Les Enfants/Les Artistes

Mentasms has been intensified by Ricardo Villalobos’ Les Enfants for some time now. Villalobos’ strength lies in his unfailing allegiance to a particular aesthetic, his enthusiastic rejection of the mediocritising forces of eclecticism.

Blissblog and K-punk have previously articulated the link between dance music’s structural repetition and Deleuze & Guattari’s conception of the ‘plateau’ as the ideal mode of extracting jouissance. Villalobos takes this method to the extreme; the effect of his use of repetition - no matter how mesmerising - is never to induce a trance (“a half-conscious state characterised by an absence of response to external stimulation”), rather it requires and manipulates a state of hyper-consciousness where even the tiniest introduction of/variation in stimulation induces intense effect.

Over the course of his tracks and live sets, the endless 4X4 beat is internalised, becoming part of the body, allowing all that occurs elsewhere in the soundscape to be experienced more intensely. Les Enfants goes even further in RV’s reconstruction of the track, doing away with the kick drum altogether - subtracting the unnecessary but taken-for-granted formailities and expanding outwards, beyond the artificially imposed limits on (track) time and space. As Enfants’ piano riff is filtered outwards and upwards the brain feels as though it is being sucked through an airlock leading to another gravitational field. All the while the children’s refrain oscillates between schoolyard playfulness and militaristic battle chant, never settling over all of the track’s indivisible seventeen minutes.

Xxxchange’s remix of Santogold’s Les Artistes transplants the original’s fantastic melody and lyrics from their dull indietronica casing and onto reinforced crunkoid beats and a black-noise bassline reminiscent of the spectacularally grimey sonic proton-charge in Ashanti’s Only U. This mutation makes the desire for a transition into an unknown mindscape all the more stirring; the feelings of determination, doubt, optimism and loneliness fighting and feeding of each other in the inevitable emotional conflict that preludes the creation of a reconstructed self

Change, change, change, change
I want to get up out of my skin
tell you what
if I can shake it
I’m ‘a make this
something worth dreaming of

I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up