User:MattHalfAwake/sandbox

Guillaume Dietrich also known as Muddy Monk was born in 1990 in Switzerland, in the canton of Fribourg. His music loving and amateur sin-gers parents enrolled him in the local choir be-fore suggesting he learned the piano. Although right from the start, he preferred improvising and experimenting rather than learning and executing. From those years, he keeps a young soul and an angelic high-pitched voice, inherited from the Christian vocal traditions of Fribourg.

=Biography=

He began his artistic career as a producer and featured on the hit song “Le Code” in 2017 with Ichon, Myth Syzer and Bonnie Banane, Muddy Monk’s work today is less hip-hop based and more a varied form of synthetic and romantic pop music, sung in French. His first album Longue Ride is a collection of songs about adventure, love, violence and the quest of a good life, all themes that refer to the young man‘s anxieties and his yearning to overcome them. A variety of topics that he approaches with a mechanic and desperate lyricism often similar to another powerful-motorcycle aficionado whose label was even named Les Disques Motors: we are referring to the legendary Christophe.

Longue Ride must be experienced as a journey on the asphalt – helmet on the head, chest leant down and fists tightly hung to the handlebar. The sound range is deliberately reduced and the guests are absent. Far from virtuosity, Guillaume prefers working alone like a crafts-man. The BPMs are soft, the synthesizers swing from Mitch Murder to Jarre and Moroder, we go from heavy arpeggiators brought from the Italian Alps to dreamier structures taken from the vintage French repertoire, mixed with round bass - somewhat melancholic - from American electronic funk. Floating above it all are those crystal- clear vocal lines, tenuous but strong, that bring to life lyrics of which each word seems to fill the groove with an endless bitterness, but –because it is delivered with such grace and fragility- miraculously manages to warm your heart; we might be suffering but we need to keep the ripple going for it will make us stronger.

The final result brings to mind Sebastien Tellier’s Sexuality days, Voulzy’s electro-pop tragic tenderness but also psychedelic com-posers such as Ariel Pink, Julia Holter, Tame Impala or even Dam Funk during his most introspective moments. What’s more, we can hear some subconscious echoes of fairly recent pop: we believe we can hear a line from Daho’s “Weekend à Rome” here, one from Kavinsky’s “Night Call” there, and then from Cassie’s “Me & U” or Kelly Rowland “Dilemma”. We can very well listen to the radio on a motorcycle after all.From this Longue Ride, filled with cathartic properties, we come out reinvigorated, restored. It was both a familiar and unknown road, we would sometimes think we knew it but mostly we felt like we took that road for the first time. With a mix of Californian arrangements, Italian-Germanic power engines and Francophone writing both vintage and contemporary, Longue Ride is unsettling and surprising as much as it is seducing and haunting, in the style of the greatest classics of French pop – and from now on, Swiss pop.

=Discography=

Album

Longue Ride (2018)

=References=

=External Link=