Even though things are changing now, Girls are rare in the Electronic Music sphere. When it comes to the HardCore or Experimental scenes, things are even worse. Sylvie Egret a.k.a. Ybrid is part of the girls who like to see the Geiger counters get crazy with predatory machines and highly radioactive melodies.
But before this double CD album Defixio, revolving around HardCore lands, and Ex Nihilo Nihil, a submersion in the gap of swampy lands where Ambiant is pierced by a legion of cords and ghost arrangements going between classical music and experimentations like Pan Sonic, Ybrid had a lot of diverse experiences.
Settled in Caen, West of France, for ten years, Ybrid starts at a very young age to play the piano and the guitar (which she taught for 5 years at the Music Academy. She discovers the Electronic scene in the eighties through the productions of Art Of Noise, Yello, Kraftwerk, Dead Can Dance…
Surrounded by brothers and sisters who play the guitar too, Led Zeppelin and the Pixies will make Ybrid want to play in an Alternative Rock band, Creep Ac, influenced by Primus, Sonic Youth, Alec Empire, and NIN… In the nineties, she finds more about the universe of Laurent Hô, Liza N’ Eliaz, Manu Le Malin, Spiral Tribe, Lenny Dee and his label Industrial Strength…
This is the instant catch. In 1998 she buys her first computer and starts to play on stage in 1999. The sound she makes gets harder and becomes more radical through her audio trip (Producer, Hellfish, South Of London, Traffik, Simon Underground, Aphasia, Joshua, Hardcoholics, Speedyq’s, Celsius, Dr Macabre, Armaguet Nad, Radium…).
Urged by the desire of staying out of one specific genre, Ybrid develops parallel projects.
She composes for Dance Companies, Jacky Auvray, she writes the soundtrack for the movie by Murnau, Nosferatu, after UWE asked her to do so for the Electronic Cinéma (Jeff Mills had written the music for the movie Metropolis de Fritz Lang), and she develops the project Silencio de Metem in collaboration with Camille who would see Dead Can Dance and Creatures play with primitive and avant-garde computers filled with sophisticated tribal sounds.
However, even though Ybrid’s compositions are all different, we can find founding elements such as the liking of little mischievous voices, tensed cords flirting sometimes with classicism and evil saturations.
Defixio (HardCore) & Ex Nihilo Nihil (Experimental) which should have been released on Epileptik, is finally out with the label Ozore Age, after the closing of the distributor Tripsichord. And nowadays this is a great challenge to offer a double album with paradoxical climate and atmosphere.
But when you listen carefully to Ybrid’s work, you are like captivated and caught up by these dark and gloomy tracks without the want of killing someone, as one people in the audience told Ybrid so.
The tracks are made of an idiom sometimes invented by Ybrid or strongly influenced by ancient languages.
They are the perfect reflection of this musical gestation which seems to revive the Pantheon of party Gods who are obsessed by the simple desire of freely moving in these waters of creativity, without having to set up neither limits nor barriers. This album is powerful, with rage, mixed up with liturgical voices, cords, bagpipes like in the surprising Loyo – Denning – Dal.
Ybrid acts as an alchemist and she reconciles her influences, her liking for dark humor and a large vision of what the music of today and tomorrow should be like.
She gives us a sound object without any constraints to make us feel good while reacting to things. Forget about etiquette and let the prejudice aside to dive these virgin ears into this special world where spectrums, machines and human beings draw the shape of the artistic independence.
Darkly joyful!!
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