IonoKosm was formed in Saint-Erme-Outre-Et-Ramecourt, on the 12th of October 2023. The duo was engendered after an extremely fruitful week of work between artists Julien Lemaire, and Upsilon Nova. During this artistic residency, they created the first version of their flagship piece Sortir du Cadre, which, upon its first performance, formed an irresistible need in both artists to continue collaborating together. While they barely knew each other before, a strong friendship between Lemaire and Nova soon formed thanks to their work together.
IonoKosm is an avant-garde duo which is unabashedly working-class, drawing from their experiences as marginalized people. It is an affirmation of their will to push their personal artistic limits, all the while fighting off the daily and quiet violence of poverty. Industrial zones, queerness, bitterness, mental illness, emancipation, anarcho-communism, sirens, and rot.
Musically, they blend Lemaire’s highly rhythmic sensibilities, inherited from a rich culture of funk and jazz, and Nova’s loose and noisy approach to synthesizers. After a year of work together, their sound evolved into an amalgam of progressive music, jazz-fusion, and industrial. Favoring heavy bass-driven riffs, percussion instruments from all over the world, french-language poetry, and multi-sequential eclectic compositions.
While the duo is mostly dedicated to music, they also delve in film. As children of the 2000’s, their visual language borrows heavily from the myriad of videos and media that defined the early Web 2.0 era. Both also share great inspiration from films such as Do The Right Thing, Funeral Parade of Roses, or Angst.
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.