Pour Le Plaisir - Tin Machine EP

One-sided EP with screen printed picture disc artwork on 180 g heavyweight frosted-clear vinyl + download

BUY: http://bluetapes.co.uk/product/x-ray-two-pour-le-plaisir-tin-machine-ep

It may be all of 4 tracks and 27 minutes long, but Pour Le Plasir’s Tin Machine EP is the closest we’ve come to a movie soundtrack. The film is Midnight Express: Legacy, in which Shia Labouf goes in search of his long-lost computer-animated heroin dealer father in a plot largely jerry-rigged to provide lots of slick music video montages.

Because with analogue synthy house this throbbing and tense, why would you risk letting something like story getting in the way of the sensory overload?

This movie moves in alternating sequences of drug-delerium hedonism and moments of vein-ripping suspense.

So Tin Machine, the opener, is all perpetual energy and fluid tracking shots, beats coalescing into a beautifully poised strut while an acid-funk synth bassline carves cocaine shapes in the air. But then The Movie is all hissing sewer grills, human silhouettes blown up to cinematic proportions by menacing car headlights, nervy walks down alleyways where our protagonist senses darting figures darting in his/her peripheral vision.

It kicks back in at the moment where the 1970s filmstock turns into a computer game and the characters go raving in a shared lucid dream. That’s Girly Hole - all futuristic and nostalgic and pulverising to the soul.

You thought Blue Tapes didn’t do bangers. You got us all wrong.

So very wrong.

When the credits roll over C-T we get gripping, Ligeti-like piano licks matched to an impervious titanium beat (think Eyes Wide Shut, if Tom Cruise’s wet yuppie-swinger was The Terminator).

This is our second vinyl release and first proper EP. Pour Le Plaisir has released 14 records previously on the Moleskine Records label.

Praise for Tin Machine EP:

"...an unsettling joyride through a world populated entirely of your own imagination. Put simply: damn, this EP is strangely fantastic." - Echoes and Dust

"Pour Le Plaisir’s The Movie is a track that cannot be summarised in words without falling into cliché. We needed to go beyond that.

Upon listening it, we decided that the eeriness of its melody and the relentless progression of its synth-line demanded a narrative treatment. We therefore commissioned, through the friend of a friend, an elevator pitch for the movie that The Movie would soundtrack. The friend of our friend sent us an elevator pitch. It was good. We would probably watch the movie encoded within in a night of insomnia.

However, we realised that that the emotional complexity of the situations faced by the protagonists of this story – that mix of horror and fascination with which they advance towards a beacon which is the reflection of light in the killer’s blade – were too subtle and multi-layered to be summarised with a simple plot summary.

The friend of our friend suggested a visual treatment, and put us in touch with a film-maker friend who would shoot some footage capturing this elusive je-ne-sais-quoi at the hear of The Movie. This is what he sent us:

Down a derelict industrial state, an abandoned warehouse, sucked dry by invisible forces. A formless silhouette in a window, or perhaps a pastiche of shadows anamorphically coming together as we enter a diorama of decay. Think of the evocative videos that provide the McGuffin for Gibson’s Pattern Recognition,imagine, if you can the industrial belt around Stalker’s Zone after the Zone has expanded to engulf it.

We listen to The Movie and these are the things that happen inside our head. There was no friend of a friend, there was no elevator pitch or visual treatment, just the unseen force inside The Movies devising a conduit to invade our dreams like it has invaded our days." - 20 Jazz Funk Greats

"Very good... For the lovers of all things leftfield dance, this isn’t trite peaks and easy listening. It engages and alienates simultaneously. Tin Machine is electronic acid funk with a bit of French house antecedents. All clean lines and anomie. Girly Hole is a peach of a track with a 70s synth funk attitude for a real dance floor pleaser. And that vinyl is quite beautiful. Worth paying £9.99." - Acid Ted