Creative Space with Fantastic Twins
Fantastic Twins are the brainchildren of French producer and live performing artist, Julienne Dessagne. The music that they create together plays around with a lot of the same themes and ideas that we are interested in at Moon Roq. On surface level, the vibe is a bit trippy and there are the irresistibly swooping synth noises and reverb soaked vocals. But there is certainly something richer and deeper going on, worthy of further investigation. So, we wanted to reach out to Julienne and the twins to get a sense of how they get creative together and to find out what their thought processes are. Team work! When talking with Julienne, there is the distinct sense of a world that you are being welcomed into. In a physical sense, for sure, there is a lot of space in her music. In another sense, it’s a surreal and perhaps rather unnerving space too, at times. Ultimately it is a space that is about asking important questions about reality, about escaping that reality and perhaps most of all: about seeing things from a different perspective and in a new way.
Are you trying to create this distinct space in your music?
Well, it’s not something I intentionally tried to create in my earlier productions, but when I listen back to them, I notice that’s it’s kind of a common thread in what I do. Now space is something I’m paying a lot of attention to while working on a track. I’m trying to keep only what’s essential to it. I also see it as a way to allow more space for the listener’s imagination. We are saturated with information every day, so I believe music should open a door for us to escape, step back, dream, reflect.
So, are you escaping into your music? Or are you inviting others to escape into it?
Both, in a way. Personally making music is a moment where I can connect with my imagination and create all kinds of fictions. I hope that when people listen to my music, they feel invited into my world and that it triggers new pictures and emotions, a bit like an “exquisite corpse” game of consequences somehow, a magic story that we continue telling together. Now, when I say to escape, I don’t mean to ignore reality or pretend to be removed from it. But doing the detour through imaginary places can be a way to understand it differently, if not better.
So, less of an escape, and more of getting a sense of the bigger picture?
Well, I don’t know about the bigger picture, music provides each one of us with different emotions. I surely have my own pictures in my mind; they might not be defined stories with a beginning or an end, they might not be clear images, but there is often some kind of visual stimuli in my head while I’m composing, or even just a physical or mental state that I’m trying to translate into music. Then, from the moment where a track is released, it’s not just mine anymore, it belongs to everyone and therefore the personal narratives hopefully turn into something more universal.
Well, there is a lot of drama to your music. Often your percussion is frenetic and intense and your melodies are always energising.
Drama and tragedy are key to my work! I like to play with the unexpected, where you think something is going this way and all of a sudden it goes another. That’s also what creates movement in a track. Club music can be way too formatted, we think it has to be functional and DJ friendly. But a good DJ can play anything. So as a producer, I don’t see the point in creating a new piece of music if it comes down to repeating the same formula over and over again. Surprising people is much more rewarding.
Are you inspired by other things, outside of your visual cues?
Anything can be inspiring, as long as you have the freedom and will to pay attention. Personally I often reach back to my childhood, books I loved that fed my imagination. As a child I was very scared of darkness, and somehow also totally fascinated by it. I still have vivid memories of the spooky creatures and monsters that popped into my head at night. That’s always material for my work.
You definitely achieve that through your music. The way that you use effects, and in particular your voice definitely help build this eery type of feeling.
Yeah, I’m always trying to explore different ways of using the voice because there’s so much you can do with it. And I do love to transform sounds through effects. It’s very rarely the raw sound of an instrument that you hear in my music. My playground begins where I can shape the original input signal into something else. But unlike other instruments, the voice is unique, so the way it will react when sent through effects will therefore always be unique and surprising. With effects you can create atmospheres that seem unreal and strange, I like that.
And these are all choices that you are making, based on your fascination with ideas of darkness or spookiness that you mentioned? Do you try to do certain things, or are you just following some sort of instinct or energy?
Well, when I “try” to do things, it’s usually not good or it ends up being completely different to what I intended. A lot of the good stuff that make the final cut in my tracks are fortunate accidents. But eventually it’s never based on random decisions and it requires a lot of work to make those mishaps rightly belong to a track. I guess making music, like every other artistic work is always a combination of grasping the spontaneous creative energy, allowing the subconscious, the invisible, to come up to the surface and then, well, hours of labour crafting, assembling and fine tuning what came out of it.
So do you approach your music with rough concepts and ideas and themes?
I used to often have an idea of lyrics, or a story that I wanted to tell and use that as a starting point. But lately, I tend to start more from the sound itself and what the instruments can offer me. Then as soon as a sound grabs my attention, it’s going to start generating images in my head and eventually a rather clear vision of the whole piece. Now, you know, it may sound weird but it can be very hard to make the music you like. Making a track might be easy. But to actually make the music that you would like to listen to yourself, is a higher challenge.
