Even Deeper Burnt - Five more songs to go further into Pepe Bradock
Plus 96 Back, Bruk Rogers, Vanishing Twin, I. Jordan and LFO
Even Deeper Burnt - Five more songs to go further into Pepe Bradock
In 2015, waspishly annoyed by the idea of Pepe Bradock as the “Deep Burnt guy”, I published Deeper Burnt - Five songs to go further into Pepe Bradock on Medium, in which I outlined five songs from the Parisian producer known to his parents as Julien Auger that weren’t Deep Burnt but which very much merited a listen. (They were Atom Funk, Peer Pressure, Intrusion, Rhapsody In Pain and Candi Staton’s Do You Duty (Pepe Bradock remix) for anyone interested. But please do check out the article.)
People have kept reading the article ever since - page metrics show it bubbling along at about 50 reads a month and it shows up quite prominently when you Google Pepe Bradock. I had occasion to look back on the article this week and I was simultaneously pleased with the songs I had selected and outraged by the absences.
Figuring there’s little point in having a newsletter if you can’t utterly indulge your every musical impulse, I decided to put this right, by assembling this list of five more Pepe Bradock songs that I consider essential listening. And, yes, I am once again annoyed by the songs I have had to leave out of this list, so I am sure volume three will come around soon.
Life (from 6 Millions Pintades EP) 2000
Life is probably Pepe Bradock’s best known song after Deep Burnt, a sky-scrapingly ecstatic piece of work that makes me want to take up rock climbing, sun bathing and male vocal choir singing. Life is both stripped down and ever moving, anchored by a simple, but brilliant, bass line and a two-chord wash that builds ever-so-subtly, as the hairs on the back of the neck explode. It’s house as sublime celebration, a genuinely beautiful piece of music that you could hang on a gallery wall, with beats so clean they will expel the club dirt from under your finger nails.
Iz and Diz - Mouth (Brad Peep’s remix for friends) 2002
On their 2000 EP Wiggle While We Work, Joshua Michaels and Dwayne Washington (AKA Iz and Diz) created Mouth, a beat track using only noises that came from their own windpipes and it was neat experiment in sampling. Two years later, Pepe Bradock got his hands on Mouth and simultaneously tightened up the song - the beats hit harder and swing with more intensity - and straightened it out, adding layers of melody and effects to create a Homeric Odyssey of house.
The original Mouth is a novelty song - albeit one that works on its own merits; Pepe Bradock’s remix is one of the greatest experiments in house music history, devastatingly original and heart-breakingly sad, to the extent that you kind of forget how the song was made as you’re carried along by its emotional pushes and pulls.
Bradock is a remixer of exquisite talent and taste, capable of blasting a song off into another sonic universe without entirely pulling it apart (à la Aphex Twin), and there is the added bonus that his remixes are often easier to find than his original work. A hat tip here, then, to Bradock’s remixes of Nicolas Jaar, Césaria Avoria and Soulstice, each of which was EXTREMELY close to being included here. But Mouth is perhaps the greatest of all Pepe Bradock’s great remixes.
Intriguing Feathered Creature (from Les Aventures De Pépé Bradock / Pistes Insolites Vol. 2 : Intriguing Feathered Creature) 2008
What is it with Pepe Bradock and animals? Abul Abbas, from an EP he recorded for Red Bull, features a whole herd of animal noises, notably an elephant’s trumpet, while his Atavisme label logo features another prominent elephant. (Which might be the same Abul Abbas, an Asian elephant owned by Carolingian emperor Charlemagne.) My guess is that, as someone with exquisite aural senses, Pepe just loves the way animals sound.
In any case, Intriguing Feathered Creature is the height of the Bradock / animal crossover, featuring a fascinating array of bird noises over a lolloping house groove and a jazz-y synth line that never hits quite where you might expect, creating a royal back and forth between synth and birds, showing off to each other in the hope that some day they might mate. Basically, if you’ve ever come out of a club early in the morning and headed to the park, THIS is what you thought you heard and yes it was that beautiful. The 12 inch also features an “AK-Pella” so you can enjoy the bird noises in relative peace.
Grandgousier (from Exodus 8 EP) 2018
I wrote my original guide to Pepe Bradock in 2015, some 16 years after the release of Deep Burnt, at a time when - if I remember right - he was still doing the occasional DJ gig. In 2023, as I write this, Pepe is having one of his more public moments, having released two records as Brigitte Barbu that are available on streaming services (of which more later) and even giving a couple of interviews.
2018 was possibly Pepe’s moment of maximum mystery. In 2017 he created the Braccio D’Oco nom de plume, for reasons that I don’t think have ever really been explained, releasing the particularly obtuse 12 inch Ata Zéro: Baby Steps. In 2018 he released two records as Pepe Bradock that flew almost entirely under the radar: Exodus 8 and ATA 019, the former of which apparently had the legend “public performance and broadcasting prohibited” written in the inner groove, a move that was almost certainly tongue in cheek but hardly spoke to an artist who was begging for a wider public.
