Photo credit: Xavier Duquesne
Original member of the Lossless family with Mathias Schober, Thomas Herb, and Neil Flynn. General music taste as vast as the sky (though sometimes as messy and wet). Born in August 1985 (same as Red Hot Chili Peppers’ second album, which explains the long hair). Son of the Mediterranean sea with roots taking place in France, Spain, and Morocco (which no, doesn’t explain the beard). Can be found at the counter of a bar on Weserstrasse, or locked up in his room moaning, eating a massive amount of lentils, chickpeas and bananas, digging on Discogs, and making some kinda music somewhere between house, techno, and Georgian polyphony (which explains he move approximately 8 times a year). Currently studying Irish slang with Wayne Duggan. Master’s degree in quitting restaurant jobs in Paris (2016 promotion) Weird animal sometimes. Please wear gloves when manipulating him.
We caught up with Anthony Georges Patrice to talk about his new Dance Artifakts release entitled ‘The Wise Man & The Plants’.
Electronic Groove: Hello Anthony, thank you so much for being here with us. Where are you now? How have you handled the lockdown? Have you been able to make the most out of this adverse situation?
Anthony Georges Patrice: Hello all. I’m in Berlin now since the end of August. I was in France since the end of 2018 and moved to the beautiful Ardeche department with my family to cool down from the city life at the end of 2019, so I ended up handling the lockdown in a village where Maurice Ravel once stayed called ‘Lamastre’. He actually wrote ‘La Valse’ there, therefore I felt it was a good place to write some music.
Electronic Groove: Tell us a bit about your musical background. What are your first musical memories? Did you go through a heap of genres until you figured out which one conveyed best your emotions and expressions?
Anthony Georges Patrice: My first musical memories go back to be on a parking lot to annoy my father working on his car (a very small blue Renault 5). My father is an absolute flamenco cassette digger and so he was back in the days. I remember once asking him “who is this guy ?” pointing at a mullet hairsprayed man on a picture, to which he answered, “this is El Camaron De La Isla”. That’s how I got into Flamenco as a kid. Later on, my older sister called me to the living room one day. She put on a record and said “this kid, is one hell of a record. It’s called ‘Imagination’”. Since that day I keep listening to ‘In The Heat Of The Night’. Did I really figure out a genre that conveys best my emotions? If I did it’s a very unfortunate accident. I feel like I’m still searching.
Electronic Groove: We know you have a brand new EP coming up on Dance Artifakts. Could you tell us more about the inspiration for ‘The Wise Man & The Plants’? We’ve noticed the blend of a vintage and modern sound palette, with tribal and minimal elements. How would you describe your sound? Is there something you look to achieve through your tracks?
Anthony Georges Patrice: ‘The Wise Man & The Plants’ title came from Terron Darby. I recently took the habit to not name any track of mine, in order to detach myself from the music. But still when it’s time to send an EP it makes sense for these to be named other than ‘SP210XX’, so I decided to name these after plants from which I read about in a book of Witchcraft that my girlfriend offered me last Christmas.
The vintage sound palette is nothing else but the sound that makes me move, but it could have been something else. I love sound that is alive and not so-called “perfect”. I love the sound that speaks, that has a word in every little wave, that has personality. It can be polished if need be, or it can be raw and have attitude. I have stopped looking for perfecting every little tiniest detail as it sometimes kills the music itself. I’m trying my best to look at music as a whole now and not as a bunch of details that need to fit to please the audience. Took me a long time to stop thinking of my music as “it doesn’t sound like XYZ so it’s not good enough”, and the result is just me making music, expressing myself freely here as Anthony Georges Patrice, or there as AGXP, or even there recently as Redrop. I’ve been trying to focus on a certain kind of music but it just doesn’t work with me. The music I listen to ranges from classical to hardcore heavy metal (thanks Sly! I owe you that one!). I am an eclectic person trying to make eclectic music and find himself into this mess. It’s a quest, not a journey.
Electronic Groove: We want to dig a little deeper into your creative process. Where do you find your inspiration? Is it hard to come by? Do you have any particular ‘rituals’?
Anthony Georges Patrice: Up in the air and down in the grass. My only ritual to make music is sit the fuck down, write, and finish. I used to play the artist saying “you have to light a candle and bla bla bla” but no. The only ritual that suits me is to “do the work” as Steven Pressfields would say.
