The single "Go for Blue" - Out Now on Catskills CD / 12" / Download.
Pepe Deluxé: Go for Blue
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“Pepe Deluxé without an acute accent at the end,†states James Spectrum, (AKA shaven-headed 35 year old Finnish scholar of sonics, Jari Salo), “is like a gentleman without a hat – a contradiction in terms.â€
Spectrum is one of music’s mad professors. Not much interested in money, fashion, hedonism or ego, his band Pepe Deluxé have always stood for the purest sonic adventuring. Like his father before him Spectrum is an inventor and his latest album, ‘Spare Time Machine’ is the group’s most ambitious and energetic yet.
The story of Pepe Deluxé is as simple as the music is multifaceted. Kicked into existence in the mid-‘90s by Finnish turntablist DJ Slow and his associate JA-Jazz (AKA Tomi Paajanen), their early underground hip hop adventures achieved a unique individuality when Spectrum joined. Signing to Catskills in 1998, their debut album, ‘Super Sound’, was so notoriously sample-laden that three versions were eventually created, each ‘cleaner’ than the last as it grew in stature and was licensed to Sony. The culmination of this era was the use of their song ‘Woman In Blue’ on the Levi’s Jeans ‘Twisted’ commercial (“Levi’s was sort of a second prize,†reveals Spectrum, “We missed Wonderbra because we were on a vacation.â€).
In 2003 the group’s next album, ‘Beatitude’ appeared and Pepe Deluxé, minus DJ Slow who’d left, showcased less reliance on samples without losing a jot of the upbeat party spirit that infuses their sound. Now ‘Spare Time Machine’ has arrived, taking things up yet another level. It has all the funk of their best material but doused in the spirit of uproarious ‘60s psychedelic and ‘70s prog-rock. What’s more it’s entirely sample-free.
The recording process fascinates Spectrum, not in a plodding computer geek way, but in the creatively crazed tradition of Joe Meek, Phil Spector and the Aphex Twin. He buzzes with the excitement of adapting technology to any eccentric whim via wire, pliers, gaffer tape and limitless imagination. He describes the years since ‘Beatitude’ as spent “on a sort of musical archaeology, tracking down obscure studio gear and Russian electronic components, working on various inventions.†His perspective is, perhaps best captured by the monthly technical column he writes for www.beatmag.net , which has taken in everything from secret Nazi tape experiments to the use of baby monitors in rock’n’roll.
Such offbeat sonic research is now accompanied by lyric-writing of equal strangeness and wonder. The new album’s sitar-led psychedelic ‘Ms Wilhelmina And Her Hat’, for instance, is based on a short story by New York artist Daria Tessler, while the groovy ‘Forgotten Knights’ celebrates those warriors of times past who avoided dragons in favour of being remembered only by ladies for capabilities in the bedroom. Other subjects touched upon include lust for long-legged ladies on Mars, gypsy magic and Beatnik meditations on the colour blue. The Streets, this ain’t.
Happily, both studio experimentation and lyrical flights of fancy are tethered to red-blooded funk-rock from a future-past dimension where King Crimson are led by Clyde Stubblefield and get down with prime-time Lee Hazelwood. Spectrum’s mind is a constant flurry of ideas boding the question of where his manic creativity hails from.
“I think the main driving force with Pepe Deluxé is the playful underground hip hop DJ attitude that’s been there since day one,†explains Spectrum, “I’ve always been fascinated by the challenge of getting people to listen to music they’d normally ignore or even dislike - something Beck did with country. Naturally we try very hard to sound like no other group in the known universe, to create something that didn’t exist before.â€
Thomas H Green
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