Hypo - Coco Douleur

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release
Soundclips

4...according to our Brian on Thu 06 Jan, 2011.

I recall being alarmed, amused and entertained by Hypo's previous outings. This is a master of avant-garde French experimental pop collage at work. His outings used to be a bit more intense, demented and toytown-like if my memory serves me rightly. This new collection of collaborations is no less inventive and exotically charged as previous releases but possesses a more abstract DIY electronic funk flavour with some strange organic grooves, playful electro rhythms & considerably less wanton mania to boot. The intermittent female vocals sometimes remind me in style of bits of work from Console, Barbara Morgenstern & Crossover. Generally I could imagine this coming out on some Berlin boutique label. There's some cracking quirky ideas throughout and it all adds up to a really rewarding and likeable listen.

To play these clips you need to either update your browser (Norman Records recommends Google Chrome) or update your Flash plugin.

Pursuing his silly enterprise of an unnatural hybridisation of pop music in the electronic era, Hypo strikes back with his most ambition record to date. Entitled Coco Douleur, it was composed and elaborated with 12 very different musicians: Carl Stone (a pioneer of laptop music), Warren Defever (His Name Is Alive), ADK (Sam & Valley of Rephlex fame, Julian Tardo (Insides), Kyoka, Kumisolo, as well as the usual suspects EDH, Sawako, O.Lamm, Midori Hirano et newcomers Yama Boy and Nobuko Hori.

Coco Douleur is a collaborative effort, then. But it is also very much a personal and intimist affair – which is not so surprising, considering that Hypo is in love with contradiction. As its title suggests, it’s filled with exotic fruits prepared in bittersweet sauce or, rather, griefs sprinkled with mashed coconut then taken by brute force in a night club. It is a lively, disjointed, gnawing experience of a record, akin to an extended mix of a New Order’s song, boiling hot like Frankie Vincent yet tormented like Pierre Schaeffer and melancholic like “Porque te Vas”.

Coco Douleur celebrates, in a sacrificial sense, the confusion of (musical) genres, defining ideas and feelings of our times.

The release of the album will be preceded by the release of the Dodo Couleur EP, which includes collaborations with La Chatte, Pirandelo, Carl Stone, Kumisolo and EDH.

Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!