Formed in Saint-Erme-Outre-Et-Ramecourt on the 12th of October 2023. IonoKosm was created by Julien Lemaire and Upsilon Nova, after an extremely fruitful week of work between the two, which engendered the piece Sortir du Cadre. After the first performance of Sortir du Cadre, both felt obliged to continue working together. While they barely knew each other before, they quickly became keenly aware of each others’ shared interests.
IonoKosm is a working class avant-garde art duo, taking inspiration from their experiences as marginalized people. Industrial zones, queerness, bitterness, mental illness, emancipation, anarcho-communism, sirens, rot.
Musically, they blend Julien Lemaire’s highly rhythmic sensibilities, inherited from a rich culture of funk and metal, and Upsilon Nova’s loose and noisy approach to synthesizers. Together creating a diverse post-industrial musical world, backed by spoken word.
While mainly a music group, IonoKosm also delves in film. Creating surrealist and gritty video art.
Julien Lemaire is a French instrumentalist and composer, who plays the electric bass as his main instrument. He mainly composes contemporary-oriented ensemble pieces, influenced by fusion and progressive rock, in which he incorporates unusual playing techniques. Trained at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Reims, he is also involved in numerous projects as a studio musician, and is working on several solo albums.
Hailing from the rural woodlands of the Ardennes, Nova became interested in music at a later stage than most, starting in November 2018 by making music for independent videogames. During lockdown, they became devoted to making music, disregarding their studies in the process. After coming out as neutrois, they began to focus on making more conceptual and abstract music. In late 2023, they moved to Reims, quickly becoming part of various local music scenes, as well as the far-left political world.
Artistically, their identity is deeply influenced by their own life: growing up and living in the working class, the Grand Est region, anarchist politics, and being non-binary. Attracted as much by surrealist abstractions as by direct and uncompromising punk art. They are influenced by heavy drone music, gothic music, dark avant-garde, and sexually-charged EBM. In poetry, they take from Stefan Burnett, Valère Novarina, and Catherine Ribeiro.