OMR

Formed by Virginie Krupa and Alexandre Brovelli, OMR is a perfect duo: two souls that blend their strengths and doubts, their blinding brightness and their anguish in a single body in this music, conceived in perfectly equal proportion by both of them. Absolute artistic harmony: of those magical, inexplicable unions that come into being between heads that are on the same minute waves, connected to the same spiritual spheres. Two individuals coming from different places but united by a common desire for powerful emotions. Emotions that form a knot in your stomach, retranscribed and crystallised in the duo’s original sound and compositions, in their delicate electronics in which robust melodies impose a fragile rule on a republic of machines, in which Virginie’s voice acts as a very carnal counterpoint to their little experiments on printed circuits.

A miraculous union: from their initial steps in the public sphere, from the sending of the emblematic The Way We Have Chosen to Les Inrockuptibles for the CQFD contest, hearts began to flip over. Quick confirmation of the brightness of this star being born: the excellent German producer Mario Thaler (The Notwist, Lali Puna, Ms. John Soda…) agreed to produce their first album, the impeccable Side Effects, hatched in the spring of 2004; the wizard and wonderful electronics engineer Prefuse 73 and the excellent Console, DJ Vadim or Abstrakt Keal Agram saw them as worthy descendents and agreed to remix them, a very rare occurrence for such a young French band.

The oracles foretold that things would progress fast. Praised by the critics for Side Effects, OMR discovered the joys and virtues of touring, the demands of performing live, particularly alongside patrons of choice who excel in stage effort, such as the Californian Grandaddy. And rather than hiding behind their machines, which would have been too easy, too obvious a solution, a source of boredom and a frigidity factor, Virginie and Alex surrounded themselves by musicians as a way of breathing life into their pieces, of humanising them, of raising the tone and temperature. In the same period, and therefore in record time, they took part in a cinemix, composing a fantastical soundtrack for a film-lovers’ classic, Victor Sjöstrom’s The Phantom Chariot, continued their image-based inspiration by putting their sound to a short made by Mat and Spon, responsible for the The Way We Have Chosen clip, and finally began the gestation of their second album.

Superheroes Crash is the duo’s first minor revolution. It bears Alex and Virginie’s beautifully melancholic, sensual yet blunt stamp; it is more human than its predecessor and develops its troubling beauty within wide-open sound spaces. Composed with astonishing maturity and as solid a sense of melody as ever, the pieces take the time to breathe, allow themselves digressions, create their spatial, heady atmospheres through time, envelop the mind in long, complex instrumental arabesques. They gradually form formidable graphic worlds; their great feat is that they enable listeners, depending on the perception and mood of the moment, to make their own film as they listen and paint it in their own colours.