More than the work of any other composer, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music seems to be genre-neutral. Over the past three centuries these pure, uninflected melodies and mutating harmonies have been endlessly interpreted by jazz, bossa nova, samba, synth-pop, flamenco, electronica, ambient, rave and drum’n’bass musicians – sometimes, as on Uri Caine’s 2000 interpretation of the Goldberg Variations, all on the same album. The latest set of interpretations comes from French artist Arandel, a rather mysterious figure on the fringes of the techno scene who preserves his anonymity at festivals by DJing in a sealed booth. Like Matthew Herbert, he has a Dogme-style manifesto for making music, never using samplers, sequencers or pre-programmed synthetic sounds.
Given away with issue #1260 Fabriqué en France. Tame Impala, Bombay Bicycle Club, Destroyer, Jean-Louis Murat and many others.