Igorrrr, that bizarre creation of a slightly crazy guy who started mixing baroque opera, extreme metal, breakcore, bal musette, animal cries and Balkan and Eastern influences, is now playing at the Olympia. Make sense of that sentence yourself, because with Igorrr, it's better not to try to overthink things. All we can say is that Gautier Serre and his band have earned it, with their latest album Amen (review) once again demonstrating a rare talent for blending violence and elegance, heaviness and poetry, with a crazy creativity that doesn't detract from its visceral nature. The opening acts were Imperial Triumphant and MasterBoot Record, two projects that are both very different and yet similar in their slightly cryptic approach.
IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT
What is cryptic about Imperial Triumphant is the music. When you see the New York band perform, you always feel like you've stumbled into ‘one of those parties’, you know, the kind where everyone suddenly dons togas and starts speaking Latin, when you thought you were just going to watch a film with Adam Sandler (these parties often happen on Thursdays, go figure). Yet they have made an effort: their latest album, Goldstar, is by far their most accessible. But does that mean they're churning out radio-friendly hits so that the audience can sing along to the choruses while waving their lighters in the air? Let's not get carried away, even if almost the entire set is dedicated to Goldstar (it's true, however, that between the atmospheric parts of Lexington Delirium and the offbeat groove of Gomorrah Nouveaux, it's almost easy to know how to move your head).
Imperial Triumphant and its blend of free jazz and black/death metal continues to impress with its freedom and taste for absolute decompartmentalisation, which, beneath its improvised chaos, also exudes rigour (a trait it shares with Igorrr, incidentally). Try to follow the rhythms of Kenny Grohowski, that mad scientist of the drums whose deconstructive work is a veritable psychedelic labyrinth. Yet, unlike those Thursday nights where everyone shows off by speaking Latin, Imperial Triumphant doesn't show off: their taste for the avant-garde and experimentation is sincere and playful.
So sometimes we grit our teeth a little, but we have a good laugh. We are obviously still as captivated as ever by the golden masks and this world straight out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, whose decadent splendour fits so well with the luxurious setting of the Olympia. When singer/guitarist Zachary Ezrin addresses the audience, it is with a disembodied robot voice. Bassist Steve Blanco manages to be communicative despite his mask, with his highly expressive gestures that are not without a certain offbeat humour. And then, well, there's champagne, there's a trumpet shooting sparks, it's like a circus! The greatest thing about Imperial Triumphant is leaving the venue and seeing this group of friends at the bar who had never heard them before, grimacing in pain... but among them, there's this one weird dude who stayed in the dark the whole time, with a huge smile like a kid at Christmas. Like all the best cults, Imperial Triumphant is aimed at a select few... but they're becoming less and less select!
MASTER BOOT RECORD
With Master Boot Record, the taste for the cryptic is reflected in the treasure hunts and codes that Vittorio D'Amore, alias Victor Love, hides around his project. Computer scientists from the 90s, you're in luck. For everyone else, it's rather esoteric. Just look at the logo, which mimics that of IBM, to understand the universe: insert a floppy disk into your A drive, Master Boot Record is digital metal. As Victor Love said, ‘we make computer music’.
Master Boot Record has grown up, and the solo synth project that got the internet so excited has become a trio on stage. Victor Love, who fans of the 2000s dark electro scene may already know from his work with Dope Stars Inc, struts across the Olympia stage, running around under his hoodie. He is accompanied by guitarist Edoardo Taddei and drummer Giulio Galati, who is also active in the excellent band Nero di Marte. Together, they pound our eardrums with tracks that, drawing on the chiptune aesthetic, combine heavy riffs with sometimes convoluted compositions. We love it when MBR picks songs from his side-project Keygen Church to add a baroque touch to his set, perfectly complementing the evening's headliner!
The audience is stirring, the Olympia is already buzzing. Probably many of Igorrr's fans have already listened to Master Boot Record back in the days of the album Direct Memory Access, with Laurent Lunoir aka Öxxö Xööx as a guest on almost half of the tracks. Even without that, MBR has what it takes to wreak havoc and plunge its followers into a techno-mystical trance, where we can also sense a hint of nostalgia for all that ‘prehistoric modernity’, the beginnings of today's dominant geek culture. We'll conclude with a simple and sober 01110111 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110111 01100101 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01001101 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01000010 01101111 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01100101 01100011 01101111 01110010 01100100 00100000 01110111 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100111 01110010 01100101 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100110 01110101 01101110 00100000 00100001, as they say.