And, of course, in a VERY Pepe Bradock twist, the Exodus 8 EP has one of the man’s greatest ever songs wrapped up in its publicly prohibited grooves, in the shape of Grandgousier, an incredibly visceral, papercut-to-the-eyelid sharp house / techno groove, that seethes and bubbles, where other house records weakly build, like Life re-programmed by malicious witches.
Brigitte Barbu - Mistori (from Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne) 2020
As I mentioned in my Pitchfork review of Muzak pour ascenseurs en panne, a 2020 album from Pepe Bradock under the Brigitte Barbu name, the record is neither the abstract hip-hop LP that Bradock promised, nor an example of the deep house with which he made his name. Instead, it is Pepe’s guitar album (kind of), a nod to the instrument he started playing at 14.
Anyone expecting a conventional guitar album, however, probably hasn’t been paying much attention to Bradock’s modus operandi all these years. The guitar on Mistori is oozed all over the track like melted butter, creating a kind of warm, astral drone that I could listen to all week. Without wanting to quote myself unduly, in Pitchfork I compared it to Brian Eno’s classic Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks (which I love so much it featured prominently in my wedding) and it certainly seems to fit with that record’s relaxed, astral feel. Dae Boj DeMoya, from the same album, is also brilliant.
Some listening
You know what’s good? Weird, droning synth noises - always. And all the more so when turned into massive dance-floor bangers, as Manchester’s 96 Back does on this banger for Local Action. The key, I think, is that 96 Back doesn’t overcomplicate things: he’s got a couple of excellent, ever so slightly sickening, noises that he knows will work wonders on the dance floor and he lets them play their merry game. If you hear this in a club you will vomit with excitement.
Bruk Rogers - Deusa feat. Onj & Roberta Silva
Every few months I wonder when the inevitable broken beat / bruk revival will come. Maybe Deusa will be the genre’s fourth horse man of the apocalypse. The song is a sun-blushed bossa nova meets broken beat gem that sums up all that is sparkling about the West London sound. If you like music you can dance to, you’ve got it. If you like music you can sing along to, you’re served. If Gilles Peterson isn’t all over this I will eat both his and my hats.
A few weeks back I said something in this newsletter about Vanishing Twin being almost too Broadcast for their own good. Well, smart arse, I was wrong: the band’s fourth album, Afternoon X, is an absolute gem, in which they crawl out from underneath the lengthy shadow of Birmingham’s finest psychedelic wanderers, courtesy of a couple of songs with tight-as-tears Golden Era hip hop beats. Marbles is the very best of these, calling back to The New Wave, Stereolab’s collaboration with Common, J Dilla, Quest Love and James Poyse, which was an itch that has too long gone unscratched.
I. Jordan and Planningtorock - TMB (Day version)
I don’t like trance. It wasn’t that bad, at the start of the 90s, when Jam & Spoon and Sven Väth were starting to explore it; but since then I have disliked trance in the mid 90s, late 90s, 2000s, 2010s and our present decade, when it seems to be permanently being revived. And don’t think I haven’t given it a try: I’ve been to psy trance nights, Goa trance nights, acid trance nights, progressive trance nights and more. And, nope, I don’t like it. (I might write about this some day. Basically, I dislike four four bass drum kicks above a certain BPM.)
I. Jordan is one of those young artists who experiments with trance, which presents me with a conundrum because I love I. Jordan and dislike trance. But here, on TMB, Jordan’s joint single with Planningtorock, the conundrum is solved, in the form of day and night versions of the song. The night one is too trance-y for my tastes; but the day version is a gem, with a wonkily brilliant chord sequence that is like vomited euphoria, and a rave menacing end to the song.
Jayda G - Meant To be (Todd Edwards remix)
Jayda G’s recent album Guy was a fascinating record: an album-length tribute to her late father, incorporating recordings he made two decades ago, in which he talked of life experiences such as being posted to Thailand with the US military and facing down a teenage bully, with Jayda’s songwriting simultaneously addressing the same subjects. If that sounds unduly heavy, the record really isn’t: Jayda does all this to the same high-octane, soulful and very shiny disco house that categorised her first album, like Fred Again getting his head out of his own arse to make a record tracking income inequality in post-Brexit Britain. In any case, getting in Todd Edwards for a remix is always a good idea and “The God” delivers the goods here on album highlight Meant To Be, with a trademark cut up and swing job that I could - and probably will - listen to hundreds of times this week.
Things I’ve done
LFO are one of the finest electronic groups that the UK has produced, a Leeds duo who were among the first acts to take the US techno template and do something different with it, the result being the speaker-busting, rave terrifying genre of Bleep (with all due respect to fellow Bleep pioneers Unique 3, Nightmares on Wax etc). I’ve been wanting to speak to Gez Varley, half of LFO, for years and the opportunity finally came up. And guess what? He turned out to be entirely charming. We talked about breakdancing, LFO, getting a record deal in a club car park; musical history, What is House; the OTHER LFO and so much more. You can have a listen here.
My playlist, the newest and the bestest, has swelled to a VOLCANIC 26 likes. Maybe you can take it to 27? It’s my pick of all the best new music.