18/10/2024
Artist: Bancal
Titile: Abruti
Label: guides
Format: digital / cassette (edition of 70)
Mastering: Mateusz Wysocki
Artwork: Marta Sieczkowska
Clément Decaudin, aka Bancal, is a French producer and sound artist. He has been active in the local french scene for over a decade, creating noise, abstract music, hip-hop and exploring the footwork tradition as a representative of the producers' collective Le French Work. The album „Abruti” attempts to bring all these fascinations together and set a new direction in Decaudin's work.
„Abruti” refers to Decaudin's first electronic project of the same name. It was as Abruti that he attempted to create music grounded in the sounds of digital noise, punk and hardcore, drawing inspiration from Minor Threat, Black Flag, Raster Noton. This resulted in the album „Mauvaises Définitions”, released in 2020, containing short and radical digital noise tracks. In 2022, Decaudin was invited to present his 'abruti' work at the Lille VJfest. It was the perfect moment to redefine his early work and make it more accessible and danceable.
„Abruti” is ten feisty tracks, filled with dense and razor-sharp sounds. Dirty, bubbling basses, raster-noton-like digital raw data and 8-bit synths are set on a footwork structure. A punk volte-face and a resounding sense of simple irony hovers over the whole album. An unusual sense of humour can be found not only in the titles of the individual tracks, but also in the sound of „Abruti” itself, which evokes similarities with the music of the famous electronic ironist Luke Vibert.
Bancal has succeeded in creating a remarkably coherent concept of music set on an expressive foundations. On the one hand, we hear the tradition of punk radicalism, and on the other we hear the hedonistic experience of dance electronica. These seemingly difficult to reconcile contradictions live in a perfect symbiosis on „Abruti” – poking, biting and scratching at the same time, they make you want to jump up and down on the dance floor.
