The first artist of the evening of the Record Makers 10th anniversary was the experimental Turzi. Iman had sent me a track ‘Bombay’, which I really liked for his strange and intriguing sonic and epic journey, and I expected to see several guys on stage as the picture coming with the press release was featuring several persons.
Instead there was only one man, Romain Turzi, surrounded by keyboards, mic, synth and guitar, and the rainbow of mysterious sounds he was producing was different from the song I had heard, but nevertheless extremely fascinating and especially very visual.
The experience is difficult to describe, a sort of journey through different countries with electronic sounds overlapping Arabic chants or African songs and rhythms, repetitive and frenetic beats mixed with pulsatile synth loops moving as fast as cars on a freeway, interrupted sometimes by cringing guitar riffs, screaming and scary voices coming from some faraway monastery mixed with high-pitched noise, hard and metallic water drops falling on a mad and scary organ coming from an horror movie.
A long and torturous trip through ethnic sounds, krautrock and more heavy sounds, and it’s difficult to say what was improvised or not at this point. It’s hypnotic and cinematic music, with at times the fluidity of running water or the solemn heaviness of a large herd of marching elephants.
Although on the same label, Turzi’s music had nothing to do with what the rest of the evening was preparing, no Acid Washed or Kavinsky’s dancing electro beats, no Sebastien Tellier’s easy pop, it was not even possible to dance on Turzi’s performance, rather it was a shoegazing flight over a strange and foreign landscape.