Dario Mars and the Guillotines

Dario Mars and the Guillotines is a Belgo-Dutch rock band. A cinematic approach to a wild and sensual music (Jimi Hendrix, The Stooges, Bettie Davis).

Two members of the band work regularly in the film industry, Renaud Mayeur as a music composer and Bineta Saware as a dresser. This is felt throughout their music, bringing images to mind, often dark, often apocalyptic, often nightmarish. Soundtracks fantasized through adaptions from short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft or Ray Bradbury into a 1960s TV series.

Initiated by Renaud Mayeur, fed by his recent work of composition for various films, as well as his taste for everything strange, Sci-fi or occult, and his experience with some of the biggest names in Belgian rock (La Muerte, Hulk, Triggerfinger…), Dario Mars and the Guillotines is a band that smashes together a sound, images and imagination, a recipe that has already been part of their debut album “Black Soul”.

Bringing with him on vocals, the phenomenal Bineta « Voodoo Mama » Saware, and on bass and keyboards, the multi-instrumentalist raised on jazz and classical music, David Kostman.

Whether in clubs with Reverend Horton Heat, Earthless, Tito & Tarantula, or in festivals like Dour, Ronquières, the Roadburn, Zomerparkfeest, Waterpop or the Scumbash, Dario Mars have bulldozed everything in their way.

The band locked themselves up in a studio over the last few months to record their second album. The album is mainly a work of composition co-authored by David and Renaud who, looking to keep a warm and organic sound, recorded the bass and drums tracks at the Chênée Palace Studio by Jean-Charles Cremers in 24 analog tracks with some old school equipment, throwing down the foundations of this second album.

With David Kostman at the helm, this time as the sound engineer, the work of arrangement and interpretation could begin. Far from everything, in a small house in the middle of a forest, Dario Mars worked for weeks, day and night, recording the vocals, guitars, organ and everything that brings this album together. A strange and intense experience, that brought the band together on a whole new level. The mixing and artistic productions were all done at the Chênée Palace Studio.

Tastes in common and a strong complicity with Jean-Charles Cremers brought him to participate, as well as the mix, to the arrangements, but mainly to give a particular and homogeneous sound to the eleven final tracks.

This last step was a crucial moment that brought all the pieces of the puzzle together, giving birth to "The Last Soap Bubble Crash", a dark, venomous album, oscillating from calmness to violence, music to noise, trippy « pop songs » to scathing hallucinating stooges.

In September 2016, the Dutchman Barry van Esbroek, a former member of the band Vanderbuyst who used to be on the label Ván Records as well, joined Dario Mars and the Guillotines on the drums. His implacable and metronomic drumming style, with precise and heavy hits, fits perfectly with the band's expectations: to deliver a tense, seamless, electric and monolithic live show!