remix to include. Bradock has been a prolific remixer since 1997, taking on everything from well-known house groups (Blaze, Cassius) to disco divas (Candi Staton), jazz funk legends (Roy Ayers), chill-out merchants (Zero 7) and Lana Del Rey. (Pepe apparently remixed Del Rey’s Brooklyn Baby in 2014, the results of which I have never heard and I can’t find anywhere.)
17 of these remixes were collected on the excellent 2009 compilation Confiote de Bits, where you can find, for example, his dazzling take on Iz and Diz’s Mouth and his gorgeous hide-and-seek house remix of Soulstice’s Tenderly - a song I came this close to including here. You’ll also find the song I did include there, Bradock’s Get Down Dub remix of Angola, by the legendary Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora, taken from the 2003 remix album Club Sodade.
These kind of remix albums can be terrible beasts and, frankly, no one needs to hear Señor Coconut's Chachacha Remix of Evora’s Besame Mucho. Generally, though, the choice of remixers on Club Sodade is pretty neat, including Carl Craig, 4 Hero, Chateau Flight and Kerri Chandler - and even so Pepe Bradock’s Get Down Dub towers over all of them. (His Bateau Ivre Rework is pretty neat too.)
What Bradock does is sorcery, applying the slightest of touches to the song to make it entirely his own, while still running true to Évora’s original, as if Angola has taken the slightest divergent path upon setting out on its adventures, then decided to see this choice through to its logical conclusion.
The remix is not really house music, not classically electronic either, despite the insistent hiss of a drum machine hi hat; in fact, it’s more like a Lee “Scratch” Perry 70s dub, pulled off by someone with an absolute expertise of modern production techniques. It’s a miracle, in other words, from someone who really understood the feel and tone of the original song.
As I have previously suggested on here, the new acid house record is one of the most depressing phenomenon in dance music, as producers discover just how fun it is to tweak a TB 303 over a pounding drum beat and proceed to do so for hours, in a way that does literally nothing that Phuture’s Acid Tracks didn’t do in the 1980s.
Pepe Bradock’s 2013 Acid Test 07 EP is presumably his own attempt to grapple with the seductive acidic beast. And yet what emerges from these borderline depressing circumstances is two utterly wigged-out songs that suggest there is an infinite of life in the old 303 dog yet.
Mujeres Nerviosas is 10 minutes of acid attack taken to genuinely extreme levels of musical sabotage, were it sounds as if the acidic sounds might be burning a hole through your synapses. Lifting Weights is even odder, using the 303 as an excuse to throw gently strummed electric guitar - a theme in Bradock’s latter work - and an authentically huge, slightly tortured neo-classical synth riff into proceedings, like Jimi Hendrix, Wendy Carlos and Spanky coming together in horrible harmony.
Confabulations (2013)
I promised myself I wasn’t going to include any tracks in this list that you can’t listen to properly online. And then I remembered Confabulations, a song that reminds me not just of everything I love in Pepe Bradock’s music but in music in general. And so you will have to content yourselves with a minute-long, low-res stream to bathe in the song’s glory.
Bradock’s musical output post 2010 has largely been concentrated into two series of 12-inch releases: Imbroglios Parts one to four, released in 2012 and 2013, and Dactylonomy parts one to five, released from 2020 to 2022. All of them are excellent and, while Imbroglios Part 1 is the strongest of the Imbroglio series - the cat purr house of Inconsequent Pussy absolutely never fails to charm - Confabulations is the best song, opening 2013’s Imbroglios Part 4.
I’m not sure if any other producer could have made Confabulations, a song that requires both incredible production skill and a slightly ridiculous sense of humour. “Imbroglio” means “an extremely confused, complicated, or embarrassing situation” and this applies, in a way: Confabulations is certainly complicated and, in the mind of deep house or techno purists it might seem embarrassing. I can see, too, while you might call it confused.
But for me Confabulations is brilliantly focused, with Bradock twisting together little clips of weird electronic noise into a central riff that is absolutely joyful, utterly addictive and yet strangely moving, a little like Todd Edwards’ microsampling adventures, if every single element was taken from a failed 1980s video game. Confabulations is a perfectly electronic song, in other words, that you couldn’t even attempt to play on an acoustic instrument without entirely butchering its charm. It is also perhaps the strangest potential dance chart hit you’ll ever heard hidden away on an underground 12 inch. Utter genius.
