Bleep

An enchanting esoteric obscurity from 1992 unearthed by Freedom To Spend run by Pete Swanson & Jed Bindeman. The history of popular music is such that while some artists are heralded as pioneers as soon as the first needle hits the groove a precious number of artists are criminally overlooked in their own time, beloved by a cult following until the day the rest of the world catches up. Danielle and Didier Jean aka UMAN had made only a slight ripple in their native France’s music industry when they decided to build their own studio in Orsay, a suburb south of Paris far removed from the epicentre of the scene. The fruit of their subsequent labours, Chaleur Humaine, is a testament to the fact that the Jean siblings’ were always better off left alone to develop their ideas; to mix-and-match genres before abandoning them altogether.

Even as gorgeous timbres recall the new age ethereality of Cocteau Twins, the distinct sound of Chaleur Humaine is positively clairvoyant of where against-the-grain production would head in future generations. It’s easy to hear grains of Oneohtrix Point Never’s production in the airy drums, choppy textures and baroque emotiveness of ‘Mémoire Vive’ and ‘Человечность’ with their synth flutes and uncanny vocal manipulations, and you half expect Tricky to emerge with a verse on the hand-percussion led, dub-like quality of ‘UMAN Spirit’.

Where such production experiments are often frayed around the edges in their earliest iterations, UMAN created a staggeringly vivid, fully-formed and perfect musical biome with Chaleur Humaine.