Review
Genre and Mood
Thylacine and Camille Després open the EP Intuitive with No Mic Stand, electronic music of the indie, song-sized kind. Thylacine’s own Bandcamp tags it electronic and electronica, and his biography there speaks of a progressive and vaporous electronica sound. The feelings, dreamy and atmospheric, follow that word vaporous; no review we found describes this particular track.
Song Summary
No Mic Stand is the first of seven tracks on Intuitive, which Thylacine released on 20 December 2012 and calls his first EP. The credits are short: original tracks by William Rezé, singer Camille Després. She sings on three of the seven, this one, Trois and Foch. The track runs three minutes and forty-four seconds. Thylacine posted it on his YouTube channel in February 2013 as part of the Intuitive album, and the EP was issued again in April 2013 on Intuitive Records, the label of most of his later releases.
Musical Breakdown
No source we found walks through No Mic Stand part by part or gives its tempo, so this section keeps to the credits.
Main Section
The track pairs a producer and a singer: Rezé’s electronics and Després’s voice. How the voice and the electronics share the space is the thing to listen for, since no lyric sheet or description is published.
Concepts in Focus
A <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist credit names a guest on someone else’s record. Here the guest is the only other person credited at all. Discogs describes Camille Després as a French singer from Angers who was involved with Thylacine for a short period; she returned on Dad, on his EP Blend in 2014, so her voice marks his first records.
ambient texture is sound used as atmosphere rather than melody or beat, a background that colours everything in front of it. It is the nearest name for what Thylacine’s word vaporous promises. Listen for which sounds stay in the background and whether the voice sits inside them or above them.
Artistic Context
Thylacine is William Rezé, born in Angers on 13 August 1992; his stage name is the Tasmanian wolf. French Wikipedia says he studied classical music at a conservatory before art school, played saxophone in several groups and has made electronic music since 2012. He calls himself close to Fakear and Superpoze and names Massive Attack, Four Tet and Moderat among his influences, the last heard in Moderat – A New Error. After Intuitive he won a place among the three laureates of the Inouïs du Printemps de Bourges in 2014 and recorded his first album, Transsiberian, on the Trans-Siberian railway in 2015.
Impact and Reception
No Mic Stand did not chart and drew no review we could find. It matters as a beginning: the first track of the first EP by a producer who went on to record in Versailles, Namibia and a converted caravan. Listen to it as a sketch of what came later.
