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Raoul Sinier: An Invitation into his Brain Kitchen

  Tobias

"Do I see myself as a visual artist or as a musician? I just do what I like and what I'm confortable with“, Sinier says, „I don't feel like a musician doing paintings or a painter doing music. I do find music stronger than visual, not only for my own stuff but in general. So I guess my answer is 'both', but at the same time.“ The process of arriving at results is extremely transparent for „Brain Kitchen“, again a deliriously collapsing cocktail of HipHop beats, breakgrooves, looped chord swells and colourful collage techniques. Not only has he shot a psychedelically tinged video to accompany the music and does the booklet fold out into a medium-sized poster, but there is also a PDF magazine available from the Ad Noiseam site, which contains even more associated paintings and an interview providing for insight on the background to the songs. In combination with the visuals, one could easily assume that the record were, in fact, a concept album of sorts – a notion which Sinier does not agree with: „As weird as it sounds I don't really have any intentions“, he points out, „I don't think too much about what I do on the moment. I'm very demanding about my work but most of the time I'm just letting myself go, just having good time and creating stuff. My personality makes the connection with all this, but it's not a consciousneffort. The only thing I do consciously is trying to avoid clichés, trying to be as less influenced as possible. And, as I like to say over and over again, I hate the intellectual arts world.“

But what about the „Huge Samurai Radish“? Isn't he some sort of Leitmotif to the album? „The Huge Samurai Radish is just me being stuck at finding songs titles“, Sinier explains, „Sometimes something comes up naturally, but mostly it's a real pain to associate words to an abstract piece of music. For this one it was related to a samurai video game I was playing at the time where the main character had to eat huge white Japanese radishes to replenish is life meter. I just liked this radish, I thought it was a beautiful object.“ The title, in turn, inspired the video, which, vice versa, unconsciously connected the different tracks on the full-length, providing for an intuitive narrative. Sinier seems perfectly happy to leave things at that, refusing to show off by superimposing a pretentious logical construct on top of his energetic and jumpy tracks: „ Titles and ideas are just pretexts. The most important aspect is the overall aesthetic.“

On the other hand, Sinier is extremely demanding on himself. „Brain Kitchen“ may be a continuation of the journey he set out on with previous releases, but it doesn't complacently repeat the winning formula of efforts like „Wxfdswxc2“. Instead, the work sees him persuing more complex structures and staying clear of overly repetitive patterns, trivial combinations and straight loops. It is not a record which suits itself to background listening, as your sensory system is virtually bombarded by an overload of information and shellshocked by pieces which are having a blast by going against the grain and building up a groove just to joyously destroy it a mere second later. On closer inspection, however, there are also more intimate and calm moments to be found, when the pulse rate of the music calms down just a bit and tracks start to reveal a more vulnerable side. It is the juxtaposition of these almost peaceful passages with the android organ funk and polyrhythmic attacks the Parisian has become famous for which marks „Brain Kitchen“ as something truly out of the ordinary.

Sinier agrees: „Behind the obvious harshness there are a lot of differents emotions, and I think it's a music suitable for loudness and head banging as well as for headphones and casual environment. I'm often using words like "brain" because to me the most important thing in music is the core, the composition, the score, the melodies, etc.“ It is a sentiment mirrored by the paintings on display at Estace, which also confront the viewer with simultaneous sensations of repulsion and intruige. Maybe the reason for this duality is that this oeuvre is founded on pure imagination, not the organised, prepackaged kind one usually finds in other releases. In any case, as he is eager to point out, it is never a question of big budgets: „Of course it's cool to have a sharp production, good sound and all but at the end that's nothing but a detail. You cannot create good music with just a top notch production and incredible technique, but you can do a masterpiece with just a piano recorded in a basement.“

Homepage: Raoul Sinier
Homepage: Ad Noiseam Records