HTRK + Megabasse + DJ Sundae

In collaboration with French music label Idle Press, the Bourse de Commerce presents two concerts by the confidential Australian music duo HTRK, with their dark, silky aesthetic. The evening begins with French musician Megabasse, equipped with his instrument of choice, a double-headed guitar, offering a concert of melodic, repetitive motifs that unfold endlessly. As a prelude, DJ Sundae, founder of Idle Press, proposes a selection of ethereal music.

Program

• 19h40 : door opening
• 19h45 : DJ Sundae
• 20h30 : Megabasse
• 21h : HTRK

HTRK (pronounced “Hate Rock”) has undergone many changes since its inception in 2003. In 2009, the group suffered the tragic loss of Rowland S. Howard, its mentor and producer, and then in 2010, of Sean Stewart, its bassist and founder. The surviving duo of singer Jonnine Standish and guitarist Nigel Yang gradually changed form, forsaking lethargic noise for softer sounds with incursions into gothic country, all the while preserving its trademark poetic gravitas. The group’s latest album Rhinestones (2021) is an elegant suite of nine windswept songs of grief crafted from bare arrangements of guitars, heart-breaking, intoxicating vocals, metronome, and effects. . HTRK is celebrating its twenty-first anniversary through a series of collaborations and performances. “21 years of thinking long and hard about pop, art, relations, not finding your place, becoming popular, not having any more ideas, losing your best friend, accepting that you’re not very good at living, talking more than making music”.

In 2016, French artist Pierre Bujeau, a member of the bands Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz, launched his solo project Megabasse with the performance “06 22 06 78 19”, in which his mobile phone, placed on an amplifier, resonated throughout the space with each call from a visitor or a friend. Since then, Megabasse has become an independent musical project, producing limited release records and cassettes, culminating in the recent Discorde, an engrossing first album that was released in February 2024. Recorded in 2019 in Normandy, Side A in the Chapel of Sainte-Anne de Bricquebec, and Side B in the Dirigible Hangar in Ecausseville, it is characterised by its repeating motifs that stretch our sense of space and time.  

Laurent – aka DJ Sundae – is a discerning music selector with eclectic tastes, ranging from delicate ambient and folk to atypical forms of dub, post-punk, hallucinatory acid fixations, and interstitial electronica. As the founder of the French label Idle press and collaborator with the English labels The Trilogy Tapes and Good Morning Tapes, he has released many records of electronic music, including Maritz by Jonnine, the vocalist of HTRK. He has been a resident of the English radio platform NTS since 2017.