Minitel Rose – “So glad to play in Tokyo”
Since arriving on the electronic music scene with their mini album “The French Machine” in 2008, electro-pop trio Minitel Rose have been impressing audiences with their live shows and DJ sets at clubs and festivals around the world. April 30th sees Tokyo’s turn as the trio roll into town for Creativeman’s foreign music expose – “Radars”. Tokyo Indie caught up with Minitel Rose’s keyboardist, Romain to chat about the upcoming show, the band and their plans for the future.
Hello Romain, we’re really excited to have Minitel Rose in Tokyo! Is this your first time here? What kind of response are you hoping for from a Japanese crowd?
Yeah! It’s our first time in Japan, we are so excited to be here! When it comes to the Japanese crowd, we just hope that they are in a total rock’n roll mood because we want to dance all night long with them. We’re sure they won’t let us down!! Haha!
You’re here to play as part of the upcoming Radars event which aims to introduce Japan to up-and-coming music from abroad. For the uninitiated, how would you describe the Minitel Rose sound?
Minitel Rose has a multitude of faces, because on stage we are like a rock’n roll band but without guitars, just synths; bass synth, polyphonic synth and one more for the lead and the themes. On the album we program all the drums but on stage we have a drummer. Actually, he used to play in a garage band before, and now he’s the drummer of Rhum For Pauline – a pop soul band who just signed to our label “FVTVR”.
Many of us first heard Minitel Rose through the synth-pop revivalist, “Valerie Collective”. How did you get involved with them and what is it like being part of the collective?
In the beginning Valerie was just a blog, and then we decided to make Valerie a collective with Anoraak, College (the man who created the blog) Maethelvin, The Outrunners, Russ Chimes (he’s English and the only one of us who is not from Nantes on the french west coast) and us as the younger band. We are just a crew who watch the same Sci-fi films. It’s interesting for us because we don’t actually have a real experience of music from the 80’s because we are too young, but in the 90’s we used to watch all the old 80’s blockbusters and that’s where we got a lot of our influences.
September of last year saw you release your full debut album, “Atlantique” – it’s a great album but it’s arguably more suited to the discotheque than to live performance. Is there anything you do differently for your live shows?
As we mentioned a few questions before, we have a drummer when we play live and we play all the parts instead of using laptop. This means that we have to re-arrange our tracks differently, particularly those off the first album.
Alongside your own tracks, you’ve put out a string of remixes, dabbling with the likes of Fischerspooner, Of Montreal and (my personal favourite) Jimmy Edgar’s “Inside Out”. What’s the key to a good mix and are there any remixes of which you are particularly proud?
We like all of these remixes, the Jimmy E is so good to chill out to in a big car near the ocean – haha! When we remix an artist we don’t want to have the original instrumental track, we prefer to compose another instrumental part, in this way we keep our touch!
The “Radars” show you are playing also features groundbreaking acts from the UK and Australia and in a sense you are representing France. If we were to rent out a club and ask you to fill it with best French acts – your audio dream team – who would make the cut?
We would want to play with our own dream team, Valerie, because it has been a long long time since we made a Valerie Party. It’s a real pleasure to play with them and, of course the line up sounds good! YEAH!
Finally, anything you want to say to the people of Tokyo?
COWABUNGA! We are so glad to play in Tokyo!
Words: Sam Mokhtary
Translation: Mizuki Oyama
March 24, 2011
