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Tin.RP

If I was to mention French music these days, you'd probably think of Daft Punk. Sadly, despite the sonic possibilities, Daft Punk are not remotely punk. Tin.RP, on the other hand, aren't remotely tin, but DDN and his wife B*L do make an unholy punk rock racket. DDN answers the questions by email.

to me, the "punk attitude" (i mean the english one, not the 60's US one) seems to be an "anti-everything" attitude. I'm not a fan at all of the punk culture (so i got no particular haircut nor piercing, nor do i dress in some way or anything) but i like underground punk music (old Conflict, Crass, Dog Faced Hermans -that were punk, in a way, without any fancy haicut !-, etc.) and i always thought this way of being ironically suspicious of everything (including and starting by one's own beliefs and attitudes /poses) was funny and sound (that's what my dictionary says for "sain" -healthy, literally translated).

We could speak for hours of what punk attitude was or should be or have been. Seen from XXIst century's France, punk attitude seems a bit ridiculous even if it's coming back again in clothes this year, but it had a naive DonQuichottesque freshness I appreciate. Ready-made "no future" tee shirts and torn apart clothes look like a great summary of what our society is to my eyes. You can make money /fashion /trends out of absolutely anything. I think people from the old underground punk scene must laugh at that a lot.

Punk is probably dead, but some people from the original scene are still alive. That's ironically punk, too.

Tin.RP is a noise /power electronics project made by my wife B¨L and I. Unlike most other electronica projects, there are lyrics and voices in our tracks (don't ask me why, i don't know, we feel it that way). Tin.RP's music is made entirely with computers but not in a classical way. I see many people using computers to have a perfect crystal-clear sound.

We are the exact opposite (the dark side, maybe) : we use software bugs a lot -so we use a lot of crashing beta versions and old softwares-, we don't fight against clicks (we leave them alone), we don't fight digital distorsion (we look for it), we use lots of degraded to 2-4 bits sounds. Making non-commercial music with only a computer has been possible for a long time now (see the enormous atari /amiga scene), but became much easier and cheaper now that computers really are objects to show-to-your-neighbours-so-they-can-see-you're-an-up-to-date-person, just like your DVD player or your 16/9 telly : this is pure irony, too. Home computers took the music out of the hands of professionals by force, as i wrote on our homepage.

The new album is called "Hun_geR" : it's been inspired mainly by Knut Hamsun's book but also by the strange behaviour we have in the so-called civilized countries with food. The book is a lot about "trips" (the hero undergoes at first then wants to use to write /create) created by sustained starvation, so there are small 1-2' length tracks between the long ones called "the StarvinG series". We made about 15-20 of these tracks (each was made in less than 20 minutes with a mono modular synth created for it) and selected some to put on the album. Depending on your equipment (and due to the cd-burning method) there may or may not be 10 seconds of silence before or after the 13 original tracks : this is one of the software bugs i was talking about. We called this track "StarvingSilence", of course.

The album is on CD-extra with webpages replacing the usual paper interface -not really replacing because there is still a small paper interface. The package is folded black paper made by hand by B¨L.

I sent a copy of the first Tin.RP album ("BattleZone") to DHR. Nothing came back, not even a simple email ("your music is shit, keep it" or "you're on the right way, keep on working", nothing), so I wrote a rather aggressive mail to them about 6 months later. Well, Mrs Gillian answered herself, it seems, and thank her for that - i mean it !

We exchanged a few (very) aggressive emails over a few days, but she said she was ill and had a broken rib and I was exhausted because i worked a lot at that time, so "normal speech" didn't seem possible, she even asked me to make a track entitled "fuck you gillian at DHR" if i wasn't satisfied, ain't that funny ?. I came out of that with a negative feeling about myself and about DHR. Well : is our first album not good enough to deserve a polite listening (this is possible) ? Are "independant" labels too busy advertising for their pals to listen to the music people send them (that's not what they SAY, but i can assure you that's what most do -not staalplaat, though)? Is the music business so hard there's no room for amateurs (that's not what they say neither)?

After sending our first album to almost every independant label we knew -and getting NO answer except from New Fidelity and Staalplaat that reviewed it in vital weekly (under the wrong name of "first floppy"), we thought we'd better do things ourselves and started to think what we could do.

BurningEmptiness Inc. is not a real record label (since we don't seem to be able to sell anything.) We burn the CDs and make the floppies at home, B¨L designs and makes the packages, I write the words on them when there are, that's it. BurningEmptiness Inc. is two bands now : Tin.RP and PRESSURE a joke-about-metal band from belgium.

the NRP (Groupe de Recherche Bruitiste) is a joke we made after the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, bands /artists making 1minute tracks you can download from our website tinrp.free.fr there are 5 tracks for now and we're looking for more... The rules are simple: less than 1Mb (all formats accepted including old tracker ones), any style as soon as it is noise-oriented (lofi electronica, metal, industrial, whatever). The point would be to make a compilation out of that : can you imagine a 74-80 track compilation on a CD ?

UltraMilkmaids (to my point, best experimental ambient project in the world), Blue Baboon, Aspic, Darky; these people have been my friends for almost 10 years now and make all very good music in different styles. Celluloid Mata, Imminent Starvation, Mlada Fronta. There's one of the world's best metal bands in France, too : SUP.

Just ask and pay us the trip and we'll come gladly..

You can get a copy of Hun_ger through Tin.RP's web site at http://tinrp.free.fr or by writing to DEL NISTA, Résidence Michelet DeLattre / B2 - 5 boulevard du maréchal Koenig, 13009 Marseille, France "We distribute the products through the CareWare system. Send us something to show you care about the music - email poems, your albums, software, a picture, a nice letter, whatever - and you'll get music."