Mr Oizo's moustache

More Hair-raising Sounds from the Inventor of Flat Eric

Paris 

28/10/2005 - 

Mr Oizo, the zany French electro maverick behind the best-selling single Flat Beat and the cult video puppet Flat Eric, is back in the music news with a new album entitled Moustache (Half a Scissor). Masterpiece by an avant-garde genius or piss-take by a musical provocateur? The jury is still out. But take a listen to all 17 tracks, delivered in a mere 38 minutes and 6 seconds, and decide for yourselves!

In 1999, Quentin Dupieux – better known by his birdy pseudonym Mr Oizo – shut himself away in the studio to work on a demo for a soundtrack to a jeans commercial. Two hours later, the young electro prodigy had laid Flat Beat, a track recorded in Los Angeles that turned out to be a veritable golden egg. Following their success on the jeans ad, Dupieux's catchy electro beats, barely reworked from their original rushed-off working copy, were released as a single in the spring of that year – and went on to sell over 3 million copies worldwide! A success story guaranteed to make fellow electro artists who spend months slaving over their computer-assisted sounds sick as proverbial parrots.
 
By the autumn of 2000, Mr Oizo was back ruling the roost again with Analog Worms (a debut album recorded, as its title suggests, in all-analogue format). While somewhat less gimmicky and in-your-face than Flat Beat, Analog Worms proved to be another big hit for the French electro maverick.
 
A rare bird
 
After this lightning takeoff, Mr Oizo returned to his nest and became a much more rarely sighted bird, only deigning to resurface for the odd remix here and there. Why the sudden hibernation? "In 2001," he explains, "I started shooting this film, or rather non-film, on which I acted as director and producer. The film never got shown anywhere, not even on the festival circuit. I made it quietly by myself, without telling anyone what I was up to. In retrospect, it would have been better to get distributors on board from the word go. But who knows? Maybe it‘ll come out on DVD one day!" Dupieux admits his non-film was not the only reason for his slowness in getting down to work on a new album. "The real reason was I completely redid my studio, refitting it with a new system. And it took me four years to master the computers and find my bearings. It took a whole four years to adapt my way of working so that my music got its personality back again."
 
Moustache (Half a Scissor) could certainly never be accused of lacking personality. In fact, Mr Oizo's new album is literally bristling with it. Definitely more hirsute than the sophisticated pencil moustache worn by the late Clark Gable, Mr Oizo's whiskers still comb through in less than 40 minutes. "Since my new studio's been operational," he says, "I've made a lot of music and 'Moustache' only presents the highlights of what I've done to date. I find that electro music can be a pain in the arse because it takes so long to put together. It's a structural problem. It's music that's made for clubs so you've got to leave a bit of room, a bit of breathing space for DJs to mix." Having shaved off the excess beats to conserve the crème de la crème of his work, Mr Oizo warns that his Moustache could nevertheless get up some people's noses. "It's a dense kind of album, so dense that it's almost asphyxiating!"
 
Ruffling Feathers
 
Another understatement from Mr Oizo, it seems. Even Laurent Garnier, producer and co-founder of F.Com (the label on which Moustache is released), declared the album makes "unbearable" listening! A comment which Mr Oizo says he prefers to ready-made phrases of approval or abstruse criticism. All the more so as Garnier is reported to have said that Moustache was "unbearable, but it's a brilliant idea to release it!" Its author goes in more for the 'take it or leave it' approach. "I simply tried to recapture the magic that surrounded the creation of 'Flat Beat'," he says, "the magic that occurs when nothing is calculated or worked out in advance. I was making up to three tracks a day and it's not always easy to put your mind on hold and just let things flow. I think the title's sufficiently obscure… It creates a certain mystery and leaves people free to put their own spin on it!" As for his take on Garnier's "unbearable", Mr Oizo declares that "maybe I managed to take what I was trying to do the whole way - or maybe Laurent's too old for this!"
 
Hopping from branch to branch
 
Whatever the case, Quentin Dupieux is happy flitting from one branch of the arts to the other. And now that his new album is safely installed in record shops, he can turn his attention to film-making again. The multi-talented producer is currently at work on a new feature film starring a pair of cult French comedians, Eric and Ramzy. "It's going to be a bit like TV commercials in the sense that it's meant to be mainstream, not too arty or too in-your-face or vulgar. It's a sort of experiment that Eric and Ramzy will help me get across to a mainstream audience."
 
If all goes according to plan, the film should be released before the summer of 2006. And, like the album, it comes with a note of caution. "If people don't take the humour factor into account when they listen to my records or watch my films, they may well find them a pain in the arse."  You have been warned!

>Mr Oizo Moustache (F.Com) 2005

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Translation : Julie  Street