Solex
Solex vs. The Hitmeister

Solex. “Solex vs. The Hitmeister”. Matador. 1998. An album outside of trends, with good manners. An unusual combination of beats, samples, voice, and creativity.

The name “Solex” comes from the “Velo Solex”, a curious bike-engine produced by a French company post-war and sold until the late eighties, reappearing from 1993 to 2003 in Hungary and China.

“Solex vs. The Hitmeister” is the debut album of the Dutch girl, class of '65, Elisabeth Esselink, owner of Dutch Records, a used record shop in Amsterdam. In that “sound quarry,” the One Girl Band retrieves and samples sounds, mostly acoustic, and minimal fragments of tracks to then treat and recompose them into songs. Her patchwork involves building the framework through sampling, sometimes having a drummer play and here and there a guitarist. In her mixtures, samples prevail over riffs, grooves captured on drum machines, ringing keyboards over organ accents, bass lines stolen over the horns. The rhythms, the true heart of the compositions, are elusive, wavering, sometimes syncopated; they abound in ups and downs.

Her style is abstract and surreal. Her constructivism is lyrical. Her musical collages are always conducted to synthesis by an idyllic propensity. It feels natural to speak of “Concept”, however strange. The contents are different from one sound painting to another, but there is a fundamental unity, even in the recurring artifice, devoid of rhetoric. Paintings are never epic, never fashionable, free from norms and conventions, always adventurous. Products of an indigenous idiom.

Her musical genre, then, is Indie: Indie Electronic, Indie Pop, Indie Rock. The references could be these: Beck, Stereolab, Bjork, Lamb, Foetus, Silver Apples or DJ Shadow's attitude applied on Portishead's “Dummy” turned Brand New Heavies (Acid Jazz), educated by Moby. Without ever reducing to the sum of the parts, her compositions live in a fairy tale world, a bit naive. More phosphorus, and little open-hand taps to the myocardium.

Her singing is lunar. A whispering thread of voice, lips of moonlight, cicada trills (without coquetry), always at a distance from the microphone and in the background. The echo recalls the female vocal groups of the sixties: Shangri-Las, Chordettes, Murmaids. A swinging and dreamy voice, with a timbre of crystal colors, intent on chanting nursery rhymes and inviting soliloquies. The lyrics, short, concise, hermetic, rich in onomatopoeias, are structured as fictional dialogues between an “I” and a “You.”

Craftsmanship, not industry. Art, not imitated life: fairy-like, reassembling fragments, removed from nightclubbing. Lo-Fi, or Post Lo-Fi. She certainly didn't invent “Cut'n'Paste”, but she adopts it in a new way, with new unexpected results. Her method provides a new aesthetic design, which is the triumph of expressiveness and communicativeness, without wanting to appear so, with disarming naturalness. In her debut, the seed already contains the genius that will spread in “Low Kick And Hard Bop” and the increasing pop taste of “Laughing Stock”. A veil of irony and joy runs through and completes it all.

Her collage composition ultimately relies on a progressively independent language, made of sounds, nocturnal and night-roaming light. Everything works together to paint an enchanted, mobile world, with lightning without rain, where each melody is clear. Beginning and end echo each other, the universe is gently grasped, without tears. With cherubic favor. Music of music. That crosses landscapes and perspectives.

Tracks: Solex All Licketysplit is wonderful, you need to start and move on from here, then the streams of consciousness One Louder Solex, Solex Feels Lucky, and the simple and enchanting melody of Some Solex. The album, in its last tracks, moves towards a crescendo of speed, rhythms, and disturbing sounds. Unripe beauty that does not need to grow and mature. It does not drag, but carries with small enchantments.