Entercourse Of The New Age asks artists to create visuals for beloved Chicago House tracks

While studying at the Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in 2007, David Chastel was introduced to house music by his fellow student and friend Yann. “We were regularly mixing in different clubs in the city,” David recalls, “During the day – like many art students – we were compiling image libraries related to our projects, not exclusively art or illustration. Then we spent our nights digging into American club music records.” Now, a decade later, David channels this combined musical and artistic love into his project Entercourse Of The New Age, initially started with Yann but now alongside Rémy Lewandowski.

Named after one of David and Yann’s favourite tracks by Glenn Crocker released in 1996, Entercourse Of The New Age (EOTNA) pays tribute to the genre of electronic music. “In 2016 I had the opportunity to have an exhibition space in the centre of Paris,” David explains of the beginnings of the project. “We quickly became motivated to work on this principle of commissioning contemporary artists. The idea is to invite them to design the iconography of old records that have moved the history of electronic music but didn’t benefit from any artwork since their release.” EOTNA held its first exhibition in January 2017 and, to date, has worked with a total of 26 artists to reimagine beloved tracks with contemporary visuals.

Although reinterpreting a variety of genres, EOTNA focusses in on Chicago House which unlike other genres including techno from Detroit, never really developed its own iconography.

When it comes to commissioning artists, the music always comes first, David explains. “The themes, the titles or the formal aesthetics of the musical textures lead us quite naturally to artists whose visual universe seems coherent regarding the sound material,” he tells It’s Nice That. Whenever he and Rémy set out to commission a new round of artworks, diversity of style also plays a massive role. “For example, we worked with an industrial designer, Martin Woodward, who is more used to work in the aerospace or medical industry. A collaboration with a neuroscience studies laboratory is planned and we are also preparing a collaboration with an architecture firm. The idea of the project is not to position ourselves within a specific artistic scene, but to show, on the contrary, very different techniques and styles,” they outline.

In order to produce the most exciting work, David and Rémy offer an open brief to the creatives. “We explain to them the similarities we see between their work and the records,” they explain, “Then the artists are free to create the visual that the title or the records inspire in them, we do not want to give boundaries because the most interesting thing is to see how they interpret this historical material.”

EOTNA’s most recent exhibition titled Out of Sight saw the duo working with Ismaël Abdallah, Gergő Kovács, Kristýna Kuliková, Yasmina Gonin, Angélique Stehli, Jacob Wise, Irwin Barbé, Jonathan Castro, Boris Detraz, Amine Ghorab and Scott Renau. And they are currently working on the next which “is moving towards a project of a larger scale than what we have done so far,” they remark, also hinting at their next venture: “A few months ago, we met Gitano Camero, Marcus Mixx’s sound engineer with whom he produced some of the most majestic artefacts of Chicago House Music from the late 1980s. We are now working with him to publish an interview in which he tells many anecdotes about music production with Mixx as well as his relationship to graphics and printing techniques at that time.”