Favorite tracks : EgoLand, Artct (fr Paul Valenti Jr.)

Maethelvin ‘Lost Tapes from Hardware Memories’ is out now on Bandcamp.

What’ve you got to share and recommend to your fans and readers?

I went for an album that takes me back to a time I cherished as a kid in the eighties. It’s an album that influenced me a lot. It reminds me of my youth but It’s not something I grew up listening to. I am an Eighties kid but I didn’t fully experience the decade the same way some of my older peers in Valerie did. I was seven years old at the end of the decade, so I didn’t experience all that much from the Eighties, besides kids’ stuff like Chantal Goya (singer), Récré A2 (a Children’s TV program in the 70s and 80s) and Dorothée (French Children’s TV show presenter whose shows helped popularize Japanese Animation in France).

The album I picked is Neurovision by Telex. I discovered this album around the same time the Valerie Collective started, when David (aka College) was just launching his blog. At the time, the Internet wasn’t as developed as it is now. The first version of Valérie was like a moodboard where we’d post stuff we liked; stuff related to Italo Disco, film stills, photos and illustrations from the Eighties… I discovered Telex during one of my internet scavenger hunts through their song ‘Peanuts’.

They’re kind of a Belgian “Joke” band, a trio made up of Marc Moulin, Dan Lacksman and Michel Moers. Marc Moulin is very famous in Beligum, he’s a radio guy who later became a Jazzman who signed to Blue Note records. He’s also the guy who produced Lio’s first hit songs like ‘Banana Split’. They released this sophomore record in 1980, which is seen as some sort of “joke” project in which they were just messing around, although I don’t quite agree with this point of view. The album is definitely a joke with a heavy concentrate of Belgian absurdist humor. There’s a very creative aspect to it, where they’ll allow themselves to go down the wackiest routes whilst keeping the execution top-notch. Marc Moulin handles the arrangements and is an amazing pianist. Dan Lacksman handles the studio machinery and is a bloody amazing sound engineer. Michel Moers is a poet who doesn’t sing all that well but whose lyrics skillfully dance at the edge separating the absurd and the ridiculous. The album art is also fantastic and was done by an artist called Ever Meulen, who has an Eighties Clear Line style (see: Ligne Claire).

The album has this extremely tacky track called ‘Euro-vision’ that the group presented at the 1980 Eurovision contest. They entered the contest hoping to score no points but missed their goal because Portugal actually liked the song and awarded them ten points. Their performance was pure nonsense and they were really struggling to keep it together. It’s hard to be truly, completely ridiculous. They even took a photo at the end of their set with the flabbergasted audience. With that being said, the lyrics to the song weren’t all that dumb.

The album also has two tracks that I really love. There’s ‘My Time’, which is an Ann Steel cover song. It’s very Synthpop, the arrangements are great and Moers puts on a great performance. Then there’s ‘Plus de Distance’, which is a completely absurd, neo-romantic Synthpop track about airports. It’s one of my go-to songs. It’s tacky but cool. It’s so well done, that the tacky side doesn’t come off as ridiculous.

This is part of the reason why I wanted to bring up Telex. These guys were off the rails but put were doing it extremely well. They would leave the beaten tracks with their musical background and weren’t tied down by musical labels.

Their albums Wonderful World and Looney Tunes were somewhat foundational to the New Beat sound, this short-lasting Belgian music style that marked the clubs of the era. It’s a style somewhere between Hip-hop and early techno, hardcore and Gabber. Telex was somewhat swept up by the movement. By simply fooling around, they ended up innovating and laying the foundation for a number of music genres.

Legend has it that New Beat came from a mistake, that it came from a DJ accidentally spinning a 12” LP at 33Rpm. The movement only lasted a few years. Near the end, everyone was sampling one another. New Beat is basically the same sound sampled a thousand times over. It made no sense, but it didn’t matter.

How does this whacky sense of humor translate, forty years later?

