Domotic
Ask For Tiger

Why am I willing to bet on the second album of this twenty-seven-year-old French musician named Stephane La Porte, whose existence I was unaware of until a few days ago?
Perhaps simply because “Ask for Tiger” is an intriguing blend of sounds, insights, and attitudes that we've seen emerge in different albums over the years.
But the lexicon that expresses them is absolutely personal and credible.
I have to draw on a vocabulary that I handle with some difficulty, made up of terms frayed from use, but nonetheless: laptop electronics and echoes of bizarre kraut rock, indietronica, and the “poetry” of homemade craft, vintage Casio keyboards, and cartoonish antics.
All infused with “noises” and scattered interferences: sound as frequency becomes an aesthetic and emotional factor, an element of syntax.
These are the ingredients present, whose coordinates intersect to create a work capable of surprising precisely because of the variety of solutions adopted and the state of grace that seems to have moved them, for the naturalness with which they take shape in the form of “songs” which, while also hosting minimalist and “naive” melodies, maintain at the same time a certain abstractness, always crackling, disturbed.
And avoiding the inevitable comparison with the myriad of productions to which listening might refer, thanks to an overall quality that decrees its uniqueness, from detail to whole.

In a word, style. Domotic certainly proves to have it, to a degree that allows him to make space all around, gaining an exclusive one where he can dedicate himself to his own sound hybrids, that have been swirling in my mind since I tasted them.
The other looming risk that the album avoided with apparent but surprising ease is the one represented by the artificial and forced outcome that such a deployment of sound sources and suggestions could have.
Watch them proceed, each with their own strange movements, these heterogeneous sound creatures, until the end of the articulated journey drawn by Monsieur La Porte.
And then tell me if you often come across such a show, a medley of impossible balances all supported by a skewed paradoxical grace, crossed as it is by prickly shards, clusters of electric discharges, hisses, and rustles.
And confess to me if, despite the multifaceted nature, you too felt a continuity.
That sensation of impossible cohesion, of irritating “continuously interrupted discourse,” yet pronounced by fragments capable of making it mysteriously comprehensible and incomprehensibly magical.


The guy truly has his own unique talent and will end up intriguing even someone who is not too familiar with that now crowded nebula stretching from Grandaddy to Animal Collective, passing through dozens of new hybrid electronic productions.
At the end of the interview you'll find in More Info, to the usual question about his musical tastes, Stephane La Porte replies: <<…Then I always recommend The Beatles, The Kinks, This Heat, Captain Beefheart, Kraftwerk...>>
Excellent advice, to which I allow myself to add mine: Domotic - “Ask For Tiger”.