Novo Rock

69 is Armand Gonzalez and Virginie Peitavi and they call their music "Novo Rock". Vocals, Guitar, Moog, Baritone Guitar and Vintage Beat-boxes: with their instruments, they create a kind of rock music that uses synthetic and analogical sounds to reinvent itself.

The two musicians were previously part of French underground cult trio Sloy. Feeding on a common background of older influences (Devo, Public Image Limited, Talking Heads, The Cramps...), they turn it into something new that paradoxically sounds catchy and twisted at the same time.

These influences have been so deeply integrated and digested that the duet manages to develop a unique musical personality stretching beyond mere references that could be identified in specific tracks. First through their inventive pop songs that sometimes revel in minimalism. And also on stage, where the band intensively tested their tracks before even considering recording them -which they did at the Infernal Machine studio (an all analogic recording venue) with the help of Téo Mannoni. There, they engaged into intensive production work, to carry out some proper "sound searching", with the aim of giving each and every track the exact feel they desired. As a result, 69 offer an album that purposefully sounds very "engineered", and whose sound is intimately linked to the studio where it was made.

The result is ambitious and compelling -and also fairly incongruous in the current rock scene: a melting-pot mixing the pop ingenuousness of a children choir (Novo Rock) with a moist and obviously sexual tension (Lux); a guitar solo flirting with psychedelia associated with a metronomic groove (Flexy body); some dance inviting rock tunes (Rock'n'Latex, Dominatrix) and a pseudo broken faced crooner ballad (Love Excess). Without going into the detail of each and every track on the album, the most striking feature about 69's music is this extreme singularity that gave birth to so many timeless, unformatted and unclassifiable songs.

Sloy fans will immediately recognize Armand's whimsical and expressive singing, as well as his unique guitar sound, but any random comparison between the two bands would be pointless -other than to underline the primal energy animating these musicians when they play rock music in their own radical, singular way.