That’s the thing. It’s hard to figure out which parts were tongue-in-cheek. It’s the same deal with Lio. ‘Banana Split’ works because it’s super catchy. For a song meant for radio airplay, it’s really well composed and put together. However, lyrics are pretty salacious, especially when you consider that it’s a 16-year-old singing them. It’s very borderline. It’s a joke, but it’s very well produced. That’s what Telex is.

It may be a joke, but it’s super well done and it’s got a lot of Synth sounds that you still hear nowadays in Synthwave and Synthpop. Even in modern productions like Cléa Vincent, you can hear Telex-like gimmicks such as Jazzy, Moog-esque touches and liquid, resonant sound textures.

There’s a tacky side to Synthwave that artists more or less own up to. We’re borrowing from the Eighties, one of the richest but also one of the worst musical eras, creativity-wise. One of our neighbours played some Jeanne Mas at a quarantine balcony party recently, for example. Her music is tacky, but her songs have some amazing synth sounds that everyone still uses in Synthwave: Fairlight, Jupiter…

Going back to the Valerie collective, do you remember what you were initially after when you started the blog?

I can’t speak for David, and he’s the one who launched the blog. For me, it was the Italian producers like Moroder that fascinated me. John Carpenter’s films came up a lot, too. I remember Valérie being heavily soundtrack-oriented. The goal was to dig up obscure, outdated and occasionally tacky stuff. I remember someone bringing up the credit sequence to Buckaroo Banzai, for example. It’s quite simply the worst movie scene of all time. It’s ridiculous, it’s extremely tacky, but the music is awesome!

Speaking of which, can you tell me a bit about the Hollywood films and series you grew up on?

This is going to sound basic, but the first film that really left an impression on me was Back to the Future II. My friend has loads of VHS tapes, but he only had the second movie in his collection. I watched that film so many times. There was also Quantum Leap, this series by Donald P. Bellisario about this time traveller who needs to take people’s place in order to influence history and return to his era. The guy used all of these silly tricks to replace people and he had this hologram guiding him around that only he could see. Like everyone else, I was also into Star Wars, too. My dad used to watch Miami Vice a lot, which ended up leaving quite an impression on me, especially the flamingos, the parrots and the sailboard in the opening sequence. I came back to it pretty late and started watching it again around the time we started Valérie, which is when I realized how groundbreaking the writing and the music were for its time.

Could it be where the ‘neon’ aspect of Valerie came from?

Actually, we were never really into that aesthetic. Alex Burkart from The Zonders, who is our graphic designer, was probably more into that kind of thing. I think he might have gotten that reference through the world video games. We were more inspired by photos. Stuff like Venice Beach, Florida, architecture…

Lastly, have you got any news or projects to share with your fans and readers?

Lately, I’ve been using my time to finalize some unreleased club-oriented tracks that I’ve been playing at my last few shows. I also got some new hardware and exploring some more Ambient sounds. We recently did this show at La Gaîté Lyrique (Paris) with David (College) for the French premiere of Rise of the Synths. I had prepared a few soundtrack/ambient oriented pieces for the occasion with my new setup, and I’d like these tracks to have a life of their own. The reason why I felt like talking about Telex is also that I’m thinking about going down a more ‘simple’ route. I want to move away from the hassle of production and getting clean sounds and focus on the purely creative side of things. That’s where I’m at right now.

Thumbnail photo by @onedaystranger

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 For those who might not yet know the story, can you tell us a few words about the origins of Maethelvin?
Maethelvin basically started in 2010, around the time David Grellier was starting the Valerie blog. The whole idea of Valerie was to dig up and share Eighties tracks for our mixing sets. Valerie really developed around “silly” mixing nights we were hosting in Nantes, which is where we all come from. It eventually turned into a blog and eventually David started developing his project as College as well as the Valerie collective as we now know it. College basically grew out of the Valerie blog. I was working on my Dance/Techno project Dach Tünner and David was playing in Sexy Sushi when he asked me to work with him. We started working together and our friends Gaël and Arnaud started The Outrunners as friendly competition. They kept at it and it turned out pretty well for them since they were a lot more focused than we were. David and I tried to work together but nothing really came of it, namely because our ways of writing were too different, so he continued College – which, at the time was called Dusty Haze – on his own.

