Igorrr - Mastering Chaos

* Article published in the book “Music That Resists“

French musician Gautier Serre has built a career that treads the thin line between genius and madness, between delirium and clairvoyance, crafting a style that casts aside every convention to venture into the realm of the unheard and the never-before-felt. Impossible to pigeonhole, Igorrr borrows the breakcore sounds typical of projects like Venetian Snares and enriches them with a quantity of elements beyond even the wildest imagination. Nothing escapes Igorrr, a kind of supermassive black hole that sucks in and obliterates every element of musical tradition, from any era whatsoever; deconstruction, endless remixing, continuous cut-and-paste that perhaps Frank Zappa himself would have appreciated, overflowing imagination, perpetually over-the-top ideas and, of course, a healthy dose of irony.

It ranges from breakcore – the dominant underlying element – to baroque sounds (baroquecore), from black metal to opera, from swing to Balkan melodies, from trip-hop to musique concrète, from classical piano or harpsichord sonatas to Spanish guitar, from extreme drumming to tribal percussion; all of it spun together at the speed of light, so rapid in its shifts and tempo changes that it leaves first-time listeners of this kind of sound utterly speechless.

Baroque music and metal fit together perfectly, like Yin and Yang, with Yin playing the role of metal, the dark side, while Yang represents baroque, the luminous side. Electronic music is more like cement, something I add to the composition to make it more solid. I very often use breakcore and electronics in what I write almost like a kind of mortar, to add solidity to the structure, but just as often I mix breakcore and baroque simply because it's fantastic, because I love doing it

(Gautier Serre)

Igorrr certainly enjoys surprising the listener, catching them off guard, pulling them out of the "comfort zone" of their usual listening habits, confronting them with an organized chaos so vast it makes you wonder how the whole thing doesn't spiral out of the musician's control — when in fact he controls and masters every sonic element to perfection. His favorite musicians are Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Domenico Scarlatti, Meshuggah, Radiohead, Cannibal Corpse, Venetian Snares and Aphex Twin. All these preferences can be heard (together). Interestingly, these so heavily "monsterized" sounds find a counterpart in the project's early cover art, which blends classical painting with monstrous deformities barely recognizable as human.

The question worth asking at this point is: does a real boundary exist between madness and genius? Are the two truly distinct, or do they very often coincide? Genius or not, Igorrr is certainly one of the most original and eclectic musicians of the last decade, a musician so far "beyond" the classic conventions as to come across as consequently ultra-modern. To be such a thing, Igorrr needs to destroy the old, to seize musical genres that have existed for centuries and deconstruct them, giving new meaning to the noble idea of "total music".

2006 marks the debut with Poisson Soluble, a self-produced, 26-minute demo that represents a first experiment in extreme collage between baroque music and breakcore. Tracks like "Mastication Numérique" or "Pizza Aux Narines", which brings together Bach and death metal, exemplify Gautier's ideas.

In 2008 he releases Moisissure, his second self-produced LP, where he continues to experiment with layering different samples, this time with the collaboration of Laurent Lunoir on vocals and Sylvain Bouvier on drums. The cover art, showing an amputated leg with teeth and hair, partly prepares the listener for what's coming. "Brutal Swing" is, up to that point, his most successful crossover, between swing, ragtime and breakcore, in which an old swing recording is layered over extremely high-BPM rhythms beating in sync. Just as striking is the deranged fusion of classical and electronic music in "Œsophage De Tourterelle", as well as the baroque sounds, crying baby and frantic beats of "Huille Molle". These first two works get him noticed by the label Ad Noiseam, which provides greater resources and the chance to play a wider range of instruments, such as harpsichord and traditional instruments, without resorting to pre-recorded samples.

A naked, deformed man holding a dog – in a pose reminiscent of 17th-century baroque portraits of nobility – welcomes us to Nostril (2010), the first truly accomplished work of the Igorrr project. It's a completely deconstructed record, a genuine hymn to chaos, with "Tendon" standing as a manifesto so convoluted and contaminated that it's almost impossible to describe.

The devastated neoclassical sounds of "Excessive Funeral" and "Unpleasant Sonata" show equal measures of irony and imagination, while metal and breakcore keep colliding in the deranged "Double Monk", "Cruciform Dachshund", or in the totally transfigured swing sampling of "Melting Snails".

By now Igorrr's name is no longer a niche one, and the French musician is a guest at metal festivals all over the world.

In 2012 he expands his lineup with Mayhem guitarist Teloch and the extraordinary soprano Laure Le Prunenec, and releases Hallelujah, an LP similar to its predecessor both in its contaminations and its lucid madness, but one that adds elements of religious music previously absent. Perhaps that's exactly why the cover shows a hideous, shapeless pope being worshipped by a mass of equally monstrous men.

In this orgy of genres we find Spanish music ("Cicadidae") and gypsy music ("Vegetable Soup"), alongside metal deliriums with operatic vocals bearing titles that are nothing short of bizarre ("Lullaby For A Fat Jellyfish").

But perhaps the most interesting crossover is the one with religious music on "Corpus Tristi", where a classical sonata is deconstructed by electronic rhythms, for once without overdoing it, maintaining a commendable balance. As always, baroque music is present on "Scarlatti 2.0" and "Infinite Loop", classic, thoroughly over-the-top Igorrr-esque mixes.

In the lineup we also find a certain Patrick, who is none other than one of Gautier's chickens, whose clucking we hear on "Vegetable Soup". Amid so many oddities, the thing can almost seem normal. In any case, Patrick's performance must have gone down very well with Gautier, who in 2014 and 2016 released two singles with two videos, hilarious in their own way ("My Chicken's Symphony" and "Chicken Sonata"), "played" by Patrick as he pecks at feed placed on a small toy keyboard. These two peaks of madness foreshadow the new LP.

