Arnaud Rivière

Arnaud’s performance is far from subtle. He will attack you with raw sounds of objects rotating on the turntable and dangerous wires stuck directly into his mixer. His sonic intervention is ecstatic but he is also detached enough to hint at sarcasm moments before he moves on to destroy another objects for auditory pleasure. For me, Arnaud is an important turntablist that extends the practices of Yoshihide Otomo and Martin Tetreault, where the raw sound of the material overwhelms any sort of reference or functionality that the medium was originally intended to have.

He is an unabashed feedbackophile who creates monstrous gusts of noise with simple tools used incorrectly. Jamming foreign objects and wires into his mixing board, using his turntable to spin metal disks or worse, twisting his distortion pedal to 11, the harsh beauty of Riviere’s music does not come from conventional concepts like melody and…