In parallel, he would also post Eighties songs and visuals. At the time, there wasn’t nearly as much of it as you may find online today. David slowly started adding College tracks as well. I decided to pull a prank on him one day by showing him some track I had made and pretending it was by some obscure artist from the Eighties. I chose the name Maethelvin because there were no search results for that term on Google. The prank worked really well and it drove David crazy for two whole weeks before I finally admitted I had written the song. Thus Maethelvin was born, which accounts for “unbankable”, incomprehensible name. It basically comes from a bad spelling of “Maethelwine”, which is old English for “Melvin”.

So you originally tried to work together on College?
We tried to start it together, yeah. He also worked with Gaël, who played with him on College’s first live show at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes. Le Lieu Unique is somewhat of a cornerstone venue. We have a mutual friend called Frédéric Sourice – who goes by the name Phonème – who books shows there and who knows the local scene very well. He’s the one who started booking us there.

 It’s fairly interesting to note that the Valerie artists are often tagged as founding members of the whole Synthwave genre, despite the fact that you don’t exactly see yourself as a part of the scene.
The thing is that we were just playing Eighties music. I’m not too big on the term “Synthwave”. To me, it just feels like a vague term that people felt the need to come up with, to group together all these artists that were starting to make Eighties music. We were just making music with Eighties gear, thus making it “Eighties music”, nothing more. We were also born in the Eighties. I was born in 1983, so I got to live through that time. I don’t think we made anything new, really.  We just make music that borrows from Video Games and Nineties dance culture. What I do is nothing new. Our purpose is pretty much the same as that of pop music, which is to have fun, to party and to play gimmicky, accessible songs.

At which point did you become aware of Synthwave scene?
Pretty recently, probably no earlier than 2014, which is around the time we started getting more gigs and around the time we started meeting artists from the scene. We met Andreas (aka Robert Parker) for example when we played Helsinki. He came to see us and we had no idea who he was, despite the fact that he already had a pretty decent following. He was super friendly and we got along really well. I remember Gaël (The Outrunners, Forgotten Illusions) telling us the next day “This guy seems pretty legit!”.
That’s the time we realized we had probably missed the mark. Until then, we had no idea that a whole scene had developed with people that were regularly namedropping our projects and the collective in interviews. We had stayed in our little bubble since 2010 with our friends Anoraak and Minitel Rose. Back when Valerie started, we knew of acts like Electric Youth, Hot Pink Delorean and the whole Australian movement that was emerging from the Synth-Pop scene. It was a whole different side of things. There were also some British acts like Fear of Tigers and Russ Chimes, who worked with Valerie for a bit. They were amongst the first in the whole “Eighties Revival” movement.

 Having lived through the Eighties’ is there anything that intrigues you about this “retro” aesthetic?
It really depends whether you’re talking about the Eighties from 2010 or its 2019 version. I make a clear distinction between our Synthwave fans and the audience we had back in 2010.  I’m nearing my forties now, and I’m under the impression that the average Synthwave fan demographic is between 25 and 30 years of age. What I find really interesting is how Eighties culture is being re-appropriated by a whole generation that didn’t live through it. I find it really awesome.

It’s true that one must remember that this current “retro” aesthetic is the result of Eighties pop culture being filtered through the lens of people who weren’t necessarily born at the time. I assume that the streets back then weren’t paved with fluorescent neon lights…
Indeed, it was probably more of a club thing. It’s also not really what we’re drawn to in the Valerie Collective. We don’t really identify with the whole ultra-glittery neon aesthetic or Tron grids. We feel pretty distant from all of that. To us, we associate the Eighties with shows like Miami Vice. There were neon’s too, but it’s less “Retrofuturistic”, less Sci-Fi. It’s more grounded, closer to what the Eighties actually felt like. There was actually a pretty realistic feel to Miami Vice. The atmosphere and the stories weren’t too far-fetched.
What I also enjoy about the Eighties is its creative freedom. To me, the Internet came with a form of standardisation of music, everything tends to feel the same whereas this was less the case in the Eighties. The record industry was releasing heaps of crap every minute and people were making all sorts of things with the arrival of all these new machines. It’s what allowed genres like Acid to develop. We really enjoy that freedom.

