Dop , Live at Off Sonar Hi five Mobilee vs Supplement facts 19-06-10
Yet again, there’s something brewing in France. This time, though, it doesn’t involve robot rock, Nazarene waters or flat beats. In fact, this uprising doesn’t have much to do with the usual tools of electronic music at all. Instead the trio of dOP—and their close friends Nôze—are busy trying to reenergize house music with horns, roses, vodka and a whole lot of vocals.
That’s the feeling you get, at least, if you’ve been following the rise of both over the past few years. Unlike their now-veteran colleagues Nôze, dOP (Clement Zemstov, Damien Vandesande, Jonathan “JoJo” Illel) have only recently appeared on the scene with a stunning string of 12-inches for Circus Company, Milnormodern, Eklo and Orac that have garnered the trio increasingly more attention as the year has gone on.
They’ve been around for far longer than that, though. Zemstov, Vandesande and Illel are childhood friends. And it’s that history that perhaps explains why the group’s productions sound so organic, their intuitive tracks borne of a trust that has only grown in the time since their former guitarist, Ramon, tragically died. But while you’ll never hear a guitar in a dOP track as a tribute to their lost friend, there’s not much else that you won’t hear. The trio almost seem to revel in bringing new sounds to their productions, taking cues from their past work in jazz, reggae, hip-hop and rock & roll bands, as well as their time in Mali, in which they helped record a number of native musicians for Ali Farka Touré’s Mali K7 label.
It’s these outside inputs that help to make their music some of the most distinctive you’ll hear in 2008. And it’s why we decided to e-mail a bit with Vandesande in advance of their performance at this year’s Unsound Festival in Poland later this month. We chatted about Clement’s sporting past, what Nicolas from Nôze has taught them and being “too hip-hop” for French promoters.
It seems like you guys appeared out of nowhere. Where did you come from? What were you doing before you made electronic music?
We don’t come from nowhere. We come from the planet Aguayo, which is much bigger than planet Earth. We came on earth recently to play techno in clubs, because we really like your drinks and your girls. Your planet is nice and girls are too expensive on our planet. To make money when we arrived, we had a few jobs. I was a cook in the biggest jail in Paris, Clément was a professional soccer player and Jo sold stuff on the beach (cigarettes, condoms, drinks and chouchou). But now we only do music. And we’re really happy about it.
Clement played soccer? What team did he play for?
Paris Saint-Germain FC. He played for them for three years, but he had some problems with the coach. So he quit the team, and decided to involve himself solely in music.
How did you end up meeting? It seems like you’ve held such different jobs.
We actually grew up in the same neighborhood, so we’ve known each other almost since birth. But, yeah, we’ve had a lot of different jobs. For a time, we also worked in the same restaurant, I was cooking, and Jojo and Clément were serving. After that, we also worked in the same hotel, but we had some corruption troubles.
Corruption troubles?
We were accused of a lot of things by the brother of the boss. He’s a very dirty guy, but the police are looking after him right now.
