The origins of Front de Cadeaux can be traced back to a dating site for bears, some ten years ago. After Maurizio had spotted a Felix Kubin poster on one of Ugo’s pictures, the two started chatting. Very much intrigued, Ugo invited Maurizio, who lives in Brussels, to play at a festival he organised in Rome. Shortly thereafter Ugo made Maurizio a resident of his Subwoofer night, one of the first bear parties in Europa that existed outside of the mainstream bear realm.
The two bonded over food of course, over their belief that dance culture is rotting from the inside, and even more over slow, heavy electronic music. You have to picture it: a flat in Brussels, a table with empty bowls and bottles, thick smoke and these two daddy dj’s listening to stacks and stacks of UK rave and breakbeat records on 33 instead of 45 rpm. Testing how deep and sexy these garbage records sound at a pace the bears can actually follow without dropping dead – Ugo & Maurizio baptised it ‘supreme rallentato’.
During those early encounters, their decade long dj experience merged into one, just like their vision that dance culture urgently needs a revolution. To them that means playing 90 bpm in a club at 3am whilst the promoters are shitting themselves, showing everyone that the body follows the groove, and not the bpm, a capitalist and macho construct that’s making crowds go numb instead of making them dance.
Around 2013, they officially started collaborating as Front de Cadeaux, referring to the Italian way of pronouncing Front 242, the Belgian EBM legends. “Le pédé BPM” (the bpm gay), their first release, followed one year later, with a Fabrizio Mammerella remix that kind of became an anthem in some circles. It’s at the same time a celebration of their love for a slower groove as it is a queer manifesto, dissociating themselves from the mainstream gay culture in big cities, dominated by a horrible attitude and bad taste both in music and style. Second single “Infodrogue” came about after the drug line Maurizio worked at, stopped operating after midnight. Backed up by a bubbling bassline, it’s telling the sad tale of a junk calling in and no-one answering. The references to culture and real life are everywhere, be it in the track titles of later releases – “Ouvre ta bouche” is a joke about Kate Bush, “Cogitate” a hommage to lsd wizard John C. Lilly – or their sound, which is impregnated by psyche music, mushrooms, dub, triphop and space rock.
Coming hot on the heels of the collaboration ep with long time friend Fabrizio Mamarella earlier this year, featuring their two oldest singles appearing on vinyl for the first time, came Front de Cadeaux’ new 12” on EMET records. “We slowly rot” is a manifesto and an epistemological breakdown of standard, empty club music, for in order to reconnect with what it should be about, our whole idea of dance music has to be deconstructed. As Front de Cadeaux militantly puts it: “every act of the human being is about transformation through destruction”.