#electro-cabaret

[rainingmusic]

Goldfrapp - Lovely Head 

[passionate-reply]

RONNY - “TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT”

“Electro-cabaret” of the early 80s always struck me as the coolest synth scene nobody’s ever heard of nowadays. Sure, Taco’s “Puttin’ On the Ritz” managed to become a hit in some markets, but sometimes that sort of thing happens and people laugh off something rather interesting as nothing more than a frivolous novelty hit. I remember when electro-swing first became a popular fad of sorts when I was a teenager, and it, too, was dismissed as gimmicky and derivative--the kind of thing people would make memes with, and anyone who caught themselves enjoying the music a little too unironically was made to feel like they needed their head examined. Yet another symptom of the persistent “joke” status so often afforded to the diverse varieties of electronic music.

But I digress. Electro-swing and electro-cabaret both draw a lot of inspiration from early 20th Century musical styles, of course, but where the former reimagines the dance styles of the era as synthesised club-thumpers, the latter crafts darkwave dirges inspired by more vocal-centric music. “To Have and Have Not,” a sordid tale of love cheapened and commodified, is a fabulous introduction to what the style has in store, with its delightfully sinister, pulsating synth hook, and the sultry alto of Ronny Vuniconnu, a model turned sometime chanteuse.

[glitteranddoom-pbsfm]

OK - maybe planningtorock doesn't exactly fit into the traditional cabaret scene, but Janine Rostron (the mastermind behind) is most definitely a musical curiosity with some serious cabaret-related cred. The evidence:

Berlin based

Cross-disciplinary artist, working with visual, temporal as well as musical narratives

In 2010, she co-wrote an opera with The Knife, based on Darwin's The Origin of the Species

Through visual and vocal distortion and effects, Rostron plays with - and challenges the boundaries of - ideas of gender, identity, vulnerability and authenticity. 

Think Kate Bush by way of Antony Hegarty and Jean Cocteau and you'll get the idea. It actually took me a while to get into her latest record, W, but give it time to seep under your skin...