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LUV is much more than a music project, it’s a second chance for Elodie. A second chance at life. At 40 years old, Elodie, like many people of her generation, felt out of place. She spent her youth travelling France and Europe, competing as a high-level BMX athlete but she felt unsettled and she decided to leave her closely linked family to go travelling in an attempt to find her own path. At 20 years old, she found love and music at the same time, when she met a DJ / techno producer from the free party scene.
After spending some time observing, Elodie started producing her first tracks instinctively (160 BPM!) and a few months later she started doing live shows. And finally, she seemed to have found what had been missing all these years. In her late thirties, Elodie took some time to think about her life.
Two months after this deep realisation, she signed up to the BPM Contest with her solo project, LUV, which she had started three years earlier, and she won the contest! This was a confirmation that she was right to go ahead with this career change and believe in the gut feeling she had had for so many years. Elodie also started doing extreme sports again. She knows now that she needs to follow her guts. In the music studio where she is preparing her EP for release in march 2021, she expresses her wild side, like a she-wolf, her personal mascot.
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Nicolas Delort, aka NTDT (Nior The Discus Thrower) is a music producer from Marseille who has been composing MAO for more than 10 years.
Immersed in the world of music since childhood, he first turned to Hip-Hop / Rap productions before turning to a more electronic style.
His first inspiration is the California of the 80s and artists such as The Supermen Lovers, Room 5, Modjo or more current ones like Justin Faust, The Phantom’s Revenge or Louis La Roche.
NTDT composes by mixing sounds as well House as Pop or even old school Hip-hop and likes to bring old pieces up to date.
Juan Francisco Izquierdo aka. Psola is a producer, musician and DJ born in Bogota.
He began his musical education as a guitarist in a rock band, which led him to study classical music at the Paris Conservatory. During this period he was introduced to electronic music and began to explore his composition in which we find the colourful rhythms of his native culture as well as the influences of composers such as Riley, Stockhausen, Ligeti and artists such as Kraftwerk, Autechre or Alva Noto, who influenced him. The diversity of his music reflects a combination of elements from several contrasting and organic soundscapes.
Through his music we find a connection between past and present, tradition and modernity, a topological search for colours and textures that create an opening to new aesthetic horizons.
For his second opus, Psola offers us spaces where minimalist elements and monumental structures complement each other. Each track tells a little bit of the story of the next one, the whole EP forms a painting, made of contrasting and dissonant colours, a real moment of escape.
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Select likes to be different. A little bit like people who refuse to shop at Ikea to avoid having the same furniture as everyone else. Benjamin wanted his music to have a distinctive sound, to be unique. That’s why, for a month he used his flat in Paris as his workshop and created his own modular synthesizer, cutting it directly into wood planks and soldering his own circuits. This felt like the end of a long journey, dating back to his teenage years, when he started working on his first demos using DAW software like Reason or Fruity Loops.
In 2018, he created his Instagram account (@select_tunes) and released a series of 1-min long videos in which he showcased his compositions. He worked with different synthetisers and produced melodic house with hints of Radiohead – this would soon become his trademark and a community of fans of Select’s music started to grow. This community expanded even more after Select participated in the BPM Contest in 2020 where the audience was fascinated by his music, which can be defined as somewhere between lo-fi house and electronic, Jon Hopkins and David August, but still with this distinctive melodic touch.
Select works tirelessly on his first album, Lost in Noise, which is scheduled to be released early 2021. No young artist pressure for Select though: in two years, he’s composed close to 90 tracks, and he has selected the best eleven which he is improving to perfection.
Music is for me an emotion and a movement. An emotion calling to dance, a movement calling to life, to my life, and perhaps, I hope, to those of others. The music allows this, make our ends of humanity touch each other. From electro to classical music via jazz, this solo develops an open, minimal space, where everyone can project the colors of their imagination and the contours of their own history.
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In 2015, Tez Cadey composed a track, called ‘Seve’, in his student room in Lille. His track was streamed five billion times, quickly making a name for himself amongst the best French electro artists. He quickly embarked on an international career, travelling the world to play, especially in Asia where ‘Seve’ became really popular thanks to a series of viral videos. He spent a big part of his student years travelling the world to work as a DJ. As a kid, Tez Cadey had grown up in Belgium, the US and France and as a result, he wasn’t too unsettled by this lifestyle and he quickly adapted to the requirements of this international career.
Between 2016 and 2019, Tez Cadey played internationally. In 2018 he released his first album and at the end of 2019, just before the covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns, he was touring in the States. Following these busy three years, Tez Cadey felt the need to focus on music again and reconnect with the pleasure of composing music spontaneously.
Originally from Fontainebleau, Woolen, 26, is a passionate autodidact and a sensitive musician. After acquiring a first piano at the age of 14, he took up the guitar, then quickly launched into electronic composition before publishing his first compositions on YouTube and social networks. If he multiplies his hobbies (photography, snowboarding, filming clips…), the seed is already planted and the young Alexandre already has a plan in mind to become a professional musician. In parallel with his engineering studies, in 2019 he released a first self-produced EP entitled Romantique, rather chill electronic music à la Fakear, a disc that he will have 500 copies pressed on CD thanks to crowdfunding, before making his first steps on Spotify.
During the day, he therefore pursues a career as an automotive engineer (in Formula E), which sends him all over the world and allows him to finance his artistic projects by buying audiovisual equipment. In the evening, when he comes home from work, he takes refuge in music and composes songs all night long that act as therapy to boost his self-confidence. “I started composing because I was a little lonely, I felt like I wasn't being recognized for my true worth. So I locked myself in, I worked a lot, to move forward, free myself and open up to others, because music is above all about sharing.
In June 2021, Woolen (who still calls himself LineFive) decided to take a break from producing songs to devote himself to a new adventure in digital music promotion. But fate takes care of bringing him back on the right path. “My mental health depended on it, I had to take a break, I was doing too many activities at the same time. But at that moment, I receive an email from the BPM Contest. It's a competition I've been aiming for for a few years now. And there, I am told that I am selected among 400 candidates to propose a live. So, I have to go back in.”
The invitation from the BPM reinvigorates him after having suffered several refusals from labels lacking in audacity. He then decided to prepare a live with all the unreleased tracks he had been accumulating for a year and a half on his hard drive. He took it well: his refined, minimalist and emotional electro, somewhere between Flume, The Blaze and Parra for Cuva, won over the BPM jury and Woolen is one of the three winners of the 2021 edition.
Eight years after his debut, this complete artist finally sees the light at the end of the tunnel and recognition pointing the tip of his nose. His first EP, Particles Vol.1, which will be released in the spring, is both a summary of his artistic career and the soundtrack to the finally achieved ambition of this ultra-sensitive multi-instrumentalist. “After monopolizing my brain for eight years never to let go, I am finally living my dream.” Woolen, driven by the desire to push his music beyond sound by experimenting with new techniques and giving it a cinematic aspect, is now ready to travel the world to “find his place”. "I know where I come from, but I don't know where I'm going yet," he explains. Except that now all doors are open to him.