Grodno (2016)
Why did Pepe Bradock call this EP Baby Craddock? Why does Pepe Bradock do anything? In any case, this six-track EP from 2016 is one of his best, including the wonky but ravishing ambient drift of Sainte-Maure, the what-would-Flylife-be-like-on-rabies? groove of Boom Boom Crash and Yazuke, which feels like a tribute to Bradock’s own 2000 EP 6 Million Pintades, mixing up the bleeps of Life with the spectral drum traces of Ghost.
But the track I have gone for is Grodno, largely for the way it shows that Bradock can skirt so close to normality at times, as if a perfectly conventional floor filler is peeping out from behind the mask of Bradock’s latest obfuscation. In this case, Grodno has a disco sample, house drums and lots of filter effects, ingredients that could, in the hands of some producers, create a perfectly acceptable filter house tune for the massed dancers.
In Bradock’s twisted palms, though, the result is a freaked out and yet entirely groovy house number, the nagging vocal sample being thwarted in its every attempt to escape from the mix by the increasingly convoluted production traps - filters, effects, drop outs, reverses - that Pepe keeps on laying in its path. And yet, of course, that only makes us love it more.
Firmament (2022)
2022’s Dactylonomy V EP is, as things stand, the last original music to bear the Pepe Bradock name. (The second Brigitte Barbu album, La Science Des Imbéciles, was released in 2023 and I think his most recent remix was his 2023 Hot Dog Cruise remix of Damiano von Erckert’s 3PIANOS.)
That makes a run of almost three decades since Pepe made his debut as half of Trankilou in 1996, with his solo bow coming a year later. That’s a remarkable stretch of music and Firmament, from Dactylonomy V, shows the fires are still burning. (And, yes, this link is to Firmament, whatever the YouTube video might claim.) The song’s backbone - if any Pepe Bradock song can be said to have something so sturdy - is a stirring, slightly rave-y piano riff that could have fit into a banging Italian house hit / rave stomper back in the early 90s.
But thats suggests solidity in a way that Bradock rarely ventures. Firmament is about as gaseous as a house music song can be when still propelled by a pumping house beats, as Pepe sends the piano drifting off into space on an ether wave of sparkling noise and occasional squelch, not so much building, in a traditional dance mode, as floating off in glorious solitude. Which feels appropriate, really, for a producer as brilliantly singular as Pepe Bradock is and always has been.
PS The last time I did this, commentators on Reddit suggested I should include Hello, 100% Cotton and 12turn13 in my list, none of which I have found space for. This is also the second time that Pepe’s Blind Pig remix of Nicolas Jaar’s Too Many Kids Finding Rain In The Dust and Mandragore have found themselves on the short list and not got in the club. I apologise to both of them.
Some listening
JASSS’ new album, Eager Buyers, is an attempt to dig into the modern malaise, via an examination of the mirage-like promises of capitalism. The title track is a brilliant introduction to this world, all looming threat, the grey wraith of vocals and minor-key melody, like Massive Attack at their most menacing. It’s nothing like the teeth-baring techno with which JASSS made her name; nor is it close to the sometimes angelic hyperpop influences of her second album A World of Service, the mark of an artist admirably on the move. JASSS was also my guest on a new episode of the Line Noise podcast, which was released today.
Modern Nature’s Jack Cooper was going to send Source to Liam Gallagher before Oasis reformed. Frankly, I’m glad he didn’t. Gallagher junior could have done a good job with the song’s brilliantly borderline downbeat / positivity - inspired, apparently, by The Beta Band’s Dry The Rain and the Rolling Stones’ You Can't Always Get What You Want - but I can also see him entirely flattening out the song’s minimal charm, banishing its nooks and crannies and shaking his noisy tambourine all over the song’s understated dual guitar lines.
Water From Your Eyes - Playing Classics
Who had a Eurohouse banger up next in the Water From Your Eyes bingo? Not me, I must admit, although it feels like the New York duo could do almost anything at the moment, such is their outrageous creative strength. Playing Classics is a total ear worm that is simultaneously cheesy as a church mouse and full of underground Gotham chic; I don’t know how the hell they do it but this really should be the sound of summer 2025.
