TEPR Leaves Yelle, Relaunches Excellent, Club-Ready Solo Project

Tanguy Destable, better known as TEPR and one-third of much loved french electro-pop outfit Yelle, abruptly left the group last year after almost a decade and two albums with the group. After a brief period holed up in the studio, the Brittany-raised producer and keyboardist is releasing the Hypnotease EP on Parisian partystarter Yuksek's Partyfine imprint. The EP is drenched in creative adventurism, ear-catching grooves and emotive melody that bare a strong human touch within their electronic arrangements. In his first crack since going solo, TEPR has come into his own.

"We made Pop-Up and Safari Disco Club, did two massive world tours together in 5 years," Destable says of Yelle. "We really are like brothers and sisters, a true family, but making music is all about expressing yourself and having fun. After the Yelle tour and Woodkid tours, I was exhausted. I needed to rest. Plus, dance music became massive these past few years, I felt such a saturation that I wasn't excited by anything anymore."

The departure, although a surprise, was by no means a contentious affair. "After the last show of the Safari Disco Club Tour, in Paris, I went to see Julie and Jean-François (Yelle and GrandMarnier) to tell them I wanted to leave the band, to rest, and then to go back to my solo career," Destable explains. "Our relationship is based on friendship before music, so they completely understood and told me to take my time and that the door to the studio will always be wide open."

What followed was a period of solitude in which Destable rediscovered his voice as a producer, one that dips in and out of adventurous, electro-wrought aesthetics with a typically French flair. "The main inspiration is the complicated relationship between love, music and youth," says Destable. "I wanted to go back to that raw feeling I had when I first starting writing electronic music––Focusing on the vibe, the music, more than the sound. These past years I lost myself in the technical side of producing and needed to un-learn and be free of it."

Of the EP's six tracks, we've got the premieres of the titular "Hypnotease," a slower-grooved, emo-house tune with Destable's vocals atop that threatens to devolve into sunrise-levels of feels until an acid house beat kicks at three minutes and it becomes a much funkier affair. It's a unique confluence of styles that is only highlighted as the refrain of "You put a spell on me" is re-appropriated in the bossier, club-friendly second half.

"I wanted to make fragile dance music. Lot of today's electronic production is super tight and explodes every sixteen bars," says TEPR. "Not that there's anything wrong with it. I just prefer to focus on the melodies rather than the bass frequencies and the drops. Also, adding my own vocals to the tracks helps the fragile vibe. Im not a singer and you can tell by listening to it. It just makes the song more personal. It's not the most well balanced, best sounding track, but it's from the heart. Beauty comes from imperfection and it took me 15 years of writing and producing to realize that."

"Never Be The Same" is a harder-edged tune, but bears the same contrast between melodic bedroom pop and club-ready elements. This EP suggests may be a hallmark of TEPR's aesthetic. In this instance, it comes in the form of laid-back, melodic electro-pop that gives way to slamming techno before looping back around in a switch-up that functions emotively as well as viscerally.

TEPR found familiar ground in this mindset with storied Parisian DJ and producer Yuksek. "Pierre and I know each other for almost a decade," says Destable. "We met many times but never really took the time to have a good talk. We have the same approach regarding Dance Music. We focus on the pop side, the melodies. Last december, Pierre invited me to his studio in Reims. We listened to maybe 25 tracks, made a selection and then he proposed to release it on Partyfine.That was super easy and joyful, just two buddies listening to music. That was a key factor to me to go on Partyfine."

The rest of the EP is as engrossingly adventurous. It carries the weight required for body music, but does it with an intimacy that comes from a bedroom pop mentality. It may have taken TEPR departing Yelle to focus on his voice as a producer, but he's very quickly found it and it seems he has quite a bit to say.

Download the track "Hypnotease" from iTunes here.

TEPR is on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter

Jemayel Khawaja is Managing Editor of THUMP.
Main photo by Magali Bragard.