Gangpol & Mit — The 1000 Softcore Tourist People Club’
Being on Ipecac, home of the heaviest hip hop (Dälek), meatiest metal (Fantômas) and dirtiest drill ‘n’ bass (Otto Von Schirach), one can be forgiven for thinking this might be a tongue-in-cheek side project of a more imposing and austere artist camping it up in disguise. The rhythm programming sometimes bears the sort of stuttering bombastics of Squarepusher (particularly on 2008’s ‘Just A Souvenir’) but usually maintains a more reserved samba or bossa nova over which saccharine melodies, often lead by a jaunty flute pad, make the experience feel like hacked versions of the demo tunes that were deftly embedded into domestic synths of the eighties.
Throughout the disk’s thrifty 35 minutes such associations come thick and fast, particularly suggesting modern children’s TV, like Teletubbies, or computer games, especially Super Mario Bros. So it’s no surprise to learn that the music is only half the story and that Gangpol & Mit are a French multimedia production team where the former (Sylvain Quément) makes all the music on his laptop to score the latter’s (Guillaum Castagné) animations. Indeed, Mit’s characters adorn the sleeve, painting a colourful cartoon of isometrically-rendered musicians playing amidst a post-riot rubble in a kind of utopian apocalypse. Apparently these characters are used in their live shows on projections to create their ‘1000 People Band’, a bit like Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz.
But in the absence of this carnival of characters the polished j-pop productions are somehow both revolting and refreshing: too sweet to swallow and too childish to chew, yet just about deranged enough to dip a tounge tip in its sherbert when no one’s looking.