Saint Etienne and David Penn - 7 Ways to Love
Back in 1991 Saint Etienne penned the iconic rave hit 7 Ways to Love, inspired by the simple brilliance of songs like Nomad’s (I Wanna Give You) Devotion. But because they were signed to Heavenly Records and about to release their debut album, they were forced to get in Janey Lee Grace to re-record Sarah Cracknell’s vocals, with the results released under the Cola Boy Nom de Plume.
In 2025, with Saint Etienne about to release their final album, they’ve obviously decided they no longer give two hoots about such niceties and have got in Madrid producer David Penn to remix 7 Ways to Love, with Sarah’s vocals restored and the results coming out as Saint Etienne. Hooray.
The new mix isn’t that different to the Cola Boy original - the song isn’t exactly drenched in vocals anyway - and if I had to choose I’d probably go for the slightly wimpy Balearic-isms of the 1991 tune. But Penn’s new version is a captivating take on a classic, slightly beefed up and shining, that works because, frankly, 7 Ways to Love is and always will be a total banger.
There’s no escaping the Lankum comparisons for Poor Creature, who feature Lankum’s Cormac MacDiarmada in their line up and here cover a song from 1839 about a young sailor, whose dying wish - not to be buried at sea - is ignored. Yup, that’s Lankum-ish. But here’s the thing: Lankum are AWESOME. And Poor Creature only sound a bit like them, their sonic stew notably more electronic, with a shimmering, marine-blue synth to the fore; and Ruth Clinton’s vocals are absolutely heartbreaking. So you’d be an utter fool to complain.
I’ve been listening to music for more years than I care to imaging and writing about it for so long I used to hand deliver copy. Still, every year I come across a song that seems so brilliant, so irresistible, so anthemic, that I wonder how it was that it actually didn’t exist a year ago and has now become so central to my life. U and Me at Home, which closes the new Wet Leg album moisturizer - US spelling, I note, for those sweet North American arena bucks - is one such song, its sing-along chorus and artfully detuned guitars, like My Bloody Valentine meet Elton John, having soundtracked the last month of my life, to the point of absolute obsession. It’s the best thing Wet Leg have done by a country mile.
I wondered if I would grow out of Clipse as I got older. Can you continue to listen to ingeniously crude tales of dealing snow in increasingly obscure code words when you’re the wrong side of 40? Well, it turns out you can. I saw Clipse play Primavera Sound in 2024 and they were astounding, half way between party starters and malevolent force; and their new album Let God Sort Em Out is a triumphant, an album that, frankly, says nothing to me about my life, but does so in such a creatively satisfying way that I really don’t care.
The brothers Thornton, Pusha T and Malice, are on fine lyrical form, ever inventive and technically perfect, while they definitely bring the best out of Pharrell, whose beat for So Be It is simultaneously weird as hell - full of backwards drums noises and samples of Saudi Arabian musician Talal Maddah - and totally commercial, minimal but packed full of interest.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast with D’Arcangelo
I was so happy to hear that D’Arcangelo, a really brilliant Rephlex act, still going strong today, were going to be playing Primavera Sound. And considerably less amused when I missed them entirely. I did, however, manage to speak to to Marco, one half of the duo, for the Line Noise podcast, about signing to Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, making music with a tracker, a certain Italian tinge, the “braindance” term, Thomas Dolby, Depeche Mode, playing Primavera Sound and more
Line Noise podcast with Mor Elian at Primavera Sound 2025
The Primavera Line Noises continues with Mor Elian, who I spoke to about back-to-back sets, cowlicks, weird noises and becoming the artist she always wanted to be.
I love DJ Haram and Beside Myself, her long-awaited debut album, is a gem. “Beside Myself is dramatic and daring, the agreeably messy sound of the kind of radical freedom that might not change our sinking world but can liberate the willing mind.” That’s what I said for Pitchfork. And I am sticking to it.
The playlists
Summer heat is definitely here in Barcelona and my head is melting into a molten orange stew. And yet I have still managed, nonetheless, to update my two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest. Do follow them before my brain melts and it is all Cyndi Lauper hereon in.
Approaching 50 and still listening to Clipse. Agree on So Be It. Also loving that DJ Haram album.
Thanks for the Pépé Bradock primer, had missed the first two issues and will dive in now. I know NOTHING except "Deep Burnt", so I guess I'm in for a treat.
Funny, just the other day I was wondering what he's up to, and whether he'll return or not. Time will tell, I suppose!