Froid Dub
Froid Dub is the Paris-based duo of Stéphane Bodin (Fafane) and François Marché (FM). They started releasing their mix of dub and electronic music on their own Delodio label last year.
“To seek air and let time pass calmly”
Froid Dub operates from Paris. Now I don’t associate dub with Paris or Paris with dub, so why did you decide to make dub music?
Fafane: It happened at a time in my life when, having worked for a few years in a bar that plays a lot of music at high volume, and in particular a lot of rock ‘n’ roll. I was saturated with sounds and I wanted to listen to airy things when I got home. I believe that Francois also needed calm and to settle down in this motionless chaos that was the arrival of the first lockdown. More than a decision of making dub music, the desire was rather I believe to seek air and let time pass calmly to the repetitive and sweet rhythm of the filtered delays.
Froid Dub is a duo. How did you get to know each other? When and where did you get to know each other?
We’ve known each other for a very long time now, we were in college together and formed our first band playing in the garage at my parents’ house. We have hardly ever stopped making music together since.
“One of us is more comfortable with melodies and the other with rhythms”
What do the both of you have in common, and what are the differences between you two? How do you make your music together? Does each of you have a specific role ?
One of us prefers to spend time on the first drafts and the other on the finishes. One of us is more comfortable with melodies and the other with rhythms. I’ll let you guess which is which. We both have the same goals, but very different ways of arriving, this allows us to refresh each other perpetually.
Your music is a mix of dub and electronic music, so is your set-up a mix of analog and digital gear?
Yes, quite. We are very attached to real drum machines and real synthesizers ( TR 808, Linn Drums, Roland Juno’s, Yamaha DX series, sequential circuits synths, … ) because in addition to their amazing sounds, they have an ergonomics that defines the way they are used. It’s like with construction tools, the shape of a tool defines the result you will get. Some screwdrivers have a bigger handle than others, and they are not used in the same way. The analog part of our studio is therefore rather the instruments and the digital part rather the recording and mixing section. But it is not an immutable dogma. Sometimes we can use a plug-in synthesizer if we like the sound, and finish a mix on a tape recorder if it needs a little dirty compression.
Why did you decide to mix dub with electronic music and not play “roots dub”? Because then you would be a retro act? Because music should always be “in the now”, a product of its time?
Froid Dub wasn’t born of an idea of making synthetic dub. We made music and it became that. I think if you start with the idea of making a mix of dub + analog synthesizers, the result of what you get does not exceed the sum of the elements. You will get a synthetic dub, but not a project with a singular identity. And that’s what we look for in the music and in particular in the projects that we release on our label Delodio. Projects that have a specific character, rather than an assemblies of styles. The most important thing is to play, to have fun, to let yourself be surprised, and to stay focused on an aesthetic and melodic line of rigor. Music first! And after that, you run the mind to see what you can do with all that.
You self-release your music on your own Delodio label. Why? Because self-releasing is the most obvious thing to do?
Putting out the Froid Dub records ourselves just allows us to go fast. We’re pretty slow in the studio, and pretty long at making decisions, but once we’ve settled on the music, the visuals and all the artistic choices, we like things to go fast. Once we have chosen the titles and visuals that became Froid Dub’s first record, we didn’t want to add the step of approaching some labels, starting discussions, and getting stuck in a release schedule.
When you play live, do you function as a sound system?
With our live set up we tried to recreate a light version of our studio. All synthesizers and delays are modulated live, the voices are sent manually via samplers, etc.… I think we have an hybrid analog/digital, chaotic/organized formula which transcribes the spirit of the Froid Dub’s music.
Are there many dub or reggae clubs in Paris? Are there dub or reggae events in Paris on a regular basis? Is there a dub reggae scene in Paris?
Yes, there is a dub and reggae bands and festival scene in France, which is either very classic roots or very “boom boom digi-dub”. I don’t think we belong to either. It is perhaps for this reason that the feedback on Froid Dub first came from Belgium, UK and the US.
Joeri Bruyninckx
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