Photograph courtesy of Camille Colin
Paul Régimbeau is mostly renowned for his club-oriented moniker Mondkopf, championing the darker recesses of contemporary electronic music. Imbued with forlorn melancholia and over a backdrop of menacing beats, like a beast waiting to be unleashed from the hall of mirrors, Hadès, his 2014 album, cemented his status as a purveyor of grainy, noisy techno, but with an emphasis on fragile melodies interwoven through the post-apocalyptic atmosphere. "My relationship with music is made of nostalgia; I don’t get why it should be a bad thing to use it to bring back memories and buried emotions," he says.
His latest endeavour is Extreme Precautions, a more experimental guise inspired by his love of grindcore. Whereas in Mondkopf there were flickers of hope at the end of the tunnel, Extreme Precautions offers no respite. It’d be a fitting soundtrack for Erebus. "After finishing Hadès, I was thinking of making a techno EP, but I mostly listened to Brutal Truth, Assück, Napalm Death and Pig Destroyer at that time, so grindcore got me carried away. Extreme Precautions was a way to leave out the overthinking that comes with the process of making an album or mixing complex arrangements. The idea was to find a way to express myself as fast as possible, which was enabled by this small set of sounds that I’m using," he says.
As well as this, he runs the imprint In Paradisum with Guillaume Heuguet as an outlet for not only his own music, but also as a platform for offbeat techno and house, with a roster including the likes of Low Jack and Run Dust.
Introduction and editing by Lucia Udvardyova.
Hadès and Extreme Precautions are both out now on In Paradisum. Paul Régimbeau is part of SHAPE, a programme by the European members of the ICAS network for emerging artists. He will play at RIAM in October and Arcadi in November under his Mondkopf moniker. For full details, head to SHAPE’s website. Click on his image below to begin scrolling through Paul’s choices
