VERMEIL

Metz, Lorraine · based in Paris since 20 · b. 2002 · FARA Records

VERMEIL (Théo Kastner, b. 16 May 2002, Metz, Lorraine, based in Paris since twenty) grew up in a city of heavy yellow stone, an enormous cathedral, dead steel industry on the outskirts and a border in every direction — Luxembourg twenty minutes one way, Germany forty the other. It's French now and was German for forty-seven years, and has never entirely decided how it feels about that; growing up there gives you a particular relationship with borrowed things, since everybody's surname comes from somewhere else and nobody thinks about it. He grew up in a house where his grandfather had been a foundry electrician, and what he inherited wasn't music but a completely unromantic attitude to machinery — you take it apart, you find out what it does, you put it back together better. He found French touch on a hard drive at fifteen, in a city with nothing much happening, learning production from forum posts and from taking records apart — filtering, chopping, working out what a sample was before it was a sample. He moved to Paris at twenty for a job that wasn't music and stopped doing that job within a year.

He doesn't sing. What he does is process: vocoder chants, talk box, lo-fi chops, and the specific French discipline of taking a warm old record and squeezing it through a filter until it becomes a completely different kind of pleasure. Four-on-the-floor, hard sidechain, analogue stabs, and an ear for the exact moment a filter should open — the entire craft of this genre and much harder than it looks. His signature is patience: he'll hold a build eight bars past where anybody else would break it. His influences run the French filtered-house tradition and the disco records it was built out of, which he came to backwards — he found the samples before he found the tracks that used them, which he maintains is the correct order. Beyond that: the specific engineering-minded, unromantic approach to machines he got from his grandfather.

Almost entirely absent as a public figure — he doesn't front, doesn't talk on a microphone and doesn't particularly want to be photographed, which is not mystique so much as a preference. Live he plays long and builds slowly and lets SOLINE be the thing the room looks at. His grandfather was a foundry electrician in Metz — the unromantic take-it-apart attitude is inherited, the music isn't. He'll hold a build eight bars past the point of comfort and has been asked to stop by three different promoters. Methodical, dry, unhurried.