Hypo (real name : Anthony Keyeux) is a somewhat distinctive character of French electronic music. Discovered back in 2001 through Brighton based Spymania (first home of Squarepusher and Jamie Lidell), he’s released six albums of unique and unclassifiable electropop music. In 2007, his collaborative album The Correct Use Of Pets (with fellow musician EDH) was honoured with a Qwartz Electronic Music Awards.
Hypo’s music is a mixed bag : it seduces through immediacy and humour. Transplanting heterogeneous musical genres into his own (from cold wave to r’n’b and musique concrete), he scores pop music that is enjoyable and perverted at the same time, where humour and melancholy, ritournelles and experimation all melt into one piece. To escape from this interior dialogue, he also enjoys collaborating with other musicians. On his previous albums, he’s conversed with diverse artists such as à Momus, Anne Laplantine, dDamage, O.Lamm, Davide Balula and many others.
Hypo performed his music in many places and contexts: Centre Georges Pompidou (France), Popkomm in Berlin (Germany), the Vooruit Art Center in Gent (Belgium), Yugong Yishan in Beijing (China), the Matsuyama Planetarium (Japan), the Norrlands Opera in Umeå (Sweden) or the Mediabrera in Milan (Italy). Recently, he took on to play his music as a trio, together with EDH (with whom he is currently recording a new album) and drummer Stéphane Bellity (La Féline).
COCO DOULEUR
(New Album / Release date: March 1st 2010)
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.
