Simon Petignat/tg
Even if their works endure, it can happen that the passage of time has given yesterday’s stars a stylish, if at times ridiculous, character. And so you can play with the development of trends and the cult of fame in a weird way. This is what Bastien Bron aka My Name is Fuzzy does, the musician and former drummer for the Rambling Wheels. He tends to present his work in a mixed form of album and exhibition.
Idol with mullet hairstyle
His second such “exhibition album” is still accessible until Sunday in Biel’s Usine sonore. The project, titled «Vedette 93» (roughly: «Hero of 93»), offers a slightly wacky look at celebrity and the phenomena that come with it, using a replica children’s room and music installations. The room, in which the pictures of a star with a mullet hairstyle are displayed, transports visitors to the 90s. The star, who here represents a boy’s idol, is Fuzzy himself – who in turn is the artist’s stage character.
The musician decided on this project after rediscovering an audio cassette about eight months ago. On the tapes of the relic was a concert recording. Bastien Bron gave this concert himself as a child for his family. «The first thing that struck me when I listened was my attitude. It was like a star on the stage of a packed stadium,” says Bron. “That’s when I realized how much I’d been influenced by celebrities.” At that time, he was particularly fascinated by celebrities from France.
Music with an 80’s influence
Fuzzy reused the texts from back then without changing a single line. For the lines align in a peculiar way with the artist’s writing aspirations today. “Direct and simple, the songs vacillated between seriousness and irony, free and innocent, in an unintended way.”
Musically, Bron mixes influences from French chanson and electronic music in his arrangements of «Vedette 93», just like the musicians Philippe Katherine or Flavien Berger, to whom Bron is artistically close. With equipment consisting of a drum machine and children’s synthesizer straight out of the 80s, the sound sounds cobbled together, but also «clean». This also applies to the stage set, which Bron built out of cardboard.
The visual world of “Vedette 93”, on the other hand, is inspired by the 90s, always with humor and distance. Clips of the fictional star, fake TV reports, a People magazine that serves as a guide for visitors: it’s all there.
Paradoxical world of music
“Vedette 93” follows “Septante-Quatorze”, My Name is Fuzzy’s first exhibition album, which he showed at Usine sonore in May 2021. In this form of presentation there are neither produced CDs nor the possibility to listen to the tracks on the Internet: the songs disappear when the installations are dismantled. So the ephemeral album is a rarity, detached from the usual current distribution formats and challenging both the mass distribution of music and its extreme availability.
“I’m not against streaming, I use it myself,” explains the musician, “but there are false promises. Today there are one million artists for every one million listeners. Lots of people use the platforms and still no one listens to you.” A drop in the bucket of all these productions?
As for celebrity, the effect is exactly the opposite. Bastien Bron says: “When you become aware that people you don’t know know you, this is the first symptom of it.”
Info: Exhibition at Usine Sonore, Gurzelenstrasse 31, Biel. From today to Friday 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. Admission 35 francs (reduced 25 francs).
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