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IonoKosm was formed in Saint-Erme-Outre-Et-Ramecourt, on the 12th of October 2023. The duo’s inception can be traced back to an extremely fruitful and relentless week of work between artists Julien Lemaire, and Upsilon Nova. During this artistic residency, they created the first version of their most important piece, Sortir du Cadre. Upon its first performance, on a minimal setup in a dark manor room, facing a public of 15, an irresistible need to continue their journey together arose in the two performers. While they barely knew each other before, a strong friendship between Lemaire and Nova soon formed around their artistic work, life experiences, and worldviews.
IonoKosm is an avant-garde duo which is unabashedly working-class, drawing from their experiences as marginalized people in the decaying north-eastern regions of the empty diagonal. In a continuation of the 80’s french underground spirit, they adopt a radical stance on art and politics: their priority is body-straining, gender norm transgressing, quasi-sadomasochistic performance art, laden with anarcho-communist messages. It is an affirmation of their unwavering will to push their personal artistic limits, all the while fighting off the daily and quiet violence of poverty; a juxtaposition of utter bleakness and revolutionary optimism. IonoKosm is industrial zones, queerness, bitterness, mental illness, emancipation, anarchism, sirens, and rot.
Musically, they blend Lemaire’s highly rhythmic virtuosic playing, inherited from a rich culture of funk and jazz, and Nova’s loose and noisy approach to synthesizers. From the beginning, their sound was sparse and minimalist, which, to this day, is still their musical backbone. This trait especially remains in their spartan musical and recording setups, in similarly exiguous places. After a year of working together, their sound evolved into an amalgam of progressive music, jazz, and industrial. They favor heavy bass-driven riffs, percussion instruments from all over the world, french-language poetry, and multi-sequential eclectic compositions. As well as their need to remain fresh, their reverence for the DIY ethos led them to create their own makeshift instruments from scavenged objects.
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.
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The warm sound of Jamiroquai's Fender Rhodes, the staccato chords of Parliament's clavinet, the timeless groove of James Brown... . This is the rhythmic, soul/funk-tinged musical context in which Julien Lemaire grew up, and which predestined him to choose the electric bass as his main instrument in 2020. With several years' experience on the instrument and an eclectic range of musical styles, including English progressive rock, the zeuhl music of Magma and musique concrète, his heavy, driving rhythms complete the musical universe of IonoKosm alongside Nova. His interest in percussion led him to acquire, among other things, an Udu, a Nigerian percussion instrument, as well as a djembe and egg shakers, an essential component of the duo's musical identity ever since. With a desire to push back the limits of his instrument, he works on new techniques, inspired by avant-garde currents, as well as unusual timbres, concretized by Nova's raw talent in the field.
Since joining the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Reims at the end of 2023, Julien has been working on a number of musical projects as a bassist, and has discovered his attraction for contemporary-oriented chamber music by embarking on the creation of several concept albums for small ensembles. Inspired by the music of Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Schoenberg, Bartók and many others, this facet of his musical universe expresses itself through cold, violent textures, characterized by his distinctive atonal vertical writing. The integration of electric bass in these pieces is partly responsible for this, accentuating the abrasive character of the compositions, which borrow from industrial metal, funk music and Japanese brutal-prog.
Hailing from the rural Ardennes, Nova began their musical journey in late November 2018, by being hired as a composer on an independent game project, despite having no musical training or knowledge. As they jumped from project to project, their style developed between two very different axes: Neue Deutsche Härte and indie game soundtracks. As lockdown was announced, their obsession with music grew so much that they disregarded their studies, spending entire days and nights composing. It is in mid-2020 that they discovered prog, which opened the door to an unstoppable need to discover new music that continues to this day. After coming out as neutrois in 2021, they were overtaken by extreme realizations about art, moving towards creating more conceptual and abstract works, especially appreciating the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk. In late 2023, after moving to Reims, they quickly became part of various local music scenes, artistic circles, as well as the far-left political sphere.
Artistically, their identity is tied to the Champagne-Ardenne region, and their proletarian life within it, alternating between existence in working-class districts and impoverished villages. This impacts their art in most subjects, from their mental health struggles, their radical vision of queerness, their anarchist thought… They are attracted by a wide array of artists, from the classical avant-garde to uncompromising punk and DIY scenes. Their love of electronics and hardware, as well as their dedication as a self-taught sound engineer, as led them to develop an extreme fascination and focus on musical timbre. In their writing and poetry, they take from Catherine Ribeiro, Stefan Burnett, René Daumal, Valère Novarina…
