THE FRENCH ELECTRO MAVERICK

Rubin Steiner Drums Up A New Album 

Paris 

24/02/2005 - 

Rubin Steiner's new album Drum major! confirms the French electro maverick's  taste for weird and wonderful mixes and off-the-wall beats. This wild and unbridled opus, cooked up on Steiner's computer, proves the Touraine mixmaster has lost none of his sharp-shooting, frank-talking ways!

Hats off to anyone smart enough to pin a label on Rubin Steiner (aka Fred Landier to family and friends!) The multi-talented French musician has dabbled in various spheres in recent years, leaving everyone perplexed as to whether he should be described as a synthetic jazzman, an iconoclastic sampler or an electro post-French Touch maverick. Steiner, who has managed to straddle everything from punk to lounge music in the course of his career, has never deliberately set out to cover his tracks and spread confusion amongst music critics, but the hip young prodigy from Touraine has followed each and every one of his musical whims, experimenting with an impressive variety of styles.

Steiner's latest flight of musical fantasy found him tickling the blue note on Wunderbar Drei, an album he describes as "more or less coherent, more or less jazzy. At the end of the day, the album was a sort of exercise in style for me." And an exercise that paid off handsomely, too. Thanks to Wunderbar Drei, Steiner ended up walking off with a coveted Adami award as electro-jazz discovery of 2002! The award appeared to confirm the widely held opinion that Steiner could be filed away as an  up-and-coming emulator of St Germain. (Those who subscribed to that point of view had obviously never seen the Rubin Steiner Quartet live on stage, playing a decidedly wilder and unbridled version of electro-jazz than his so-called 'brother' sampler!)

Steiner now seems intent on proving his non-affiliation with electro clans and cliques of all kinds, his new album Drum Major! affirming his identity as a free-thinking, free-mixing electron. Talking of his new album, Steiner asserts that he "threw all forms of rules and constraints out of the window! Everything on the album was totally spontaneous. I stopped myself from working on the tracks too much because I wanted to keep a bit of a fresh feel to things…I wanted to stay in that realm where you're not too sure why you're doing something and you lose that when you work too hard on a piece, because then you get to know exactly why you're doing it! On the new album I got all the tracks out pretty quickly without hanging around mulling things over too much."

Sampling spontaneity

Steiner's original sound could not be further from the concept of "musical wallpaper" or the electro-jazz scene he has so often decried. And while other samplers and DJs rely on celebrity attitude or churn out beats reserved for a certain scene (making house music for exclusive use on the club scene or chilled-out electro for lounge listening), Steiner, the inventor of his own genre, "Lo-Fi", insists on taking a much more fun approach to things. "I make music the way other people make video games," he says, "That's the one thing I get a big kick out of and I don't waste time thinking too much about what I want to do!" This strategy certainly appears to have paid off on Steiner's latest opus, Drum Major!, which might best be described as an inspired musical collage where sampling rhymes with spontaneity and track titles explode in your face with tongue-in-cheek sarcasm and playful irony (c.f. the wonderfully titled single Your Life is Like a Tony Conrad Concert and the gloriously rude Put Your Horn in your Ass and Pull Off!) "I start out trying to do something to please myself," says Steiner of his musical approach, "and, if that happens to please someone else after that, then so much the better! But I never set out with a list of things I'm obliged to do or feel as if I'm answerable to anybody."

Beyond records 

Steiner, who appears almost surprised that his taste for the eclectic and the bizarre should ever have found its way onto CD and vinyl, is a mine of musical information, punctuating his conversation with the most obscure references. The iconoclastic French sampler, who set up his own fanzine, Le stéréophile, has always swum against the general tide and happily admits almost total ignorance of club culture. "I never go to nightclubs, except when I DJ!" he proclaims, not without a hint of provocation. When it comes to live performances, Steiner prefers to take to the stage with the Rubin Steiner Neue Band (bass, drums, trombone, guitar and machines) rather than cut a solitary figure behind the mixing decks.

"I think you have to give people something other than records," he says, "and that means getting out there and sharing something with people in concert. I've never claimed to know much about the French electro scene. It seems to me that there's a whole stack of producers out there churning out techno and jungle records… Things move at a hectic pace and they seem to be putting out new records all the time. But the scene's really closed in upon itself – and my problem is I've always been a bit scared of cliques! The guys involved in the house movement are the same. Their records are all brilliantly produced, but there comes a point where, personally, I'd rather go out and see a bad band live on stage than a super producer sticking on his records all night!"

Steiner, the electro maverick, bows out with an elusive smile, saying, "Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming I don't belong to the ‘extended electro family'. I don't want to be seen as the black sheep. I'm just trying to do my own personal thing without getting bogged down in predefined categories like hard house or disco this or that!" And we have to say, Monsieur Steiner appears to have been wholly successful in this so far!

Rubin Steiner Major Drum! (Platinum/BMG) 2005

Loïc  Bussières

Translation : Julie  Street