ARTISTS

Stellar OM Source

US / FR
concert

2012 has found artists from all over the US noise/synth underground dabbling in dance music structures. Among the most successful to make the transition has been Christelle Gualdi, a classically trained musician and trained architect whose early beatless releases - many collected on Olde English Spelling Bee's vinyl album Trilogy Select - consisted of strange structures evocative of sci-fi cityscapes. At the time, she was a clear contemporary of other modern synth explorers like Oneohtrix Point Never.

Since then, however, Gualdi has been delving deeper and deeper into jammed-on-the-fly acid house with banks of hardware, with an approach not dissimilar from contemporaries like Jamal Moss in the US and Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel. They first found their way into the world through a limited Japanese 7" of the tracks 'Energy' and 'Clarity', and a live show debuted 3 years ago at Unsound Festival. The release of a new 12" through renowned Amsterdam label Rush Hour, features four tracks of melodic, Detroit-leaning dance music, that still have the same keen ear for harmonic and melodic structuring that was evident in her early synthesiser work.

The development of this new sound was the result of a lucky break on Ebay. While buying a Roland MC-202, the seller offered her a broken Roland TB-303 for a fraction of the huge amount a working model would usually cost. Incredibly, when it arrived through the post, the 202 was broken, and the 303 was fully functional. "It's a mint 303 which I bought for 25 euros," she says. "[It] literally fell from the sky, it's insane. This is a dream of I don't know how many people. I would say the music I do now is an evolution from this gear, and trying things, and finding a new sound."