| phawn |
How does a 15-year-old hailing from sleepy Rimouski elbow her way into the big wide world of electro? For DJ mini, it all started when she felt the vibe at her first rave in Montreal. Subsequent heavy exposure to techno, new wave and German squarewave productions provided further impetus. The result is an original album, out in Fall 2006, with a sound like no other, merging dirty-bass lo-fi textures with intimate, personal, melancholic melody lines; marrying square, spare sounds to round, airy ones.
Moving from her early deck duties at Blue Dog to a first residency at Blizzarts, and standout gigs at electromeccas in Quebec and Europe, Mini finally unpacked her gear bag at Montreal’s Le Parking in September 2003. Since then, as the club’s resident DJ and artistic director of its Overdose events, she’s made Thursday nights wild and crazy—and the talk of the town. In between sharing her “lab space” with a bevy of world-renowned artists including Ellen Allien, Tiga, John Selway, Zombie Nation, David Carretta, Laurent Garnier and Miss Kittin, Mini also keeps after-hours lovers pumping till the wee hours a few streets away at Aria, where she’s shared the decks with the likes of Green Velvet, Vitalic and Boy George. She’s also rounded out her résumé with musical contributions to various festivals and experimental projects, from live painting sessions with the group Lattakeuse Dimage to a more recent collaboration with the Opéra de Montréal as part of TechnOpera, a project to set various classical opera themes to experimental electronic music.
With a background marked by such singular encounters and experiences, small wonder Mini was moved to refract all those influences into a single opus, which drops in August 2006. It’s called Audio Hygiene. A title that evokes a sonic cleansing, an antidote to the redundancy of force-fed pop. Mini’s unique creative recipe melds organica and electronica over synth and sub bass lines, with healthy dollops of samples and ambient noises—including soundbites captured from circuit-bent toys’ she’s made herself. Stir in remixes of, and a vocal duet with, France’s legendary Eighties goth-rock/synthers Trisomie 21, along with a guest appearance by fellow Montrealers Lesbians on Ecstasy on the track “Ego Trip,” and enjoy—preferably on the dancefloor.
Despite the Mini moniker, this artist’s signature, decidedly, gets attention. |
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