Continuous: recent gang hunger or nausea . December 9th
Mimi Luce was a dead teen. On many weekends, he's found camping out at festivals in his home state of Connecticut—not playing music, but fanning, so to speak. It was in the early 2000s and he was very interested in the jam band scene and classic rock bar acts. She read 1960s counterculture books in the library and began sewing her own clothes on a sewing machine, patchwork and embroidery.
"You're a hippie!" Luce, 38, said he was sitting next to a used instrument that he had recently begun using to plug in drum and bass samples. "I really tried to create my own culture."
Coming from her job as director of events at the Nash Museum of Art, Luce donned a bright green blazer and dark skirt, the stark contrast between her cool, calm manner and her sexy intensity. the music you make.
But many of the Scarlet Begonias fell somewhere between Dead and DAF, with pioneering German new wave group Long (clad in black leather) among the influences that transformed Luss from post-punk to techno-techno to his first band, Cochon. Its only design, perennial - after late flowering, rapid flowering.
Toward the end of high school, Los discovered punk at an arts camp in Boston, where she was met with scorn from New York kids who loved Little Danger. It was a musical boom that accelerated at McGill University, where he studied English and art history with the aim of becoming an art writer. Immerse yourself in the vibrant Montreal scene as Culture Editor at McGill Daily . He frequented self-spaces and warehouse shows and dabbled in genres such as electric flash, no-wave, and noise.
However, making music "seemed like only cool people did it, and it didn't feel right," she says. I was a writer and cultural commentator. I saw myself more as an observer.
After college, he spent a few years in New York writing for Art in America and Frieze magazines while working at an art auction house. She then took a year off to continue her university studies while living with her French grandmother in Paris and working in a mattress shop. In 2011, he enrolled at Duke University for his Ph.D. in art history. His focus on the twentieth century was a moment in early twentieth-century France in which art historians and journalists rejected modernism, the underlying principle that today underscores the interaction between art, culture, and lived experience in its musical field.
But then he became a newspaper reporter and the music faded into the background.
2015, when Luce submitted her dissertation, and 2019, when she defended it, she was confused. He moved on to Paris, then Durham, then Paris, then Durham, then Amsterdam, then Paris, then Durham.
Meanwhile, something has awakened in Paris.
"That's when I started living again, I guess physically, going to clubs and hanging out with musicians and artists," she says.
Before leaving Durham, she took a girls' rock class at Base, which was "amazing" and felt inspired by all the women I met who started bands like Fitness WmxN and Silent Lunch. He auditioned to play in a post-punk band in Paris, with his limited experience of learning songs the hard way, and was devastated when he didn't get in.
"But that's how I learned to play music," he says. I said, "Now I can play." I'm not good enough to be in this touring band, but I could start my own band. "
In 2017, Lucy and Patricia Bass, the drummer in her band, began writing demos; Luce sang in French and found poetic interest in her unique command of the language. They were called ODV, a Duchampagne play on words as hard to decipher as the band's nickname, Cochon, which puts a feminist spin on a terrifying sound.
"For example, I can't tell my French family the band's name because it's too offensive," Luke laughs.
Back in Durham, Marielle Dutoit would play guitar and Carla would comment on keyboards; Hannah Spector (playing on Silent Lunch) and Jeff Schilling, playing drums frequently; Next, Dave Rodriguez played bass and synthesizer. Anchored by Lizzie Mercier's No New York and Desclox, Cochon's music might suggest the raw 1982 trade-offs lost.
They throw spatulas like The Slit and spray aerosols like Joy Division. "But she was never a copycat," says Luce. "They always rave about the contemporary bands I listened to and the female-led post-punk bands I read about in old Maximum Rock 'n' Roll reviews."
Cochonne has played a few shows, but it's mostly been a songwriting and recording project, with one called Pink Tape in 2019 and a 12-inch album, Emergency , in 2021. Meanwhile, Los is thinking more and more about people and places. .
“For me, electronic music and the spaces it creates are a continuation of the modernist project in the sense that you analyze art in life,” he says. “You are not a passive spectator, and that was the essence of Dada, Futurism and Surrealism. You make reality stranger, but the audience gets involved.”
He got some equipment (effects pedals, Roland Groovebox Sequencer) from Duke's musician friend Yar Rubinstein, who also gave him a crash course on his art idols: Geometric Splendor, Chris & Kosi, DAF.
He was learning to play drums, bass and synthesizer. After Sonic Collage, he began establishing himself in the early days of Pandemic, amassing a magpie empire of eclectic samples: Wine Glass Colors, ASMR and Horror Movies, Seneca and Real Housewives.
The first permanent band, Social Disease , was more synth-oriented, but later releases were heavy on techno-industrial. "Because it looks great!" Luce explained. "I love the intensity. I want it to be scary and danceable."
That intensity is evident in the A0 Museum 's explosive bass machine—named after the effect pedal, with a nod to Luce's day job—in the heavily connected North Carolina Hot Releases Experience, released in October. It's a constant sound relegated to a box for touring purposes, like the short summer tour by Los and Ryan Martin, who headline a major release and play Secret Boyfriend.
Luce says the generosity of Rubinstein, Martin, and the people at the Nightlight Club in Chapel Hill was instrumental in creating Permit for the Music.
"It's like girls rock," she says. "It is very important to create an institutional framework for educating people."
Hunger or Nausea , A Stream of Incredible Ink Technology, available online Dec. 9 on Modern Tape. A vinyl record followed a week later, debuting on the Brooklyn label.
Women Invented Noise Volume , the new compilation from British record label Industrial Coast, also received a standing ovation. Los Stevie Nicks and "Dr. Mabus Movie".
On 9 and 17 December he performed at Club Fruita, respectively as part of the Permiso and No Name concerts. He does not use a laptop. The groups are pure devices, though it's more about the learning curve than class ideology.
For Luce's music, it is encapsulated in cultural contexts, something exciting, something open to investigation, something that is noticed as it wanders, rather than peripherally floating at the heart of the music industry.
"I don't consider myself a person," he says. "I consider myself an artist." But against this neutral role—that academic imprint—there is something more, something vague yet complete.
"I've always felt deeply inspired by music," says Locke. But when I finally started doing it for myself, it brought me a sense of togetherness that I hadn't felt before. I developed a strong inner world, with which I could access my dark side.
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