Description
The corpus of POL is sprawling. Electronic music is its barycenter, but it transcends the barriers of genres, modes of expression and identities.
The primordial movement of POL is to be found in Geneva, at the beginning of the 1990s. Within the MXP collective, he then laid the foundations of the electronic scene at the end of Lake Geneva. It is there, and at this moment, that his original aesthetic is forged: an electro hammering, but given with dark tools. POL certainly invents machines to move, but what they set in motion are, just as much as the hips, the neurons. The angst and the means to sublimate it through an alignment of rhythms and patterns. But also the pure desire for sound research, for example when he revisits Steve Reich with Drumming By Numbers, or the composer Rousseau via JJRMX.
A look at his discography (partly hosted by the label he built himself, Helvet Underground, a welcoming matrix of many other artists) shows how the aesthetic of urgency that is that of POL flows naturally into adjacent propositions. Aeroflot, with Goodbye Ivan, is done in a form of lustrous electro pop, with zenithal harmonies. Shokogun promotes hip hop that is both rocky and surreal. With Tout Bleu (alongside Naomi Mabanda and Luciano Turella), he produces the compositions of Simone Aubert – an unknown object, between noise, song and trance. Enoia (with Da Saz and Goodbye Ivan) is an ambient ascension generator. The list is still long: Sunisit (with Cesare Pizzi, sampler of The Young Gods), Chymere (with Sonia P), Robor, Core, Inflaton…
POL crosses still other borders, beyond music considered as an object in itself: his creations have found their way into the cinema (with Bruce LaBruce or Xavier Giannoli), he composes for the stage (in collaboration with choreographers such as Gilles Jobin, Marthe Krummenacher, Ioannis Mandafounis or Louis-Clément da Costa) and creates sound and audio-visual installations (Tactile, Autoradio Orchestra, Le Potager sonore, Jantar Mantar or Echorda).