paul mahoux official website

::: MUSIC :::

TEN ROLE PLAYS
(4th world/electronic/
ambient/jazz)

Japan Relief Charity Concert
2011 (ambient / jazz/4th world)
Paul Mahoux - guitar: chords,
melodies percussion and noise.
feat .Hyoue "Gane" Takagane -
ambient bass background

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all realtime improvisation. no looping nor prerecorded material

SIL3X - 2011 XilsLabs CONTEST
(ambient /electronic/4th world)
XilsLabs is the developer of some of the most analog
sounding soft synthesizers.
track made with only the Xils 3 modular synthesizer.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL

<-----Audio from the video

ALBUMS

YONAGUNI JIMA
(ambient/world)

Okinawa. This tiny island is the most western part of Japan and is very close to Taiwan.
An Okinawan friend went there to record his grandmother singing some traditional songs
from the island and he gave me the recordings. Good intuition actually, because she
passed away by the time i had finished the third song. And i don't even know her name,
nor her face... just this harsh, salty voice. On purpose, i did not try to make her timbre
more sweet sounding and i was very tempted to include some very funny moments
between the songs when she coughs like a truck driver or gets a bit upset because her
grand son continually asks her to stop moving some papers in front of the microphone
when she sings. To stay true to this absolutely authentic harsh voice, i had to limit
myself to a few elements to avoid sounding like a sometimes too civilized deodorant spray
called "world music", and stay true to the Ryukyu traditional spirit.
No guitar at all in those tracks.

This is a series of three songs i made
with the voice of a very old grandma
from Yonaguni Island, south west of

TOXIC WOOD DOLLS
jazz-house/funky tech-house

Between minimal with soul, funk and atmosphere and something else...
Based on my processed jazz guitar and small vocal clips ...

VARIOUS TRACKS

it is well worth listening. Somewhere between ambient and spacey funk, and even some
guitar solos (very short, rest assured!). Of course, i used Ableton Live to loop myself,
making my own (complex) setup of delays (echoes) repeating endlessly, and then fading
out, while i am playing another non-looped guitar part on top of it. This setup was still
to be perfected at this time, which means that i was not able to undo anything if i
would make a mistake when looping: it would stay in the loop for good. That's why some
good moments sometimes go away too quickly: i make a mistake on a beautiful loop and i
have to "make it up" somehow, which forces me to move to another musical scene. I
have many recorded improvisations like this, some sounding better, but this one got
selected here because it goes ininterrupted for a rather long time, without an obvious
mistake or a very bad idea. Also, i really enjoyed it!

MIRROR ROOM SESSION

A pure guitar live looping
improvisation (43mn) from
2005, with no other
instruments whatsoever.
Very live... and hence very
unperfect, as it happens often
with improvisation.
The best moments are too
short and the long moments are
not the best, but all in all,

LUANG PHRABANG

A sound poem made in an
old style radiophonic way,
with various field recording
with no relation to each other,
and some haunting gibbon sample
repeating endlessly and variating
subtlely. Sweaty erotic
sunset in Laos, where i have
unfortunately even never been...
Pure postcard from 1995..

MIRAGE

What happens when you just
fool around leisurely with
your instrument ( i mean
guitar, of course ...)
and you forget that a D.A.T
tape recorder is running silently
in the back of the room,
recording everything for hours.
Just guitar and a bottleneck,
some t.h.c. support, and a

totally free mind, for a little ambient guitar piece from 1997 with that typical "my heart
flies like an eagle in the sky" kind of feeling...

LOOPING LOOPONG LOOPANG

My first "official" live looping
attempt on guitar.
1998, in New York, where i
was about to live for three years.
The title sounds kind of
ridiculous now, but i thought it
was damn cool at that time,
being blown away by live looping,
using nothing but two ping pong
delays, one short, one long.

And a ring modulator effect for that typical bell like sound that fits so well to guitar.
Dynamics and sound quality in general are so so, but i still do love some moments of it.

COLOUR BEADS SESSION
(dub/house/electro)

Sixty six minutes non stop of guitar based dubby and progressive house music.

Eight tracks of original audio clips, many of them being my own guitar, looping together
and controlled in real time into a seamless one hour mix.
Contains one sample from Hassan Hakmoum and one from the Bee Gees.

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"Ten Roleplays" is a pretext to release unsorted tracks that i accumulated
over the years 2000-2007 and that never fitted into an album, for lack of
stylistic unity. Ranging from ambient looped guitar improvisations (tracks 2, 10) to more
standard electronica (tracks 1, 3, 7) or even house (track 9), their only common link is
that they almost all contain my guitar playing and some field recordings i made,sometimes
heavily processed and unrecognizable. Those ten tracks are like ten role plays, with me
ending up in several styles in a schizophrenic way, always oscillating between my love of
guitar and my love of computer music.