In The Studio With
MAELSTROM & LOUISAHHH
After a decade of collaboration, techno rock duo Maelstrom & Louisahhh release their debut album. Danny Turner finds them at the peak of their powers
Despite having divergent musical upbringings, Joan-Mael Péneau’s techno/rave background has merged seamlessly with Louisa Pillot’s New York indie-rock past to forge an enduringly successful partnership. Since the release of the duo’s debut EP Translations in 2013, the twosome have explored numerous gritty excursions into vocal-based techno rock while creating the RAAR label for their own releases and others. After ten years working together, their debut album Sustained Resistance is a perfectly timed celebration of their hard-hitting amalgamation of styles and political commentary. The LP marks a new chapter in Maelstrom & Louisahhh’s creative growth, with its driving, club-ridden aesthetic scouring the industrial/EBM terrain, amidst vocals riven with polemic outrage and post-pandemic angst.
Tell us a little about your musical backgrounds.
Maelstrom: “For me it was about going to illegal rave parties in the late ’90s when I was 16 or 17. After the criminal justice bill, people like Spiral Tribe started coming to Europe from the UK and organising free parties around France. These guys were obviously DJing but some were playing live. They’d bring their equipment onto the dancefloor in front of the sound system and that made it really easy to understand what type of gear they were using and how. At that age, it was like listening to magic.” Louisahhh: “My background is completely different. I played guitar, piano and sang in choirs until my dad took me to see Nine Inch Nails when I was 11 – thanks Dad [laughs]! Music was a way for me to understand how to feel comfortable inside my own body and the world around me – Iwas obsessed with Garbage, NIN and Smashing Pumpkins and started going to clubs in New York. I felt socially awkward but decided to DJ and try to control the energy in the room – it also gave me an excuse not to talk to anybody in a club. My secret dream was to be a front woman in a band, but it felt very scary to live that dream until I started writing and performing vocals on other people’s tracks. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my production skills so I started releasing my own music collaboratively, and Mael played a big part in that.”
When did you first gain access to gear?
M: “I learned a lot from a magazine in France called KR home-studio and there was a music gear shop in my home city of Nantes, so I started talking to them to try to understand the cheapest way to buy my first piece of equipment. At first that was an Akai S20 sampler, which had no sequencer so I had to put all the samples on top of each other, and then a Korg MS-20 semi-modular synth. I later found out about Roland grooveboxes like the MC-303, which was a big deal at t
