Tophee Cheesecake - Rollerskates

Remix of Melanie Safka's U.S. #1 hit "Brand New Key" from 1971. Commissioned for the Braindance! forum rollerdisco compilation entitled "Rexing Classics". Music to rollerskate to ! Available for free on the Bit-Phalanx netlabel along with 17 other rollerskate-related contributions from various artists.

Topher - Bombin' Brooklyn

A 23-minute soundscape recreating a graffiti artist's journey across Brooklyn to find spots he can "bomb" with his spray can. Contains a sample from "Art Of Drums (Rap Version)" performed by Mac Attack. This piece was commissioned as ambience for an exhibit dedicated to urban culture called "Urban-Inside" taking place at Le Module in Saint-Laurent Du Var, France from September 25th until December 31st, 2010.

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Tophee Cheesecake - Guettalife

Audio collage meant to reflect David Guetta's arrogance and lack of music education. Out soon on CD along with 18 remixes from other artists from the south of France to protest against the outrageous town hall subsidies spent on his coming to Nice (think six figures) when the city grants only a tiny fraction of that ludicrous amount to local music associations over the whole year.

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All my DJ mixes now on Mixcloud

Today, I have officially chosen Mixcloud as my favorite webhost for my DJ mixes ! The ones I had previously posted on Topher.fr are now re-linked to Mixcloud and you can definitely expect many more mixes from me this year. Quite a handy website as there is no upload limit ! Does need a few features and touch-ups here and there to make it even better, but already stands as a serious contender for Soundcloud (where my audio collages and live sets will remain for the time being). Stay tuned ! :)

More Ligeti updates

This afternoon, Mike Paradinas (a.k.a. µ-Ziq) e-mailed me the AIFF version of his exclusive Droops track after he found it on one of his external hard drives. I'm quite happy about that as I had been offering a 256 kbps mp3 version of it for the past 2 1/2 years, but it is now finally available on the site for all to hear and to download in 320 kbps mp3 and FLAC, for free of course, like all other contributions (27 so far). By the way, many thanks again to all featured artists. :)

On a related note, the Visuals section is now fully up and running. I don't have too much time these days to dedicate to the Ligeti tribute, but please keep sending your contributions. I will process them and notify you once they're online. Make sure you read the FAQ before you send me anything though !

More wicked tracks coming up this spring - stay tuned !^^

György Ligeti Tribute - Visual Contributions open !

Back in June 2008, I received an e-mail from Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca, a visual artist renowned for his artwork for Detroit greats such as Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Los Hermanos & Underground Resistance, but also for François Kevorkian, collaborations with Overton Loyd (artwork designer for Parliament/Funkadelic), Hideki Nakajima (artwork designer for Ryuichi Sakamoto), the Nat King Cole Re:Generations cover project (featuring Will.I.Am, Cut Chemist, Bebel Gilberto, Nas, TV On The Radio, etc.) and the John & Alice Coltrane Foundation.
Clearly an impressive and interesting resumé, but it turns out the e-mail ended up in my junk mail and I only discovered it about a week ago, looking for something else ! Gustavo was asking me if he could submit a visual contribution to the Ligeti project. So I replied (20 months later !) and Gustavo's enthusiasm conveyed to me the idea of opening a section dedicated to visual artists. Not only graphic designers and painters but also video artists.
So if you are one of the above and Ligeti's music has influenced your art, I'd be most pleased to hear from you ! The contributions will appear as thumbnails below each contributor's name with options to zoom in and enlarge and to download the work in hi-res. Gustavo is, of course, the first contributor and we are going to try to get more people interested in this. I'm now collecting all the works that will be sent to me via the contact form on the Ligeti page and I hope to get the "Visuals" section up and running by March with already a few works to check out ! ;)

Posthuman - Lander (Topher Remix)

My remix for the awesome Posthuman is now complete ! Slowed it down to 120 bpm with many Juno Alpha "hoover" sounds that I find reminiscing of very early Frank De Wulf tracks, and a lot of freehand editing which may sometimes mess with the tempo a bit, but helping keep the track purposely raw. I'm not sure everyone will get this but I think most 20plus-year old-schoolers should like it as much as I do. :)

Not sure if Posthuman's plans are to release it anytime soon (if at all !) so I won't make it available here (unless it's rejected). In any case, you can always go ahead and give it a listen at my MySpace page for the time being. ;)

György Ligeti Tribute update

The day after the famous composer György Ligeti died in June 2006, I started the idea of a tribute from experimental electronic artists. µ-Ziq, one of the renowned pioneers of UK electronica, was the first one to send me a track, which I reckon helped pave the way for more contributions to come. The project was launched online on June 13th, 2007, the same day it was initiated, for the first anniversary of Ligeti's death, and is still ongoing to this day, counting 27 brilliant artists rallied to the cause so far, from Rapoon, the pioneer of industrial ambient since the early 80's with his band Zoviet France, to emerging artists such as +10 who is now on Rephlex as Jodey Kendrick, or KiNK, one of the unavoidable figures of the new electronic dance scene for many D.J.'s around the world.

Today, and after some time spent chasing down some of the master recordings, I have finally made all the tracks collected so far available for download in 320kbps mp3 and FLAC lossless format. All but µ-Ziq's which shall remain in 256 kbps until he gets his hands back on the master recording (which unfortunately sounds very unlikely...).

Also, the project has just been accepted by the mighty Discogs website as a proper netlabel, thus procuring it and its unknown artists a somewhat more official presence in the world of recorded music.

The tracks are all available for free on my website and the contributions are always welcome. Just make sure you read the FAQ section of the site before submitting any.