IGORRR
A red curtain hides the stage. Tension rises. The Olympia's sound system has abandoned metal to offer us piano accompaniment. Little by little, a heartbeat resounds, growing louder and faster, like an echo of the audience's cardiac rhythm. The curtain disappears, the heartbeat becomes Daemoni's pulse. Gautier Serre stands alone in the darkness, as if to remind us that this is his project, that he started it alone. Then the others arrive. JB Le Bail appears in the centre, on a platform, monolithic and solemn. His hooded silhouette mimics the statues of cultists/menacing Nazgûls at the back of the stage. The staging is magnificent, with hands reaching out from the drum kit and Gautier Serre's equipment, like a horde of zombies just waiting to devour us... but also reminiscent of Igorrr's taste for limp body parts that pile up and mix together! Then Marthe Alexandre arrives. The atmosphere is heavy and occult, Igorrr plays with our nerves before crushing our bones and souls.
During their last visit to Paris, we had some doubts. Was it because of the venue? A new line-up still finding its feet? The contrast with Amenra, who played just before them? Those doubts are now forgotten. This is the Igorrr we love: majestic, imposing, crazy, theatrical. Marthe Alexandre and JB Le Bail finally had the opportunity to embrace their characters and the project while working on a studio album, and the result is palpable: more confidence, more presence, more madness. The former Svart Crown singer, with his toga and earrings, appears as an ageless mystical figure. Their complicity is now apparent: on ieuD, for example, when one sings, he moves towards the other, forcing him to back away, as if to express all the struggles and tensions that live in Igorrr's songs, these different parts that collide and clump together to form this very special monster.
Igorrr. We never asked Gautier the lame question ‘where does the name of your project come from?’, but we can't help thinking of Doctor Frankenstein's slightly hunchbacked servant... Serre is a mad scientist who also likes to sew together unrelated pieces to ultimately bring to life a unique creature that is both grotesque and sublime, a blasphemy with sacred connotations. Hence the body parts, perhaps!
A blend of opera and metal, the concert also unfolds like a play, with its various costumes and breathtakingly beautiful lighting. Gautier Serre regularly remains alone, making ‘strange noises’ in his enclosure. Nervous Waltz and its glitches invite breakcore into baroque music. We relax a little with Blastbeat Falafel, but the overall mood of the concert is quite similar to that of Amen: darker, more overwhelming. The breathing spaces are more haunting than light: Hollow Tree or Silence plunges the Olympia into apnoea, a moment of ghostly grace that is only matched at the end of the concert by Opus Brain, leaving the audience on an anxious note. With Savage Sinusoid in 2015, Igorrr seemed to find the ideal formula, the perfect blend of all his desires, and has stuck with it ever since. As a result, tonight, all the songs are from the last three albums. They are the most spectacular, the most expansive, the most ambitious, the most masterful and, of course, the most representative of the band at the moment. However, we would have loved to delve a little further back and relive some older oddities!
With twenty years of hybridisation under its belt, Igorrr is starting to have quite a history. As we said in the introduction, there is something quite moving about seeing the behemoth that this project has become, originally the absurd and poetic delusions of a slightly strange guy. Let's take a moment to share a personal anecdote: Igorrr is a project we've been following here since the beginning. In 2006, I wrote to Gautier on MySpace to buy Poisson Soluble, his first EP/demo. He said, ‘OK, send me a cheque for €7 and I'll send you the CD.’ I sent him the cheque, received the CD, which became a cult thing that we listened to with friends and had a good laugh about. Then Igorrr grew up, end of story... until very recently. On 19 September, the day Amen was released, I was tidying up my CD collection. I came across Poisson Soluble. Inside the sleeve, I found a note from Gautier that I had never seen before: he thanked me and explained that ‘there must have been a misunderstanding, the price is normally €10, but it's okay, I'm happy to send it to you!’. So I discovered that I had ripped off Igorrr in 2006 and owed him €3 for almost twenty years! Rest assured:I left a €3 cheque at the Olympia to make amends for these past misdeeds!
Yeah, it's a bit of an off-topic anecdote. But it sets the scene: buy your favourite artists' records when no one knows them, keep them, and over time some of those seeds will sprout and grow into strange trees, twisted yet beautiful, giving your evenings a special flavour. In 2025, Igorrr packed the Olympia with a show that was at once serious and delirious, grandiose and intimate, a grandiloquent and impressive exorcism whose impression of perfection, whether in the music or the stage performance, did not erase the human dimension. On the contrary, Igorrr has never seemed more sincere than with Amen. The next time we see these gentle madmen, whose frenetic bursts of creativity are as much ritual as they are reverie, it may be in an even bigger venue. We fear that we may lose some of that emotional connection, but we are confident: Igorrr is as much about hard work as it is about inspiration, and the ambition of the project assures us that we have not finished feasting our eyes and ears.
Thanks to Agence Singularités for the accreditation.
