Peter Peter

Peter Peter has allowed himself a dive without a net. Abrasive and percussive, frontal and combining in the same momentum crushed beats, vocals irrigated with a wild sensibility and panache. From troubled oscillations to deep pulsations, he probes the forces of the sonic web, imposing the power of melody with beats per minute without totally turning away from the song format. Ether, his fifth album, is an immersive experience at its most intense. Was it the still-burning transition to middle age that ordered this letting go? Or his recent geographical move to Quebec City, after an eight-year stint in Paris and a two-year return to Montreal? In any case, by scrupulously avoiding confrontation, the boy builds a new world, almost uniform in its approach, full of vitalizing bursts and rich in rhythmic deluges.

During the pandemic-disturbed release of Super Comédie, his previous eighties-style synth-vapor record, Peter Peter was already thinking about the next chapter. He had two options in mind: to continue in the glorious lineage of continuity in the company of his guitar, his instrument of choice, or to free himself completely for the first time and open wide the doors to a radicalism, to a certain electro-dance grandeur that had long frightened him. In the end, he opts for the latter. Synthesizers, piano, programming and sequences are the order of the day. Although he had already flirted with this purely and fundamentally electronic incursion in Bien réel, the blistering opening track of his 2017 album Noir Eden, the Quebecker had not extended the idyll over the long term. This time around, he set himself constraints, such as not using any musicians, only letting Guillaume Guilbault (Constance, Duu, KROY), co-producer of the tracks, in at the end. It was a lonely road, fraught with pitfalls, since in 2022 he lost part of the hearing in his left ear. Psychologically, the blow was severe. He sank into depression and thought of calling it quits. Four months of doubts, questioning and dark thoughts. There are no echoes of this event on the album, except indirectly, on a Day like this one, a song of remission, illuminated by a beam of light, which gave him renewed confidence both in life and in music.

In the end, we realize that Peter Peter, without abandoning his obsessive penchant for melancholy and his vocation to comfort lonely or flayed souls, has managed to reinvent his own musical language. With the possible exception of 20 k d'heures de solitude, which he describes as his "most reassuring song", and whose sound and lyrics are unmistakably his own ("Je n'accuse non rien ni personne/Je ne sais pas moi-même où je vais/Toi connais-tu un endroit/Où il fait bon d'errer? "), this homebody frequently surfs on the heritage of an exciting English techno scene that bears the names of Underworld, Boards of Canada, The Chemical Brothers, Kelly Lee Owens, Daniel Avery... Equally at ease in seizing the ecstasy commanded by the dance-floor or designing the perfect aftersoundtrack, he lets rhythms and ideas wriggle here.