Excuse me as I dance on the graves of our downpressors! Excuse me as I amplify the voices of of the voiceless! Excuse me as i turn y’all the in your face Techno of Maelstrom & Louisahhh. Their new album May the Rage Burn a Path for Joy that comes out on Feb. 8th via RAAR is the BOMB! This is subversive Techno created by Punks for Punks! I can’t from I love every song on this offering! I’m stoked that we are premiering their new visual “Hate Machine” below plus a cool interview! Yo Maelstrom & Louisahhh I want y’all to know that I’m over the moon for May the Rage Burn a Path for Joy — RESPECT DUE!!!
Take us back to your childhood—what music did you hear around your home, booming out of the cars in your hood, or your headphones? What four albums have had a major impact on y’all’s creative spirit?
Louisa: My dad was in the music industry when I was growing up so a major connection point with him has always been music. He took me to see Nine Inch Nails when I was like eleven years old, and the first concert I remember seeing was a Pink Floyd tour rehearsal in an airplane hangar in Florida around 1994. Obviously, it ruined me for life and it is why I am the way that I am (impossible, incorrigible) . I made my own life hell by lugging a gigantic CD book to school every day because I didn’t want to have to choose music, I wanted access to everything, all the time. Big highlights of my pre-teen angst were The Smashing Pumpkins ‘Adore’ and ‘Machina’ albums, Nine Inch Nails ‘Downward Spiral’ and ‘Broken’, and Garbage’s ‘Version 2.0’. These records changed my life and made me feel connected to something bigger than me, or showed me how to be in the world, in my body, made me feel less alone. I really hope our music can do that for someone.
Mael: My parents weren’t listening to much music when I was a child. I remember a friend of my dad came back from a trip to Jamaica with a portable record player and a Bob Marley single but my dad ended up hiding it because I guess he wasn’t that much into listening to the same reggae track all day long (but I was)! So I relied on other adults to help with my musical education later in life, young architects who worked at my mum’s agency and were always blasting stuff like Blonde Redhead or My Bloody Valentine on the office stereo. I also started spending a lot of time at record shops from around the age of 15. That’s when I started buying techno and house records (Laurent Garnier’s F Comm label, first few DAft Punk white labels, some Mo’Wax, some Drum’n Bass, and a lot of gabber and hardcore). So that’s really what shaped my influences. The record store as a social space and as a curated collection.
Give us the science behind the title and artwork of your new album, “ May the Rage Burn a Path for Joy?
Louisa: Our first record, ‘Sustained Resistance’ (RAAR, 2023), was very much about making contact with the challenging feelings of frustration, depression, disillusionment that so many of us were experiencing ‘post pandemic’. As we toured that album with our live hybrid show and felt the power of bodies moving together in space to these songs, we were able to watch the complicated and challenging feelings of suffering transform into ‘collective effervescence’. The rage we were challenging when we made the record was able to evolve as it was expressed. The title is very literally about that process.
Mael: The artwork was made in collaboration with our Friend IPNO who’s also an incredible artist. We just decided to go explore the river banks with some paint, and found that spot which was a big wall just by the river with some barbed wire on the top and a blue plastic chair in front of it. It felt like the exact image we were trying to convey with the record : there’s a path for joy through hardships and rage, no matter how fucked up the situation might feel like in the heat of the moment. So we painted the whole wall in black and Ipno sprayed the album title on it, and we shot it with the chair and a bit of barbed wire.
If you could put three of your songs from May the Rage Burn a Path for Joy in a time capsule to be opened in 2062, what songs would you put in there, and why?
Louisa: I’d put ‘I’m A Whip’ because it’s one of my favorite things we’ve ever worked on, our first tri-lateral collab with the person who was initially responsible for our partnership, Brodinski. It is a really wicked track. I’ll let Mael choose the other two.
Mael: I’d go with ‘Hate Machine’ because it sums up the contradictions of our times pretty well – how everything that feels like a race to the next dopamine hit, but how at the same time these machines can feel like (and actually be) liberating, and then ‘let the night’ because it’s pure joy and rave energy.
Describe Maelstrom & Louisahhh’s album ““ May the Rage Burn a Path for Joy”” as a weapon of mass change or a superpower—what impact do you want to see it have on culture or our society?
Louisa: Right now I do think we need rage to burn a path to joy on a lot of levels. It feels like the death knell of late capitalism is ringing loudly and it’s pretty horrific to bear witness to; I really hope these songs give people courage and clarity in these challenging times to keep some fierce hope alive, to speak truth to power, and to remember that joy is an act of resistance.
Mael: I have a teenage and an almost adult kid, and I can see how angry and depressed they sometimes get about politics at large and the world, and I’d want to share with them this idea that joy, love, and collective energy can bring down mountains and walls. Anger or sadness are of course legitimate, but they generally fail to bring positive social change. That’s what the album is about truly. The transformative and the agentivity of a bunch of kids raving, protesting, chanting, painting or screaming together.
What are y’all’s earliest memories when it comes to knowing about the power of frequencies and how has this knowledge impacted the way y’all create?
Louisa: I only like horrible noises. Next question.
Maël : I literally work with frequencies, that’s my primary material, but then of course, for this project, all of them need to go through some kind of distortion phase to bring up their real soul. Running two bass tones through the same mixer with all channels in the red is my favorite way of making music.
Talk to us about the song “I’m a Whip (Feat. Brodinski)” and how it came about.
Louisa: As I mentioned, though Louis Brodinski is largely responsible for our partnership, and we’ve both worked with him independently, we’d never made anything all together, so it was really special to make this track and have it be the first single from this album. I feel like it captures all of our sensibilities at their best, and is a very dark track that’s also super fun. It’s evil but it bangs.
Maël: Yes, I can’t believe it’s the first song we made all together. It’s so good I want to work on a whole album now, Let’s make it happen.
Talk to us about these two songs “Feral Rhythm (Provocation)” & “The Seed (Slave to Society Version)” — what was the creative process like and what emotions provoked you to create these songs?
Louisa: Feral Rhythm was actually a track of mine that we released in
2019 on RAAR that was transformed into a ‘Provocation’ version for ‘May the Rage…’ after performing it live over the past year. I wrote it as a pride anthem and it felt more urgent as we were coming out of confinement, a real celebration. We rarely make ‘happy’ music but this one feels acutely joyful.
As for ‘The Seed’, the original version was on ‘Sustained Resistance’ and lovely Andrew Bowen (Slave to Society) was kind enough to offer us a remix because he was quite taken with it. We are big fans of his work and that of his former duo, AnD, and it was great to have a real digital hardcore track on this record.
We played Feral Rhythm for maybe 4 years on stage at all sorts of speed and in various shapes and forms, but that’s probably the track we played the most, and at every show, no matter how we played it or the actual setup or project, so it felt important for us to have one of the latest versions of it on the album. The Seed is one of my fave tracks from the last album and it’s rooted in noise energy, nothing else.
