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LA FRAICHEUR - Reversing Stigma EP

by LA FRAICHEUR

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1.
From Protest to Rave and Back Again 05:28
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2.
Reversing Stigma 05:47
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3.
Meeting Points 05:43
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4.
Rising 04:24
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about

“Reversing Stigma” is La Fraicheur’s new EP, excerpts from M.A.D, an hour-long immersive piece for 8 dancers centered around club culture from French choreographer Julien Grosvalet, which La Fraicheur composed and plays live. The dance performance touches on themes of clubs as political spaces for community bonding, visibility, solace and empowerement. The piece was born after the events of June 21st 2019 when, in La Fraicheur’s hometown Nantes, a young dancer, Steve Maia Caniço, died during the violent police raid of a legal techno party, leading many to fall in the Loire river, lost in clouds of teargas in the darkness of night. The piece evokes the rave environment as a safe place for a queer and disenfranchised population to bond, to grieve, to breathe, to celebrate one’s identity and to empower your physical body, helping you reclaim the legitimacy to inhabit the social body, the public space and the strength to protest and show up for your struggles despite repression. Yet the rave is also a space perceived as a dangerous threat by governments and police forces, leading the “safe space” we create for us to possibly become the place where you can die because of cultural stigmas. Fittingly, the soundtrack was composed during the historic pandemic moment of true withdrawal, when club spaces were banned and blamed, now scapegoats more than ever, leaving the queer and marginalized communities out of safe spaces to meet and support each other.

In her sountrack, La Fraicheur tried to convey those principles of what the rave scene represents for its participants and detractors, by creating moments of tension, release, apathy, celebration, fear, anger and joyful explosion in the shape of cross-genre electronic music. You can’t pin down a 3 decades-long movement to one style, so the piece travels between ambient, electronica, electro, house, techno, breakbeat, acid and EBM. From the 60 minutes sonic and choreographic piece, La Fraicheur extracted and reworked 4 moments reshaped as DJ-friendly, club-ready stand-alone tracks.

From Protest To Rave And Back Again is evoking the moment you bring the rage of the protest into the club and let it all out. The track is created around a thundering, ever-evolving, angry acid bassline that travels through the distrortions and backed by grimey punk metallic disruptive elements, like a Greek chorus shouting our existential pain.

Reversing Stigma is the exemplification of techno as a movement that managed to see light in darkness, blending the two in a non-binary vision of the world. Hence somber growling dirty gutsy bass sounds associated with out-of-this-world eerie and tense sharp melodies can be the vector for a joyful and warm communal moment of solace and letting go. With an EBM feel and a Breakbeat-infused groove, the track is the sonic embodiement of reappropriation, the menace turned celebration.

Meeting Points, as the title hints, is the epitome of a queer church anthem for those magical celebratory moments when they open the Pano blinds on those sunday afternoons. The track, with its spacious stabs of classic House organ, galactic disco elements, a warm round bassline and big reverbs, catches the crowd in this spiritual communion bubble, where one can forget the outside violence and live free within the safe boundaries of queer culture. The track paints the picture of clubs as our churches and our sundays spent dancing our masses.

Closing the EP, Rising is an emotional trip evoking that part-gooey, part-floaty moment of the after hours between exhaustion and lightness of being, when seeing the sun rise you ponder if you should gather your strength to go back home to your “normal” life again or make this reality go on for a little longer. La Fraicheur made a wavy light arpeggio rise and fall while cavernous sound design and cheeky deconstructed traveling bass sounds bounce off each other to transcribe this moment of in-between where contradictions co-exist.

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released May 16, 2022

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House of (S)PUNK Barcelona, Spain

HOUSE OF (S)PUNK is the record label founded by La Fraicheur and home to the young queer, trans, femme & cyborg electronic scene of Barcelona. Its mission is to highlight the talents of this generation who grew up in a melting pot of techno, trance, hardstyle, makina, breakbeat, gabber or eurodance they spit it back out blurring the lines in a special playful blend of fast-paced neo-rave sound. ... more

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