It’s hard to deny the fact that the Synthwave genre also came with a saturation of gimmicky copycat projects. Would be fair to say that your affiliation with this largely “standardised” scene is what once caused you to somewhat grow tired of Maethelvin?
Absolutely, though I’m not sure if “tired” is the most fitting word. All of the songs I wrote prior to last year, including my latest EP – which is made of tracks from my first live show in 2014 – are things I don’t necessarily identify with. I’m really glad to have made them, but I wouldn’t feel too keen on playing them live again, simply because they sound like a lot of music being released today. They rely on gimmicks that are a little bit overdone. I didn’t feel like doing that anymore, so I briefly turned to Techno to change things up, to try out new gear, new songs, and return to Maethelvin with a more Italo-influenced club sound, which was the essence of what we were trying to do nine years ago. It’s got more of a Techno edge, as opposed to the «poppier » side of Synthwave. A lot of Synthwave songs tend to have the same structure, I find. I’m not pointing fingers nor do I want to pull anyone down, because it’s usually pretty well produced and done by talented people, it’s just not what I’m after. Producing for the sake of producing isn’t my thing.

 Does this mean we’ll be seeing a new side of Maethelvin for your upcoming set at Retro Synth Fury Fest 2019?
Absolutely, I’m going to be switching things up for a more Italo-influenced sound: lots of drum machines, much fewer breaks and more of a « club-oriented » sound.

Has this led to a change of gear or approach to your songwriting?
Somewhat. I’m also starting to realize that I’m an Eighties kid as well as a Nineties kid, given my age and the fact that the Nineties was when I started listening to music and playing video games. I’m also growing increasingly aware of a sort of symbiosis between Dach Tünner and Maethelvin. The former is starting to sound a little more « Eighties retro », whereas Maethelvin is starting to borrow a little more from Dance music. I’ve been told that my new stuff sounds like the Soundtrack to Streets of Rage, which itself was inspired by Black Box.

If you could bring back something and banish another from the Eighties, what would you pick?
We need to bring back the moustache, I’m thinking of growing one.
Also, the Internet should have never existed. Things were better back in the day. I’m going to sound like such an old fart for saying this [laughs]. I do love the Internet, but not so much these days. A lot of great things did come back from the Eighties though: Air Max shoes, Digital watches, retro-gaming, Gameboys, analogue synths…

When I asked David the same question he said he would banish the haircuts.
[Laughs] That’s easy for him to say, he’s got no hair! [Laugh] That’s a good answer though. Those haircuts definitely shouldn’t come back.

Closing off: can you name one of your favourite albums, movies and books?
The album that left the strongest impression on me is The Man Machine by Kraftwerk. It’s one of the most modern-sounding albums I’ve heard. It’s also been sampled to death. It has this Hip-Hop edge, the band work wonders on their gear, the songs are incredible and the overall aesthetic is incredible.
Film-wise, I’m going for something pretty basic: Shining. The cinematography and the Soundtrack by Wendy Carlos left a strong impression on me. My mum had the great idea of showing it to me when I was seven years old, and I think it scarred me for life.
Book-wise, I’m going to say Ubik by Philip K. Dick. That book messed my head up. That book is insane. It’s said to be unadaptable to film, simply because the book is so out-there.

European Retroheads, be sure to catch Maethelvin and many more heavyweight Synthwave acts at Retro Synth Fury in Paris. 

Retro Synth Fury
April 4th at Supersonic, featuring Réno (Fr), Grimlin (Fr) & Maethelvin (Fr)
https://www.facebook.com/events/303022477023907/

April 5th at Le Petit Bain, featuring Yx (Fr), Christine (Fr), Starcadian (US), Morgan Willis (Fr), NINA (UK)   https://www.facebook.com/events/321622565224863/