Geneviéve Pasquier * Le Cabaret Moi (cd 2009)
The female half of Thorofon / The Musick Wreckers is back. It is only recently that I got to know Geneviéve Pasquier (about a year ago) and I have to admit that I pulled her three earlier releases off the internet. I like some of the songs on these albums. Pasquier has a nice mix between oldstyle industrial and electropop, but the result is less predictable than this description suggests. On “Le Cabaret Moi” Pasquier has a little bit more of a ‘cabaretesk’ sound, the lyrics are now mostly in French and Pasquier incorporated a few new sounds. Still the new album is recognisable in song structure and style. Poppy songs with strange distorted industrial sounds or simply rhythmical industrial with Pasquier’s singing, most of the time nicely catchy. Yep, an original style and I happen to like this relatively more accessible current in the extreme electronics scene and this album is a very nice one in this direction.
Links: Geneviéve Pasquier, Ant-Zen
There is this Dutch project called 
Recently I have searched through the electropop/-punk scene since I kept running into interesting music from that corner. Now there is a lot of typical electropop that comes nowhere near the level of Vive la Fête, but there also appears to be a lot of very experimental and progressive material with crazy humour and weird ideas. Dandi Wind is a female vocal artist who puts together some weird and wonderfull music. The music is more electropop than a Duchess Says or Motormark, but sounds nothing like Crystal Castles or ADULT.. This is mostly caused by Dandi’s use of vocals, but the music itself is not too typical either. The music is catchy and danceable, but you have to like to crazyness. “Concrete Igloo” (2005) is a great album, “Yolk Of The Golden Egg” is even more experimental, but it is a bit tame compared to the predecessor. There are a couple of more rock-oriented tracks that are nice, but overall I like “Concrete Igloo” better.
Damn, there is so much crazy music out there! A while ago I ran into a digital compilation with 64 tracks varying from electropop to electropunk to experimental punk and all kinds of weird stuff: “Modern Mutants handbook” it seems to be a compilation of a music lover going around on P2P networks. A great pile of mostly new music. “Digital Penetration” is a real compilation from a real label, released on a real cd. The music is a crazy and varried as on the illegal compilation. You get to hear Duchess Says with a rather typical electropop song, but already the opener of Kap Bambino is weirder than some 
Crystal Castles supposedly are one of the earlier electropop groups, but it seems that the releases do not go back before 2006. This album with no title is the only full-length so far. I knew the name, but not the music. Crystal Castles has some of the more typical soft electropop tracks, but some tracks have weird, distorted female vocals that I hear with more electropunk oriented bands. Other tracks are completely over-the-top Atari-sounds tracks with strange rhythms. I guess I only knew the more accessible tracks (which are the most on this album) and therefor never really paid attention, but the band has a weird side too. Not my favourite from this corner, but not all that bad either.
“Pop:Up” opens brilliantly with a fast punky track. Next up are digital rhythms with guitar and crazy (distorted) vocals. Not all tracks are explosive, but all are great. Electropop and electropunk. I wish I had heard of this Scottish band before they quit.