Adulting

At first, Claptrap’s songs are like a wandering mind with fingers sliding randomly between two rusty strings. Rinky-dink snippets come into view: a clementine, a few grains of sand, a dial phone… Words, sounds and images materialise and remain totally groundless.

Erring brings about reflection and some unexpected relations begin to show between sound, meaning, noise and silence. What matters is not what they signify as a whole, but what the whole points out and reveals.
 

In these lost-and-found items where intimacy meets the political and the trivial, there may be the idea of a primitive song, a distant echoing of folk and cabaret songs or even of Tin Pan Alley. But all this is distorted by a magnifying glass, a synthetic filter verging on fantasy. There may also be something of the viewpoint characterising 1950s and 1960s “Exotica” music, an imaginary elsewhere entirely made up by science and art. All in all, Adulting is a collection of phantasmagoric songs imagining their own territory.

Originally conceived by Eric Pasquereau (a member of the Colonie de Vacances, amongst other projects), the songs have been skilfully decomposed, twisted, disguised and recomposed with Julien Chevalier, Paul Loiseau and Vincent Robert (members of Borja Flames, La Terre Tremble !!! and Electric Electric). Claptrap have made up an unorthodox instrumentarium bridging an ancestral practice (mandolin, classical guitar, percussions…) with a futuristic chimera (modular synthesizers, rhythm boxes, electronic music…), a small electro-acoustic ballroom orchestra to shield oneself from vacuity. 

Although the band had a few references in mind, like the tightrope experiments carried out by Franco Battiato, Arto Lindsay or Haruomi Hosono, Claptrap have a singular musical identity, each of their songs building a theatre for a play that shows the world in all its confusing presence and diversity.