AUCAN don’t quite sound like anyone else out there. Their alternative electronica is bolstered by visuals, live shows, performance deejaying, graphic design and media communication that are now as essential a part of their message to the world as their music.
The group started out as a young instrumental noise band, but spent long nights raving “in front of huge, temple-looking sound systems with loud techno/jungle beats,” as they recall. While touring Europe during their noise/math-rock years, AUCAN shifted focus to electronic production. Those efforts would evolve into 2011’s Black Rainbow LP, which, as only a band diving laptop-first into new sounds can do, fused the tastiest bits of grime, electro and downtempo into an “Aucanized” brand of bass-tastic music that couldn’t be tagged to any one scene or genre.
“We never had a bass player, so it just made for us to put in that deep synth bass,” they explain. “We just always liked that sound, from rave and jungle and grime to early dubstep, dark electro, and now trap music… we’re sort of black sheep. So it’s very natural for us to move between different musical landscapes.”
Early tracks like the sleazy, ominous “Rusty,” and the anthemic “A Better Place” (which caught the ear of EDM blog Do Androids Dance?) showed AUCAN capable of making wildly different underground hits, and earned them standout festival appearances Fusion in Germany and Marsatac in France, as well as support gigs with Chemical Brothers and a double show with Placebo by personal invitation.
Their remixes for the likes of Die Antwood, Skream and, most recently, The Bloody Beetroots feat. Paul McCartney, show how the group can impact subgenres with an almost contrarian originality. In fact, Aucan’s official remix of “Out of Sight” had over 100,000 listens in two weeks on Soundcloud. “We build up a trap structure which sounds different from all the ‘normal’ trap beats, but people felt it.”
"Our project really needs to be multidisciplinary. It’s like directing a film. You need to arrange, assemble and mash-up different areas of knowledge to shape and give a voice to your own imagination. That’s why we work on every aspect of the Aucan project by ourselves." To that end, the group has launched Aucanism.com as an organic archive of imagery - much of it submitted by fans - that resonates with the Aucan community, mixing live pictures and official artwork with images of black hoodies, forgotten landscapes, ancient and modern monuments, as well as other art, graphic, graphics and fashion which connects with the Aucan aesthetic: timeless and relevant, current and iconic, dark and deep.
Likewise, Aucan’s DJ set is its own complete experience, featuring customized edits, bootlegs and unreleased tracks as Jo emcees over music and original visuals in realtime. “When we DJ, it’s about channeling the energy we feel we’ve developed playing over 300 live shows..." they explain.
In this spirit - contrarian, confrontational but most of all convincing - Aucan release EP1, four wildly different tracks that capture a four-headed moment in the band’s continuing evolution.
In EP1's four tracks, Aucan span genres and sounds as they bend and transcend them.
“Let’s just say in this Beatport Top 100 era, where everything sounds alike, we’re outsiders" says Jo. "Right now, we focus on distorted bass and keeping the rough, live elements, staying away from complex sound design and production gimmicks and allowing the emotions to build in real time. We don't want to be the Yngwie Malmsteen of electronic music, we want to evoke dark feelings combining digital and analog sounds. Aucanism, indeed.
