Mr Oizo debut album

Life After Flat Eric!

Paris 

05/11/1999 - 

You might well remember a certain fluffy yellow glove puppet who appeared on TV screens six months ago, advertising a well-known brand of jeans. And if you don't - you should do! Because this was the birth of Flat Eric, the hand puppet who catapulted his creator Quentin Dupieux - aka MR OIZO - to fame. After causing a major stir in the advertising industry MR OIZO and Flat Eric went on to shake up the music business, selling over 2 million singles and rocketing straight to N°1 all over Europe. MR OIZO is now proving there's life after Flat Eric- indeed, the young video whizzkid/composer/musician has just put the finishing touches to a debut album entitled "Analog Worms Attack"!

The Quentin Dupieux Affair

Successful partnerships often emerge from the most unlikely sources. Whoever would have thought that the combination of Quentin Dupieux, a yellow glove puppet, a world-famous jeans company and a small French independent label (F Communications) would have wrought such devastating effects on the international music scene? And yet, thanks to this unusual mix, Quentin Dupieux hit the music jackpot in April of this year, rocketing to overnight fame with his third E.P. "Flat Beat". "Flat Beat" shot straight to number 1 in the UK charts and went on to sell 440,000 copies in just 4 days, clocking up a staggering 1.6 million copies in less than a month!

Within a few days of Flat Beat's release, Dupieux and his groovy puppet sidekick were everywhere. In fact, the media appeared to be gripped by Flat Eric fever - while one British journalist claimed the phenomenon was a "reconciliation of pop culture and art", French radio stations went crazy, one national station playing "Flat Beat" non-stop for an entire hour one Saturday night!

After the international success of Stardust's disco-style house anthem "Music Sounds Better with You", Dupieux invented his own special French Touch, exploding onto the music scene with his vibrant, low-tech techno. The phenomenal success of "Flat Beat" took everyone by surprise - including Eric Morand, founder of the F Communications label! As MR OIZO rocketed to overnight fame, the small French independent label found themselves the focus of unexpected media attention.

Thanks Dad!
Dupieux began his career directing videos for French DJ star Laurent Garnier. The young video-maker owed his lucky break to his Dad, who used to be Garnier's local garage mechanic. Legend has it that Garnier took his car in for a service at Monsieur Dupieux's garage in 1996 and Dupieux senior began chatting away about his son's video work. Garnier's ears perked up immediately and before you know it, Quentin was locked away in the studio shooting video clips for "Crispy Bacon" and "Flashback".

But Q. Dupieux was not content to stay put behind the camera. The young whizzkid soon began experimenting with recording soundtracks to accompany his "nutty" videos and short films. One thing led to another, of course, and Dupieux soon scored his second lucky break by sending a video with a techno soundtrack to a leading advertising agency in London. The rest is history - Flat Eric rocketed to glove puppet stardom, the "Flat Beat" single shot to the top of the charts and F Communications announced MR OIZO's debut album would be released in June. Dupieux being something of a perfectionist, however, music fans had to wait until September '99 to get a taste of the post-Flat Eric sound.

Surprise, surprise!

And it looks like MR OIZO has taken everyone by surprise. Who would have thought that the whizzkid video director was also a talented composer and musician? A dedicated experimentalist capable of locking himself away in the studio with his "ten-year-old" machines and working away for hours with the quiet determination of a lab. technician.

The next surprise is that there's no sign of Flat Eric on the album cover - not even the slightest hint of yellow! So music fans won't automatically link MR OIZO with his ex-Groovy Puppet sidekick. Flat Eric has been replaced by three strange little animals on the album cover, doodled in pencil against a forest background.

So much for the cover, we hear you cry - what about the music? Well, here techno fans are in for a big surprise. Or should we say major shock? On the opening track Dupieux's techno Flat Beat has been replaced by an unexpected style of raw lowdown hip hop! The next track begins and…. yes, more relentlessly pounding hip hop, right up until the fifteenth track where Flat Eric makes a temporary reappearance - only this time round Dupieux's techno is rougher, tougher and rockets straight to the brain cells. On successive listens, music fans may begin to glimpse a certain method behind the Dupieux madness. A series of basic vignettes begin to emerge in all their 'brut' splendour, Dupieux experimenting with the most minimal form of minimalism before his beats explode into total disintegration. Life after Flat Eric has proved to be stranger than anyone could have predicted!

Mr Oizo, Analog Worms Attack (F Communications) 1999

Emmanuel  Dumesnil

Translation : Julie  Street