The Other Side, a joint venture between Time Out and Resist Music is an interactive guide to the bleeding edge of the world’s great cities. Utilizing the Dual-Disc format, each edition of The Other Side is comprised of two key elements: a mixed CD compiled by a native audio pioneer and a DVD guide to the “other side“ of the city – a visual handbook for both the frequent flyer and the armchair traveller. We’ve already had Fischerspooner direct us around the flipside of New York and Cross Town rebel Damian Lazarus uproot the weirder environs of London – so this time it’s the turn of the ultra-garlicky French electro duo Black Strobe to shred all our a priori knowledge of the Région Parisienne and instead slip us a private and alternative slant on the city.
So what is Paris if it’s not the louvre, the place where Diana, Princess of Wales died, a place where you can meekly resist Nazi-German occupation and the home of Blackpool Tower? Well it’s a place where you can buy geeky, fashionable urban props from ‘street art’ shops like Black Block, arse around the ‘high-end’ sex-clubs like Chadellas, observe a more discerning Striptease artiste at Pink Paradise or simply bounce around the lofty peaks and troughs of the urban metropolis in a ‘parkour’ stylee like our host for this evening, spiderman, David Belle. And when you’ve finished mopping up the coolest shops, hotels, bars, restaurants from your Timeout platter and leaping from roof to roof of every arrondissment, you can flip the disc over and sample a dozen or so tracks from artists such as Front 242, Bauhaus, DJ Hell, Martini Bros, Boys Noise, Trentmoller, Sun God, Huntemann, Mickey Oliver, Hell, Basteroid and Black Strobe themselves.
Simple idea. Simply done.