As we detailed in a lengthy piece at the end of 2011, the last eighteen months have found artists from all over the US noise/synth underground dabbling in dance music structures. Among the most successful to make the transition has been Christelle Gualdi, a classically trained musician and trained architect whose early beatless releases – many collected on Olde English Spelling Bee’s vinyl album Trilogy Select – consisted of strange and chilly structures evocative of sci-fi cityscapes. At the time, she was a clear contemporary of other modern synth explorers like Oneohtrix Point Never.
Since then, however, Gualdi has been delving deeper and deeper into jammed-on-the-fly acid house with banks of hardware, with an approach not dissimilar from contemporaries like Jamal Moss in the US and Leipzig’s Gunnar Wendel. They first found their way into the world through a limited 7" of the tracks ‘Energy’ and ‘Clarity’, and a live show debuted at last year’s Unsound Festival. Now she’s announced the release of a new 12" through renowned Amsterdam label Rush Hour, featuring four tracks of melodic, Detroit-leaning dance music, but still with the same keen ear for harmonic and melodic structuring that was evident in her early synthesiser work. The EP is entitled Image Over Image, and you can listen to clips of the tracks below (via Juno).
The development of this new sound was the result, she explained to the Quietus in an interview soon to appear on the site, of a lucky break on Ebay. While buying a Roland MC-202, the seller offered her a broken Roland TB-303 (the synth responsible for the distinctive squiggle that launched a thousand acid house records) for a fraction of the huge amount a working model would usually cost. Incredibly, when it arrived through the post, the 202 was broken, and the 303 was fully functional. "It’s a mint 303 which I bought for 25 euros," she says. "[It] literally fell from the sky, it’s insane. This is a dream of I don’t know how many people. I would say the music I do now is an evolution from this gear, and trying things, and finding a new sound." Watch out for the full interview, to be published on the Quietus in the near future.
