Christmas falls on the 3rd November this year for electro fans. Because each time Erwan Castex a.k.a. Rone drops an album it really is a gift. This disc comes four years after Tohu Bohu (his magnificent missive written and posted from Berlin, which allowed him to make a name for himself and impose a style of his own) and two years after the beautiful and bewildering album Creatures. This gifted sound engineer has now added another floor to his electronic tower of Babel. And yes, it is indeed this famous construction from The Book of Genesis that is the best symbol for his work. Far from the dancefloor, Rone’s music is a multistory building in which we have already met people as diverse as Etienne Daho, François Marry without her Atlas Mountains, the unusual cellist Gaspar Claus, the equally elusive pianist Bachar Mar-Khalifé, Bryce Dessner from The National or even the avant-garde Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo…
For this fourth work, whose liner notes bear the name of Michel Gondry and his son Paul, Rone has assembled John Stanier, Claus and Dessner from the group Vacarme once again, as well as the slam poet Saul Williams, the quirky Baxter Dury, the Israeli Noga Erez and Kazu Makino from Blonde Redhead. Taken independently, each piece on Mirapolis differs from the next.
But Rone, being a sound architect, manages to homogenize all these sound textures and ambiences to make for a disorienting sensory trip. Sometimes electro is not the dominant genre but this doesn’t matter as it’s always Rone who comes out on top.
On 14th January 2017, Rone performed on the stage of the Philharmonie de Paris:
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