Pleasure Principle Vinyl, CD & Tape 2 Items

Body search the record and you'll find chemical faves of the last forty years. Paul Ramon is doing 20 on the highway ("Hacienda", downhill dub with over-the-top bass), and 60 in the city ("Les victimes du roi", arpeggiated medieval-fantasy trip). Pleasure Principle obviously decided that traffic regulations just didn't apply to his vehicle. Sung in french (neither bellowed nor whispered, thanks), highlife guitars travelling light via the Carribeans, 90's synths stabs, calculated MTV moments: traces of everything, traces everywhere. A singer by obligation, by his own admission, he performs with a cheeky Madchester University alumni attitude. Happy to be there, but wishes nobody knew. Paul Ramon stuck his tongue out to write : he deals generously in one-liners, as sharp as disposable razors. Can't wait to see him pull those out of his pockets, struggling to bleed everyone.Marc Portheau saves the day in his mix : "Heliopolis", psych-pop jam lost in heavy delay, could have gone astray but suddenly gets all sophisticated with winds and chorus - as much appreciated as they never RSVP'd (Olivier Demeaux, Romain Vasset).This is a bear trap of an album. "La punition commence" (the punishment begins) and we expect a synth-wave dungeon moist with whispered confessions, when in fact it's more about wiggling arms in the air, and trampling the corpse of dance-pop to the sound of brain-dead synth, circa 1995. "Frappe le cuir" pays homage to the Happy Mondays, which you'd expect given the drummer's pedigree. "Buvez le poison" and "La sieste", a barely legal promotional campaign for narcotics, contain more than you asked for, if you can only listen. And "Rêves", chord-driven summer track gets turned over by the effects-laden guitar solo. Traps, again. So when you get to "Plein de rancoeur je vis mon meilleur moment", successful attempt to remake "Loser" in 2022, you'll know that Pleasure Principle knows his business in a rather endearing way. This is not a collage, but tie and dye colors spread to be l...

I’m going to say “I” because I think I can’t write about my music other than in the first person. I’ve been playing drums since I was fifteen years old and I’ve always had bands since. Even if I always contribute artistically, to different degrees, my latitude of action, from a creative point of view, has always been limited by the fact that I am a drummer. Like many people, I learned to play very approximately the guitar and keyboard, and I spent years going over obsessions and recurring patterns, in my room and in my head, without doing any of that, and knowing that even though I was and still am extremely involved in my past and present bands (Skategang, La Secte du Futur, Marietta to a lesser extent, and ), the music we were making was only partially representative of me. I’ve always listened to a lot of reggae, dancehall, music from Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, and overall music that is based more on repetition and intention than composition, and that’s something I could never really develop in there.
In 2015 my brother and friend Benjamin Dupont, the human behind Bryan’s Magic Tears, moved into my flat share / Noah’s Ark at 35 rue Clignancourt, in the 18th arrondissement, and it was him who unlocked everything by showing me how to record music by myself ; and one September morning, lying on my back, I saw the light.
It’s really a new world that’s opened up to me, I started recording at a pretty intensive pace, just letting myself be carried away by what I’ve had in my head and fingers for years; I’ve accumulated a lot of material, including a lot of unfinished pieces, and I’ve tried – I’m still trying – to understand for myself what my point really is and to learn how to systematize and channel my obsessions to make it something personal.
Recording a lot, without any constraints of format, group or expectations, by letting myself be totally carried away by what was coming out in the moment, it allowed me to give myself a certain insight into myself; I am not one of the people who compose music by having an idea of where they want to go, but by repeating the exercise, something coherent ends up taking shape. I would say that it oscillates, for the music, between synthetic krautrock, dancehall lo-fi, Manchester sound recorded with toys, rock à la Velvet and Memphis rap for children; and between Les Négresses Vertes and Julien Gracq for the texts. I still write the basis of my lyrics without music, and I attach a lot of importance to it; French has become obvious because I want to say something true and I would not be able to do it otherwise – even if the text of “The Fur” is in English, but it was to seduce a girl (it didn’t work), and it won’t happen again. This is my friend Paula from J.C. Satan and Succhiamo, who sings on “Mariposa” and “Venera 16”, because I had no idea what to do about it; I sent her the songs and she sang on her phone, it was great so we recorded it.
This first album is a kind of best-of from 2015 to 2018, the songs that held up best, the ones I had lyrics on, the best finished drafts, basically. I owe its existence to my friends at the Megattera micro-label who, after hearing my songs at home at night, decided to release them confidentially on tape first; without them, they would still be on my hard drive. Under the spell, Born Bad Records then entrusted Olivier Demeaux de Cheveu/ Heimat with the mission of mixing the “best” tracks to give them the lustre they deserve and make these few crazy and scattered tracks a full-fledged album. I asked Adam Karakos, from Villejuif Underground, Guillaume Rottier, from Rendez-Vous, Nikolaj Boursniev, from Quetzal Snakes, and Milia Colombani, who plays in half the bands in Paris, to play live with me.
Pleasure Principle is located somewhere within a triangle formed by Francis Bebey, Add (n) To X and Ludwig Von 88; it is a solitary race to the outside, an ode to the forward flight, a way to escape in the peaceful expectation of the great liberating flash. I often find myself dancing like a monkey who forgets the world when I record at night in my room, and I hope to provoke the same reaction in people.
Paul Speedy Ramon