A newborn Damien was found by one of the priests of the Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel, burial place for the Tsars. He was adopted by a modest but loving young couple of clerks from the Soviet Patent Office and, at the age of ten, got apprenticed to one of the most revered jewelers in Moscow. Music is banned from the large, monastic workshop, for “only the jewel suits the soul of a well-born gentleman.” Strangely enough, this is where the first elements of his musical consciousness will coalesce: the motorik steadiness of the workshop sounds, the unexpected lining up of two streams of jingling and jangling, the miraculous synchronicity emerging from the racket.
1998: Damien embarks on a grand tour of the jewelry capitals of Europe. Prague, Berlin, then Paris, where he ends up staying for good. At this point in his life, he hates music. With one crucial exception: techno, which he discovered by listening to snippets of albums on display at big, well-heated department stores. Then it gets less quixotic: the French Touch (Daft Punk, Mr. Oizo, Air, Motorbass, Etienne de Crécy & Cassius), then Bpitch via Feadz and Perlon thanks to Akufen and Ricardo Villalobos, Matthew Herbert, Matmos, Björk, Institubes, Robag Whrume, Pantytec, and the German minimal empire: Kompakt, Musik Krause, Freude Am Tanzen, Milnor Modern, Trapez/Traum... Damien buys his first pair of turntables on April 14th 2001.
One year later, he asks Alex from the record shop Katapult, pioneer of all things minimal in France, how one gets to play in clubs: “You have to have a record out!” So production is the next step. All the money his grandmother has been saving for him since forever is used to buy a computer, and a year of his own savings goes into a decent soundcard.
At the first “Alors les Filles” party thrown by Institubes, Damien discovers the incredible mixing style of (TTC DJ) Orgasmic and realizes he has found a home. In September 2004, we get a strange soundfile in our inbox. Two years later, we give you Das Glow – “Weiss Gaz EP”.
A1/ Cathédrale (45 RPM)
Para One says it best: “A perfect techno moment. A track I’d love to have done.” It starts low-key, with a tiny, decimated harpsichordion synth layered onto some machinic cruft, shards of white noise clipping and clicking, then the bassline bleeds in from the edges, delays widen the scope and the whole track swells up. Then a massive kick drops from ten feet high and a vast landscape comes into focus before being swallowed again by a huge liquid moon. Then there is this immense,
cathartic breakdown... Sure, such maximalist techno shares some DNA with Border Community, but mostly because Holden, Fake & co. made it cool to sound sincere and engaged in big, unironic, all-engulfing feelings. “Cathédrale” is unashamedly epic, it comes from the heart and speaks to the brain and feet simultaneously and we’re damn proud of it.
B1/ Weiss Gaz (33 RPM)
“Weiss Gaz” is mostly electro, with shades of ghettotech, acid house accents, laser-guided snaps, a huge bassline revving like a V8, and bits of musique concrète. You may like to know that these weird reverse hi-hats are actually meat being thrown on a frying pan, and somewhere in there the artist can be heard kissing his girlfriend. It’s tailored for big clubs, tweaked for maximum dancefloor impact. Usually people start dancing in circles and shouting, calling you a traitor, a ruiner of crops, only stopping to make sure the ceiling is still aglow with this bizarre, lopsided disco sun.
B2/ Vulcanice (33 RPM)
Recorded in one take then barely edited, this call-and-response between two chords also sounds like worship music: it’s focused, throbbing, it’s slightly hypnotic, it’s built around Hammond organ samples. But what kind of sick god* can you celebrate with five minutes of dark, grimey flexout? A brusque revolving bass, little variation, small, local build-ups, no release, all tension. Oh, and those ambient sounds? A Vietnamese restaurant in Belleville, Paris, France.
If you’d like to start a secret cult of bass worshippers, write to the label.
