We hadn’t seen C-Lekktor in Paris for nearly fifteen years… and it’s likely that some of the audience who’d come to see Markko B.’s dark electro project were already at Glazart for the 2012 Noise Complex festival! As is often the case, the Atomic Cat stayed true to its post-apocalyptic/cyberpunk theme and served as a bunker, a veritable shelter from the summer heat offering its underground protection to “people dressed in black” who came to dance under the spotlights for an evening organised in collaboration with Hellektro.
On stage, Markko is joined for the occasion by DJ Nibi. Inside the Atomic Cat, everyone is already starting to wiggle, as if it weren’t 666 degrees outside. Markko, for his part, couldn’t care less about the heat: he wears his hood the whole time. The Mexican artist celebrated his twenty-year career in 2024 with 2.0, an album full of re-recorded old tracks, and it's indeed these two decades of mechanical aggression that are covered in an hour. The furious Infected, Animals with its relentless, heavy rhythm, the chilling El Comienzo de la Muerte whose sinister melody sends a few welcome shivers down the spine… we journey through his discography without pause. You wonder who’s feeding off whose energy: in front of the stage, the crowd is determined to flail their arms and legs frantically, as if to air out the basement. C-Lekktor was eagerly awaited; there’s even a guy belting out all the melodies with the enthusiasm of an overexcited nursery class (well, on Radioakktivity, an aggrotech cover of Kraftwerk, everyone knows the tune, so that’s fine, and it fits the Atomic Cat theme perfectly)!
With its gloomy samples, menacing beats, creepy melodies, distorted slogans and diverse influences ranging from EBM and industrial to psytrance, C-Lekktor ticks all the boxes for hard-hitting dark electro – devastatingly effective, mindful of its roots yet firmly rooted in the present. Markko infuses it with a biting rage, a visceral ferocity. The martial Are You Ready for the Bass or the intense Juicio Final brook no resistance, and time simply flies by. Dark electro and industrial nights have become rare in Paris, despite the vital work of a few die-hards. So we must make the most of every opportunity to see cult or emerging artists from these scenes, especially in an intimate setting (the Haus Leipzig, where C-Lekktor played a few days ago, may not be the largest venue at the WGT, but it’s at least ten times the size of the Atomic Cat!).
Over the course of an evening, different eras blended together: a near, apocalyptic future evoked by the setting, and echoes of the 2000s, when people with a cyber look would gather for a pilgrimage to their favourite gothic shop. At the centre of this temporal vortex, C-Lekktor also seems to straddle the eras, having reimagined his past. What will his future hold? Only time will tell, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed to see him again before 2040... because those who were there tonight and were already there in 2012 might start being less here!