But first, Gautier Serre and Laure Le Prunenec create the Corpo-Mente project. Their only, self-titled LP, Corpo-Mente, is released in 2015 and, unlike the Igorrr project, contains no breakcore influences, focusing instead on Laure Le Prunenec's extraordinary vocal abilities.

Savage Sinusoid (2017), for all its extremism, comes across as less impetuous and eager to shock than its predecessors' hymns to chaos; it seems to mark a further level of maturity reached, one that scales back the pursuit of effect in favor of a greater awareness of his own abilities. The journey through this unprecedented sonic blender begins with a piercing scream that precedes an extremely heavy metal riff, breakcore rhythms and deformed voices. "Viande", in its brevity (under two minutes), is a shocking yet liberating calling card for anyone approaching Igorrr's music for the first time.

"IeuD" is one of the boldest experiments here: the howled chant of a primitive man, preceded by harpsichord notes and followed by breakcore drum rhythms, death-metal elements and female operatic vocals, embodies a kind of hyper-modernity confronting the primitivism of the Cromagnon. An unheard-of blend that closes with a few flute notes: schizophrenia and genius touch each other.

"Houmous" travels between Balkan music, accordion, metal and videogame electronica. The breathless rhythms of "Opus Brain" are the perfect example of Igorrr's baroque side; Bach-like modern rhythmic patterns merge with terrifying metal screams, giving new meaning to the word progressive. There's no time to digest one sound before being catapulted into opposite worlds; once again, operatic singing is followed by an epic-metal finale.

After this breathless opening, the tone shifts. "Probleme d'emotion" starts off almost like a classical piano sonata, before being gradually warped by electronics and strings. "Spaghetti Forever" nods to Italy, bookending the track with pristine classical guitar solos, while the middle section descends into chaos made of distorted guitars, synths, violins and total deconstruction.

The remaining tracks range from the brazen hyper-technicality of "Va Te Foutre" - a kind of plunge into the abyss of harpsichord and metal guitars obsessively repeating the same motif - to the gypsy rhythms and drunken tavern choruses of the deranged "Cheval". "Au revoir" closes the album with further baroque-music quotations, a sacrificial victim of a deconstruction that spares nothing and no one.

A world tour follows, and in 2020 comes Spirituality And Distortion, whose title already contains the two elements forced to coexist within his music. It's hard to say what more could be expected from Igorrr after hallucinatory albums like Nostril (2010) or Hallelujah (2012), startling examples of extreme breakcore pushed right to the limits of listenability.

Dismissed by some as gimmicky, hailed by others as genius, Gautier Serre's music can hardly take a step backwards, yet struggles equally to take one forward, given how far "beyond" it had already pushed things. So the only viable option seems to be another album along the lines of Savage Sinusoid, with the addition, on the heavier tracks, of Cannibal Corpse vocalist George Fisher. Fourteen tracks in classic Igorrr style, where the bar is always set at the edge of nonsense, with the lineup unchanged (singer Laurent Lunoir, soprano Laure Le Prunenec and drummer Sylvain Bouvier).

Not quite a clone of its predecessor, given the heightened role of operatic vocals and a greater number of distinctly metal tracks, ranging from the powerful "Downgrade Desert" (with its desert-like intro) and the breakcore-metal madness of "Very Noise", to the pure death metal of "Parpaing" featuring George Fisher's vocals.

It's a Vivaldi-esque baroque, instead, that we find in "Barocco Satani" and even more so in "Nervous Waltz", tracks that clearly echo the band's early days.

There are plenty of tracks worth discussing, many of good quality, but this time the stroke of genius that leaves you speechless seems to be missing.

If you ask Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater what his favorite album of 2025 is, he'll tell you it's Amen by Igorrr. Amen indeed starts from a clear axiom: surprise, always and no matter what. The result, however, only partly succeeds.

As usual, Serre marshals a veritable "multinational" of musicians, among whom the presence of fellow Italian Lili Refrain stands out on two tracks ("Limbo" and "Ancient Sun"). The vocal duo of Laurent Lunoir and Laure Le Prunenec is nowhere to be found this time, replaced by Jb Le Bail and Marthe Alexandre, who are less versatile and more one-dimensional in range: a clear step down from the theatrical richness of Savage Sinusoid (2017).

The usual mix of extreme metal, breakcore and baroque music tilts this time mostly towards metal, in at least eight of the twelve tracks. "Infestis" and "Pure Disproportionate Black And White Nihilism" are the most aggressive tracks and - blasphemy for Igorrr - also the most conventional. More convincing, on the other hand, is the return to Middle Eastern sounds on "Blastbeat Falafel": a hilarious title for a track where the usual delirium of contaminations still manages to raise a smile, even if it feels predictable to anyone well versed in his discography.

The opener "Daemoni" mixes metal, electronics and flashes of acoustic sound, built to set live shows ablaze, while "Headbutt" shines with its unexpected piano virtuosity, one of the most inventive tracks on offer. There's no shortage of pure breakcore either, with "ADHD", a single that showcases Serre's mastery of that field.

The ending, though, is genuinely surprising: in "Étude n°120" the classical guitar solo seems to foreshadow the usual chaos ready to tear the melody apart, but that chaos never comes. It's the album's most disarming choice. The same happens on "Silence", Igorrr's first true ballad-like piece, built like a classical sonata enriched with orchestration and only light breakcore incursions. No more violent fractures, just a gentle path towards an alternative sonic world. Perhaps the track to build a new creative phase from.

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