Gangpol & Mit - The 1000 Softcore Tourist People Club’ [Ipecac - 2011]A first, uninformed listen to the mysterious short album, ‘The 1000 Softcore Tourist People Club’, is as confusing and convoluted an experience as its title suggests. Kitsch computer pop performed by orchestral plugins hurries by in 14 short, sugary instalments where pastiches of country & western hoe-downs are mashed with toytown gabba beats (‘The 1000 People Band part one’) or acid arpeggiations rise through sci-fi sound effects to form a cinematic chase theme (‘The Softcare Tourist part two’). 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. Russell Cuzner
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