One fateful night in a London club sometime in 2008, a DJ dropped Mama Used to Say by Junior and everyone cleared the dance floor, everyone except for a boy and a girl from Paris. They clicked and spent the rest of that night talking about disco and funk and soon after, Jupiter was born. Next Thursday, the Parisian group hits the The Wall with a live show.
“We are Quarles and Amelie, a boy and a girl both living in beautiful Paris. Well, right now it’s raining, but you get the point,” the playful duo joked in an interview with the Taipei Times.
The two connected again and worked on Starlighter, the first song the pair released together, which went viral on the underground music blogosphere. “Upon writing it, something clicked and we realized that this was the type of music that we wanted to do,” they said. “The story is 100 percent disco: a girl meets an amazing dancer in a club with whom she’s going to live a truly romantic story. Like Sister Sledge’s He’s The Greatest Dancer in a way.”
Photo courtesy of Antoine Delaporte
They went on to make a handful of remixes for Two Door Cinema Club, Metronomy and Anoraak, before all this music production finally landed them on the renowned French label, Kitsune.
They consider remixing essential to their inspiration and an interesting departure from what they usually produce.
“It’s very rewarding work because you build a new track around vocals or a riff; this is the way we usually start writing songs, but with remixes you work around someone else’s idea, it’s truly refreshing,” said the twosome. “We try not to listen to the original version more than once so we’re not influenced.”
Then on June 4, Jupiter released its debut album, Juicy Lucy, which shot to number two on the French iTunes chart the day after it was released. The album fuses the pair’s signature French electro sound with a vintage flavor and makes you reminisce of lazer beams, disco balls and fog machines.
“With Juicy Lucy we attempted to show the many sides of Jupiter, beyond the disco-pop flavor of songs like Starlighter,” they said of the album. “There is a bit of disco, funk, dub and rock music.”
The band is scheduled to play a live show at The Wall next Thursday, where they are inviting a third musician to the stage to tackle electronics. Quarles will be on bass, alternating between playing synth and electric, and Amelie will lead vocals and play synth.
“The live aspect is very important to us as we consider ourselves more as pop musicians than an electro act: we did not want to play live hidden behind a laptop,” they said of their live show. “Maybe in a few years Jupiter will be a full-on disco band like they used to have in the late 70s, including a horn section.”
But as for their current trajectory, they say Jupiter’s sound is difficult to describe because they try and mix as many influences as they can in their music.
“Pop culture in general, but music in particular,” they said, explaining their influences. “We enjoy stuff from any era, be it last week or last millennium: awesome content usually doesn’t get old. It’s like a vintage piece of equipment, it might be obsolete in certain ways, but for certain uses it can’t be matched.”
Cliche Records presents Jupiter Live on June 14 at The Wall, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd, Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are available until the June 13 for NT$800 at 7-Eleven ibon or FamiPort kiosks, and online at www.walkieticket.com. Admission is NT$1,000 at the door.
Doors open at 7pm but Jupiter is expected to go on around 10pm. DJs VISA, Disk0Kidz, Spykee, Bunjibeat, and J.F Amadei are supporting Jupiter. CDs will be on sale for around NT$350 but will be limited, as the group is only releasing 1,000 worldwide.
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