In January 2019, the band has released its brand new album “Landmines Have Feelings Too”, and will release the next one really soon !
Indie-pop band based in France, Staircase Paradox melodies range from euphoria to melancholy. Some kind of bizarre love triangle : 80’s UK pop (The Smiths, My Bloody Valentine, Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, Queen…), 90’s alt-rock (Pixies, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer…), and 2000’s Canadian indie rock (Broken Social Scene, Land of Talk, Metric, Feist, Alvvays…)
Staircase Paradox :
– Pauline Falzon : bass, vocals
– Billy Montoya : vocals, guitar
– Amélie Repetto : synth, piano, vocals
PREVIOUS EP “Hand Shaking Heart Stopping Moment” (2015)
Check that link if you have a card with a redeem code : https://staircaseparadox.bandcamp.com/yum
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“Lower Manhattan Hipster Elite” is still available on iTunes / Spotify/ Deezer / BANDCAMP. It can also be shipped to you (against money 🙂 ) in all its physical CD format glory if you request it by e-mail
ABOUT THE BAND (former biography…)
Created about a decade ago by-the-charismatic-multi-instrumentalist-singer,-Billy-Montoya , Staircase Paradox now presents its second album after numerous adventures. This is how the story goes…
Trapped between the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, as between madness and despair, Staircase Paradox offers the soundtrack of your nostalgic and rainy afternoons (or even your blooming post-suicide episodes), comfortably sitting in the legacy of the Pixies, the timelessness of The Smiths, the electric darkness of My Bloody Valentine, and the synthesis work of Radiohead or Elliott Smith.
Born from the ashes of an international conspiracy, the project was brought to life by Billy Montoya, who, while in Lubjana for an art performance, showed to an audience in awe the famous “Staircase Paradox” concept of Escher applied to music. From there, he came to a conclusion that can never be denied, “Everything is its opposite, and the other way around”. The die was cast.
Classic debut. After several shows, he recorded his first album in one take, with local musicians he met in the studios in Reykjavik. This album, “Songs Are Minutes Made To Last Forever”, differs from its contemporaries as it is a pretty well achieved do-over of the last thirty years of vaguely independent pop music. The story followed a usual course, between total absence of lucidity and flashes of pure genious, until the formation of a new line-up composed of three musicians.
Struck hardly by the subprimes crises, the band was quickly amputated of one of its members but still decided to go to New York to record its new album. Surrounded with the best of the “über-underground” music producers, the new formed duet recorded almost a hundred songs in a few weeks. The tapes were eventually destroyed, in the liberating anti-capitalistic gesture of an intern working at the studios.
Back in France, the band, amputated of another member, went back to work and recorded some of the songs it had been composing in New York. On stage, the line-up varies from one to nine musicians, depending on weather conditions and if they all feel like it.
This new album, “Lower Manhattan Hipter Elite”, a concept-album about treason (and its little disagreements), stays in the same melodic vein that the previous one but adds a twist of electronic sounds (to hide an obvious lack of budget). It doesn’t push the boundaries of the genre, but it has achieved its goal in offering an acceptable music from the last century which will still be here after the Apocalypse.
Drowned in the chaotic beginning of a new millenium, where one still tries to figure out twenty decades of frauds from authentic masterpieces, Staircase Paradox chose to give birth to simple melodies, also giving them the doubts and cracks that define the existence, even if the question of their paternity remains unanswered…
staircase paradox 