Review
Genre and Mood
Nicolas Repac’s Swinging in the Rain is electro-swing, as its Bandcamp page tags it, in its most handmade form: a jazz record made by machines out of other people’s records. It is playful in the way a cartoon soundtrack is playful, nostalgic by design, since its raw material is the sound of the 1930s, and quirky in every borrowed voice.
Song Summary
The title bends Singin’ in the Rain into swing, and the track keeps the reference: a sample-tracking database lists a dialogue sample from Moses Supposes, the number Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor perform in the 1952 film. Around it, the album’s own notes describe what Repac was after: Harlem nights, the Thirties, jungle fever, meowing muted trumpets, long-playing records with their breaths and creaks, assembled into modern, repetitive jungles.
Musical Breakdown
No published source walks through this track section by section, so this guide stays with what the sources say about its material and leaves the rest to your ears.
Intro
Listen from the first seconds for the surface of the sound: the album’s notes count long-playing records, breaths and creaks among its ingredients.
Main Section
The body of the track is built from repetition, borrowed fragments returning in loops; listen for where the film dialogue sits inside the pattern.
Outro
At just under five minutes it is the longest piece on an album where several tracks last barely a minute.
Concepts in Focus
sampling is the whole method here. Dandelion Radio calls Swing-Swing the sample-based solo outing of Arthur H’s guitarist, and Repac explains the appeal: pairing pieces from different decades allows meetings between people who would never have met. A Hollywood musical of 1952 and a Paris studio of 2004 meet in this track.
The album’s notes speak of repetitive jungles, which is another way of describing a loop: a fragment repeated until it becomes a groove, with change coming from what is added and taken away.
The title promises swing, both the jazz of the 1930s the album evokes and the lilting rhythm it is named after. Compare how Caravan Palace – Lone Digger later turned the same era into club music.
Artistic Context
Repac is a French guitarist and producer, for years Arthur H’s guitarist, who spent more than a decade on electronic production before returning to the guitar; Shazam’s biography names Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott among his influences. Swing-Swing came out in 2004 on Nø Førmat!, as catalogue number NOF2; Swinging in the Rain is its second track. La Grande Roue followed in 2007, Black Box in 2013 and Rhapsodic in 2021.
Impact and Reception
Dandelion Radio heard tunes at times playful and comic, at others tough, dark and very film noir, and the album has stayed in print: it is still sold on Bandcamp, with a heavy white vinyl edition. Listen to it as a question the album asks out loud: do machines have a soul?
