Monsieur Grandin

Mr Grandin....
I don't really remember when I first began making music, but I remember perfectly the first time I messed around with sounds on a computer. The Amiga 500 was my first true instrument with Soundtracker and MED. At the time I didn't think of it as electronic music, it just a way to make music for DemoMakers. I was like 13 or 14 years old and even though I loved rock & roll (Jerry Lee Lewis, the Straycats) without realizing it, I was cutting my first teeth in electronic music on remixes of the B52s (Planet Clare), Depeche Mode or Front 242.
Long story short, this more or less serious messing around wasn't anything I considered to be very important... until my first rave when I think I got slammed with one of the greatest sonor shocks of my life. I quickly understood that making this kind of music was within my reach because I already had the know-how.
Two years later I got together my first 'Live de Techno' under the name of Konoko.
As a fan of the Detroit scene, my techno was pretty minimal and slightly bourine.
Did a few nice opening acts for Derrick May, Chriss Liberator and others.
Then one day Plastikman (aka Ritchie Hawtin) turned up on my record player and that was when I heard what was for me the best in this style of music. Just my point of view. And it was also the end point in my desire to make this kind of music.
About the same time I discovered a new hip hop scene, different from the little I knew about it then. Notably the Mo Wax mixes produced by Matt Black & Jonathan More, but especially DJ Food's Concentric Circle which was probably my second sonor shock. So, after that I sort of went bulimic and got into hip hop, trip hop, jazz and salsa all at the same time, and also tried to reproduce the sounds of labels like Ninja Tune or Warp. The problem is that alot of hip hop artists come from a sampling culture, but here I was coming straight out of techno with this armada of analogical synthesizers that were all creaking.
But I kept at it. And starting in 1999 with a few different groups or solo, I played in a few concert halls in London and festivals, Spain, France. Did some opening gigs for Amon Tobin, Néotropic, Jaga Jazzist, Pest, Sayag Jazz Machine and others.
Eight years later in 2007 I was fed up with trying to book dates and sending incredible amounts of demos to labels and organizers. I decided to stop everything and just play music, and put it out to anyone who wanted to listen to it. And strangely that was when I discovered a scene that I'd never have imagined could exist. In fact, I had this misguided thought that only the best who belonged to a kind of elite could do concerts, when in fact there was this subculture in which artists with breath-taking talents self-produced and distributed their music for free, and they turned out to be the most generous people I'd ever met. I spent two years without making a sound, but took over a radio program for a few months to get the artists from this subculture some air time. Some of them were about to produce their own LPs and since I'm a sound engineer I offered them help mastering their albums (notably Degiheugi, Ghostown and Screenatorium). Following these experiences the desire to make music and come out with an album became clear to me. A year and a few months later with the help of the afore mentioned artists, Mister Dressmaking and the Patchwork Mind came out in September2010 under my real name: Mr. Grandin.
Mister Dressmaking and the Patchwork Mind.
Writing on Mister Dressmaking and the Patchwork Mind began in January 2009. At first the idea was to use a work method I'd never tried before to make music – one and a half to two hours a day and no more, the settings used on the synths (analogical and some without memory) had to obligatorily be the same ones on the following day for the next piece, and so on, to create the impression of acoustic unity between the different pieces.
Still, this acoustic shambles didn't sound like much of anything until I came across a canvas by Julie Hourlier. This canvas was part of a series she was working on, a mixture of needlework and paint. It would become the album cover and was the starting point of an entire universe and a story. As soon as Julie gave me permission to use her work for the illustration of the future album, everything sped up and everything I wanted to put into it became clear.
I'm not a songwriter and I'm even less of a singer, so I went looking for partners to work in cooperation on the project and further accentuate the sonor patchwork, but also particularly to place words and a story in this electronic molasses. I was also looking for temperaments and sensitivities that were diametrically opposed.
Ghostown, whose album I did mastering on, would start off the album and set the tone for a delirious, multi-faceted universe. Ghostown is about to release a long-awaited new work.
Doctor Ray Valentine, groove research worker and an old friend, brought a touch