Released four years ago, the first Black Strobe album, Burn Your Own Church, took everyone
by surprise with its furious feel, aggressive guitars, nods to hard rock and deliberate refusal to
stay within the electro-pop limits rife at the time.
In 2007, exhausted from burning guitars on stage during the worldwide tour that accompanied
the album, Arnaud Rebotini decided to hole himself up in the studio, switch off his computer
and forget about the programs and plug-ins used everywhere else, sometimes to great effect,
often not... He went back to all his old machines acquired over the years, the TR-808, SH-101,
TR-909, TB-303, Juno 60... all instruments that have earned their place in the old school techno
hall of fame.
Back then he said, “Faced with my old drum machines and keyboards again, I felt so at home,
like I’d been using them all my life. Getting so much pleasure from going back to those sounds
was a revelation. When you switch on a synthesiser, you’re playing an instrument that is part
of music history. A laptop will always be something you use to send e-mail.”
Music Components, the album released under his own name that resulted from this rediscovery of diodes and transistors, is a pure homage to techno classics and the philosophy that
accompanied them: long tracks, instrumental, repetitive, powerful and melancholic, carved out
of one idea explored to the point of obsession. Ten carefully crafted tracks that prove techno
has a life outside the dancefloor, in the vein of classic albums by Carl Craig, Plastikman and
Drexciya (to name but a few). But above all, Music Components went totally against the grain,
eschewing all the fashionable traits of the time; saturation, successive layers of sound, a mix of
genres, the hybridisation of formats, malformed ideas…
After the unexpected and strangely revealing success of this concept album in the pure techno
tradition, it seemed inevitable that Rebotini would pen a follow-up to Music Components. And
so he has! But just as our man mutated from Zend Avesta to Aleph to Black Strobe, he’s a great
fan of doing something different, always returning with new projects and carefully defined identities. Don’t expect to hear Music Components Volume 2. Instead, expect a new approach, a
different angle, another side of his return to machines. Someone Gave Me Religion is an album
resonating from the live tour that followed Music Components, where from behind his machines, Rebotini launched into his music, confronting it with the harsh reality of the dancefloor…