Dottie Doppler
Dottie Doppler Plays
FRANCE FRÉQUENCES CRITIQUES #24 LP (2024)
Great vinyl LP of insanely twisted synth goop released by this Parisian micro-label run by the friendly Antoine Rigaux – an earlier record on same label, Frédéric Nogray’s Wild Noise Hall, took the genre of field recordings into a crazy zone and led to zoo liberation actions everywhere.
As to Dottie Doppler – well, I just wish there were a real person by that name, hopefully a New England computer scientist, operative in the 1960s from her home in Boston and the lab in MIT, and bemused by all the interest in her punch-card music, but it turns out to be an alias, possibly for three creators. The press note unspools such a long list of project and band names that a certain degree of scepticism might seem in order, but look for the names Blason, A/N/T/I/O/P/E, Ero Babaa, Bison Skull Mountain, Oïmiakon and others – and you’ll find at least one linking name, that of Philémon Girouard, who has also been associated with Napalm Jazz and Morceaux_De_Machines. Prolific while still maintaining a low profile and multiple slippery identities seems to be one watchword of these three masked geniuses, while the label want to stress the high degree of inventiveness going down on the grooves, and attribute it to a sense of mischief-making and chaotic freedom. It’s all about taking risks and boldly pressing buttons that should not be pressed, crossing wires, and actions that verge on hacking – and so there will “emerge stimulating ballets for tremulous electrons, punkoid nanoparticles that are thrilled to escape from the silence of printed circuits”, selon the press note. Each printed circuit and soldered node stands a chance of becoming an anarchist, a “little troublemaker” in this very open field of enquiry and play.
This is not formal electronic composition such as we currently find on the tame, academic electro-acoustic circuit, it isn’t flat-out crazy noise wall (although there has been a collaboration with Romain Perrot), nor is it music that owes any debt whatsoever to the dance floor, no matter how extreme the departures of the Vienna glitch-merchants and Cologne micro-hammer brigade. I mean you won’t find any 4-4 beats, nor pre-digested sequencer tedium, or indeed a single familiar sound that might entice the experimental clubber out of their corner. Just six dazzling cuts of sheer creativity in the modular-synth mode, all of them registering high in the markers for colour, events, textures, and dynamics. First and only record made under this Dottie Doppler name, although the CD also includes a live CD of when they first smashed their databanks live on stage in 2023 at Le Non_Jazz. Fabulous. From 19 June 2024.