Because then you are really, trying to do something, aren’t you?
Yeah, of course! I don’t spend my day just jamming on my keyboards. The more you learn, the more possibilities and challenges come with it. But also the more doubts. I don’t have a masterplan. I just know thinking is good and overthinking can kill ideas before they were even born or get you frustrated if you can’t achieve what you’re after. It’s always a balance and creating is definitely a tightrope walk.
So with that in mind, how has that changed your music, over the years?
In terms of process, I’m learning to be more patient and accept that making music often comes down to searching things rather than finding them. Finding ideas is great but the search itself can be rewarding too. I work more precisely now, less randomly... but also less spontaneously. You win one thing, you lose another on the way. In the beginning, you achieve simple things because your skills and knowledge are limited, and there’s often some magic in those first artistic experiments. And the more you learn, the more difficult it becomes to find again that simplicity.
The Berlin-based producer and live performing artist began releasing music originally under the name The Twins in 2013 before evolving into Fantastic Twins in 2017. Since then, she’s seen work released on illustrious dance labels such as Optimo Music, Pachanga Boys’ Hippie Dance and the legendary Kompakt. She’s also contributed to two volumes of the respected Weaponise Your Sound series that showcases women producers.
The twins are an imaginary persona, creatures of my mind if you like. I use them to tell my musical stories, or it’s them who use me to tell theirs, I never really know.
Are there any things that regularly inspire you to try to answer these questions, outside of music?
I’m very much into art, my dad used to work in a museum where I spent countless hours and getting older I realised how lucky I have been to grow up in that environment. Now whenever I feel down or uninspired, going to a museum or gallery and looking at sculptures and paintings is going to help me, it moves me. My knowledge of films is way more limited but some of what I saw is also fuel for my creativity. I won’t hide there’s some heavy Lynch influence in my musical world. Every image in his movies is thought as a painting that could exist on its own, that’s maybe why it particularly speaks to me. The way he explores frontiers between the real, the surreal and the absurd always fascinates me.
That’s something you’ve asked yourself a few times, “is this real?” is that a question that you keep returning to?
My own sonic world explores the imaginary. It relates to something real, happening in me or around me, but through the process it always gets distorted into some kind of myths and legends. Even if I happen to use some field recordings, noises or sounds taken from my environment, I always transform that material so it becomes something else, more subjective and therefore less tangible.
I feel like we’re on the borders of some philosophical questions here, when we talk about what is real. For you, how does art try to understand this?
Well, art is always built and rooted in to a given time, a sociological and political context which it reflects, confronts or tries to deconstruct. Our imaginary, our subconscious is fed by what surrounds us, by our collective and individual history. And art invites us to set a new, subjective pair of eyes (or ears) to look at the world from a different angle.
One way that you might be able to find ways to see things differently could be psychedelics, or other drugs?
Well, I’m aware my music works well with drugs and people also sometimes think I must have been super high while creating some of my tracks. The boring truth is, I wasn’t. It’s not something I deliberately try to force on people. But since I like to play with distorted perceptions and put sounds into weird motions, combined with the use of strange vocal effects, there’s a good chance for my music to land into the psychedelic side of things. And I quite happily embrace that.
Julienne runs a label and compilation series, appropriately named Microdosing, alongside French visual artist Geff Pellet. Although she has many interesting thoughts and inspirations on where that name came from, I wanted to share with you one perspective that I found particularly interesting.
Well, we see that word in so many ways. It can be perhaps just limited to the idea of using LSD as a therapy or to improve creativity and so on, and while I’m not denying those benefits, I’m more tempted to look at the ideologies behind it. We picked up that name for its versatility and also as a kind of a piss take of the incentive to feel good, of how in modern society we need apps and 2.0 gurus to tell us to feel positive and how to take care of ourselves. Personally, not only it creates the opposite effect on me but I find that wellness industry totally lobotomising. It’s just another intrusion of capitalism into our every inch of our lives, minds and bodies and ultimately the goal is always the same: be more productive. So my label and the music that gets released on it is a kind of “collective therapy” and hopefully an antidote to these empty motivational quotes and self-made gurus. As the label’s manifesto says “life is a struggle, time to embrace it”. I want to believe that music can help us with that.
Photographs kindly provided by Fantastic Twins. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this article or any other with us - don't hesitate to get in touch.