Valerie Pop

Valerie is a collective of electronic producers on the west coast of France. I've been following them for a year now, and they have proven themselves to be some of the most consistently impressive producers out there.

Unlike a lot of stuff right now, their music is not about sidechaining, saturating, compressing, and bitcrushing everything into oblivion. They don't care about infusing their music with some sort of constructed badass electro/rave attitude. They let the quality of the music itself shine through.

Valerie's focus is melodic synth-based pop with a lot of heart. If you're into 80s movies where suburban teenagers shoot flirtatious looks at each other or main characters walk through the city, gazing pensively at the skyline, then these guys are for you.

Valerie comprises:
College
Russ Chimes
Maethelvin
Anoraak
The Outrunners
Minitel Rose

Here's the collective's MySpace, as well as their HQ, the Valerie blog:
Valerie on MySpace
Valerie

Definitely add the Valerie blog to your RSS feed. It's one of my favorites because its focus is not primarily on new music, but rather on showcasing any music that fits the Valerie aesthetic of 1980s nostalgia and quality dance & synthesizer-based music.

The collective carries on a long tradition, and they are well aware of this. They are all contributors to the Valerie blog and consistently write about and pay homage to their forerunners, legends like Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, Jan Hammer, etc. In other words, they are not only great producers, but also music connoisseurs, historians, and critics.

What's more, they understand the impact an image culture has on how people experience and remember music, so they meticulously choose images that complement the music they post. In fact, the early Valerie posts were little more than pictures and an occasional song, making this dual-layered approach explicit. If you're in your twenties and this doesn't make you smile, there's something wrong: Early Valerie posts

Here are two of my favorite Valerie tracks thus far. They're not new, but neither is Valerie.

Both tracks come courtesy of College, though the first also owes itself to the gorgeous synth-pop wizardry of remixer Russ Chimes.

COLLEGE


RUSS CHIMES

"Teenage Color (Russ Chimes Remix)" makes you wish you were in high school in California, ca. 1986. It's pure pop bliss.



College - Teenage Color (Russ Chimes Remix)

Moment of Pop Bliss:
The entire song.

The second track, "Your Smile," is more pensive and less sugary, but is perhaps an even better embodiment of Video Pop. With a driving pulse and an insistent melody, it conjures up a scene of sincere longing, of hoping for something wonderful and elusive. My most played mp3!



College - Your Smile

Moment of Pop Bliss:
00:59.86 & onward - The bassline is pensive and hesitant, but the melody on top is pure optimism. The internal dialogue of a male teenager.