ALX: The idea of Technomunism was a proposal to our audience: we noted a fairly important depoliticization of the night life and artistic production in general, and we weren’t completely sure that the aesthetic form of techno expressed its supposedly obvious political meaning to the crowd – especially since it’s a music without lyrics most of the time. So we tried to tinker a little bit with things, for example by showing videos connoting different imaginaries related to work, to mobilisation, sometimes to rioting, sometimes also to dance.

And with this idea that is specific to techno and danceable electronic music in general, there was something almost from the Noise side that evoked the city, and by its repetitive character, it evoked machines, it conjured images of the environment we live in – I mean even in our post-industrial societies, we are in environments that are very regulated, very rationalised. Techno music allowed this phenomenon to be sublimated, and it allowed people to dance and not just to be processed by the machine. Creating something together, being on a dancefloor, collectively, in a moment of celebration and selflessness… we hoped this togetherness would go beyond just the space and time of the night. We hoped it was not just a moment of decompression in a life punctuated by labor – which would be a part of the machine, but on the contrary, a moment of dance, an intentional time of the night, as a political project in terms of what do we wanted in our life in general.

Oras Elone: ​​It’s true that one purpose of the free party is to take the noise of the industry and to exorcise it all night long; the party is created in opposition to the world of work during the day where we reappropriate this industrial sound to liberate ourselves from it. But maybe, this moment of exorcism of the day is in the end part of capitalism too.

ALX: That’s the whole ambiguity and the kind of dialectic I am trying to find in the relationship between political music and political aesthetics. All the more so in the period we’re living in.
I think of Mark Fisher, an English philosopher and cultural critic, who has spoken a lot about late capitalist realism. He sees we have undergone a form of slow cancellation of the future; we are in a situation where the future seems blocked. It is a little bit like Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”, but also, it has repercussions in the fact that in the cultural psyche, we have the impression it is easier to imagine the end of the world rather than the end of capitalism.

We see cultural productions are losing creativity and elements of rupture from this order; we are very much in the repetition of what has already been done before. So music, a cultural creation that has always worked like this, but not not this extent, no longer makes sense. We create patchworks of a whole bunch of stuff, whereas before one cultural movement chased another by opposing it. Punk chased progressive rock, new wave chased punk… and each time there were counter-proposals to what was already happening. Whereas today, we devolve in tired repetitions, with a vintage effect, and it is difficult to get out of this cycle.

I reflect about this a lot, especially since I make vintage music using Roland drum machines from 30-40 years ago. I don’t have the impression I am creating new things, but I think we must go through these moments in the collective imagination. For example, the sounds that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall, were very strange, as the communist hypothesis still existed, but at the same time people wanted to experience unbridled neoliberalism, bizarre forms of hedonism, where they still believed in promises that we know today were not kept, such as the infinite improvement of our standard of living.
Succeeding in summoning these spectres while not being stuck in the retro, not being stuck in the vintage, but succeeding in grasping how it speaks to people, this slightly retrospective imaginary of these desires, is perhaps how we find paths to emancipation. In any case, that’s what I would like to try to do.

Almevan: And in addition at the period you mention, Techno was being created in Detroit, the Techno City. So I want to ask you, how do you move forward in your musical and other artistic endeavours then?

ALX: Right now, I’m coming out of an artistic residency at Carbon 17, a squat near Paris. I haven’t moved on to post-production yet, but I’m going to release an EP. I have several remix projects at the moment, including with an old rock band called Stuck in the Sound. And I’d like to try to expend my sights further onto the whole Postpunk, Italo Disco, EBM, New Beat spectrum of things, trying to explore that, and trying to get out of it at some point; not in the sense of changing style, but finally trying to make new music. I don’t know if I am strong enough for that, but it’s the ideal that I would like to pursue.