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Dislcaimer : Fire Walk With Me’s tracklisting is not eclectic for eclecticism’s sake. It’s not eclectic and versatile just to show off the oh so wonderful taste of its creator. Jean Nipon isn’t the kind of guy who needs this.What he wants is totally different and free-spirited : simply enriching and enhancing the rare idea of highway romance through damaged sound flashes. Getting deeper into those lost, unreal, impossible love feelings generated by long road trips into melancholy-drenched motorized souls.
The sheer diversity of Nipon’s musical picks reflects the various surroundings you can see while driving on the highway, as well as the non-descript yet all very different looks of the toll collectors. The ambiguous mood of the whole mix is just like a cloudy sunset seen through thick plexiglass, half asleep on a cheap, synthetic, dark gray fabric-covered backseat. Sometimes this sunset looks like it’s not even moving, or is just an image projected between the inside of the car and the rest of the world. It’s like you’re watching it as an isolated part of a blood red- and fire orange-saturated Japanese 80 anime. And like you’re watching this anime on a truck stop TV set – a French truck stop, full of dirty beige tables and walls and trays, while eating some industrial pork chops drowning in wine sauce.
One loose principle leading Fire Walk With Me is to refuse to select just great, perfect songs forming a perfect, clean-cut collection. Because the thing is, music’s not always great when you’re driving : tapes you find in the glove compartment are not always carefully composed, so you put on the radio, which is creating another problem, with bad reception and non-sequitur programming. And on the top of this, there’s the engine rumbling, and other car noises, so you can’t hear the music so well. Plus, people talk over the sound, making the whole « car music experience » a pretty disturbing, yet singular affair. Fire Walk With Me works the same way : while distracting you from the main drive, it finally takes you to a unexpected state of sublimeness. The sublime of the generic.
But then what’s on the tracklisting ? It’s starting with a Dusty Kid edit of Knuckle’s Your Love instrumental, and almost ends with Chris & Cosey’s October : two perfect FM hits that you virtually never heard on any FM station.
Between this, you have baroque but easy synth-prog, specially designed for moments when the road is clear and you can serenely drive faster. You also have stiff, dusk-ready italo tunes, some driving classics by Todd Rundgren and Fleetwood Mac and some super-Prince-like popfunk, almost directly made to go along those moments when conversation in the car gets suddenly hectic after hours of silence. An Italians Do It Better production by Desire shows how those guys should work for the International Higway Romance Comittee. And a nice DAF track makes way into the mix, just for gas stops : please play it loud at night, on a parking lot full of sped-up horny truckers who can’t get no sleep. You also get the odd Michael Jackson cover, addictive and satisfyingly non-ironical. And some Deerhoof, and some bony punk rock, and some intimate weird folk. A maladjusted mix, but a also necessary and justified one.
Fire Walk With Me : soon to be the blueprint of any driving music compilation.The compilation is available in a gorgeous Jonathan Zawada-design digipack here: http://www.sixpack.fr/shop/629-fire-walk-with-me-mix-digipack.html
As well as a full-color printed tee of the artwork itself: http://www.sixpack.fr/shop/man/626-fire-walk-with-me.html
Posted June 4 2010
1:45 pm by Emile Shahidi