“I’m trying my best to look at music as a whole now and not as a bunch of details that need to fit to please the audience”
Electronic Groove: How do you go about placing your tracks? Do you create something with a particular label/sound in mind, or do you tend to wrap something up and then proceed to pitch the track to labels? Do you feel like a good network of contacts tends to trump good music, or is it the other way around?
Anthony Georges Patrice: Creating something for a particular label is like sucking someone’s dick, saving the cum in a tiny bottle to then wrap it up as a christmas present. Not saying I never tried to make music for a certain label, as when you love something you’d wanna be signed in there. I’m just saying it’s the biggest mistake any artist could do to himself and to his music. Make the god damned music. When it’s finished, guess what: make MORE of that god damned music that is yours. When it’s done you know what to do: make even more of that sound that is yours and then maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll throw it to the right people, those that will really listen to it and either tell you what they like, or what’s wrong in there according to their judgment and what they think you’re trying to achieve. Take ownership of it all, your mistakes and your success, but listen to these advices you feel are the right ones, those that bring you somewhere as pleasant or unpleasant as it might feel.
Electronic Groove: Diving into the studio…What’s your set-up like? Do you favor physical gear over digital?
Anthony Georges Patrice: I favor anything that allows me to be creative, but let’s say I tend to go more on the hardware side of things. The music I love is made of hardware, therefore I do feel more comfortable using hardware. It’s also a question of workflow, but still, I don’t see this should be put as a limit to people’s creativity. You can make great music with a Tascam recorder and Ableton sampler… All you need to add is all that makes your music greater. For these tracks, I’ve used a combination of both: a prophet V from Arturia, an Electribe SX, and an Octatrack.
Electronic Groove: What are your plans for the rest of the year? Do you feel like you had to change strategies due to the pandemic? Do you think these changes in everyone’s agenda will be permanent or do you think everyone will go back to the old ways and models?
Anthony Georges Patrice: For the rest of the year I plan to be conscious that my responsibility as a human being is to make sure I do not pass around something that I may have, to which I may react really well (and feel like a big bollocks superman because of that), but to which others may die, and these others possibly being a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a grandmother or a grandfather, or even simply just a good friend. Every life down this planet deserves to stay alive until their last hour, and there are already a good number of things that can decide if you’re going to go a little earlier or not, so I, therefore, plan on not adding one more bullets to any of those already loaded in the gun.
I plan to see less people physically until this all gets sorted and we can all dance together again, share a drink, a cigarette, hug people I know for 5 minutes or those we know for 15 years, and dance and sweat all together unified to celebrate the life we live in. Humans will not change until we come to understand ourselves deeply, and this is not planned for tomorrow as we keep finding unreasonable and stupid explanations to something because it has taken away our little comfort. And I’m not talking about people struggling as those struggling are not the ones who go out to party, they’ve other shit to take care of… and I really feel for them. I myself have food in my fridge and a roof over my head because I had the opportunity to plan my career different for some time, fortunately. I might have read the signs, or just got lucky who knows?
Everything will be back to normal as it always did. It’ll just take as much time as it needs for us to understand the lesson to be learned until we do the same mistake again.
Other than that, I will keep working on my lessenorg.net website, as I love to write about what I love and who I feel we don’t hear enough of (when I have the time to do so cause I’m not moving house 3 times in the same month), I will keep developing this Redrop project which is pretty exciting to me (I already have lots of finished music for that), I’ll be working with a few local people on a podcast to share our passion for minimalism and house, and of course, releasing music on my own next year.
This year I’ve had the opportunity to finish so much music I barely know what to do with it at the moment. All I know is I want to release it with people who it makes sense to walk hand in hand with, like Dance Artifakts for example. People who listen to music and don’t only think “strategy” all the damn time, making electronic music look like 90s pop. This happens so much in every scene it makes me vomit.
Other than that, when I have a minute for myself, I’ll keep doing what I do, try to not make the same mistake, nourishing my vision of music to explore, expand, (by buying records and buying digital tracks on Bandcamp only) to go forward and backward, up and down, left and right, dance to the rhythm.
Electronic Groove: Thank you so much for your time, Anthony, It’s been a pleasure. We wish you the best going forward!
Anthony Georges Patrice: Happy days!
Anthony Georges Patrice’s ‘The Wise Man And The Plants’ will be out on October 2nd via Dance Artifakts. Grab your copy here.
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