Author: Emmanuel Jolivet

“ Christmas is a time of very mixed intense emotion for me, and the existing canon often sounds like a forced smile. Christmas is a typical time for superficial happiness, but also a time for reflection and mourning the sad events throughout the year. The songs of A very chilly christmas make room for a more authentic interpretation of this very peculiar 2020 holiday season. ” Chilly Gonzales

From feudal oldies to newer holiday pop canon, A very chilly christmas surveys a broad scope of seasonal repertoire and sentiment. There’s grandeur and solemnity, there’s austerity and merriment, an original featuring Feist and covers featuring Jarvis Cocker. And, of course, there’s Mariah Carey. 

As a whole, the album’s gift is the space it creates for quieter moments amid the flurry and noise of the season.

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Solo Piano III completes the Solo Piano trilogy. Like any final act, there are complications and consequences, followed by an urgent race to the finish line. Like its predecessors, it’s a mostly happy ending in C major, but there is more dissonance, tension and ambiguity along the way. The musical purity of Solo Piano III is not an antidote for our times, it is a reflection of all the beauty and ugliness around us.

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In December 2011, Chilly Gonzales moved his piano into Paris Studio Pigalle.
There, alone for 10 days, he recorded a handful of songs that had made the short list from a hundred or so melodies written over the eight years that had passed since the release of the now iconic Solo Piano. Hour upon hour, the purest and most microscopic process of recording took place. Chilly Gonzales played all the songs over and over and over again, until each one’s essence had been captured. After years of entertaining with his larger than life musical persona and challenging all artists to work tirelessly to achieve excellence out of respect for their fans, Chilly Gonzales brings us perhaps his most powerful argument of all, the 14 pieces of Solo Piano II.

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“The Unspeakable Chilly Gonzales” is the first ever all orchestral rap album. Accompanied by Hollywood swells, tympani rolls, noble French horns, hypnotizing bells and influenced by Prokofiev, Morricone and Phillip Glass among others, this record is Chilly Gonzales’ ‘professional confessional’, revealing more of himself on these monologues than ever before.

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“The best piano-driven slice of Disco in 10 years.” Rough Trade Shops. Produced by Boys Noize. Soundtrack to the prize-winning feature film Ivory Tower starring Chilly Gonzales, Peaches & Tiga and directed by Adam Traynor.

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A CD of 16 piano themes for left hand accompaniment and right hand melody. A DVD (From Major To Minor) directed by Nina Rhode aka Ninja Pleasure, with the surrealist “Master Class” by Professor Gonzales, teaching music theory to real students taken from the audience as well as his friends, featuring Jamie Lidell & Feist on “Melody” and Daft Punk on “Rhythm”, the “White Gloves Concert” featuring Jamie Lidell, Mocky and Feist performing each others’ songs, followed by Chilly Gonzales concert footage, videos, television interviews and the Paris Nuits Blanches “Organism” installation by Ninja Pleasure.

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Beginning at 23:30 on Saturday May 16th and through 3:00 Monday May 18th, 2009 Chilly Gonzales broke the Guiness World Record for longest concert by a solo artist. The previous record was 26 hours and 12 minutes and was performed by Prasanna Gudi (India) at the Mallikarjun Mansoor Kala Bhavan public auditorium, Dharwad, Karnataka, India from 28 to 29 December 2008. Gonzales explained his motivation: “I will do this to push my muscial and physical stamina. I believe music is part art, part athletics and this 27-hour concert will demonstrate both aspects.” Gonzales had been consulting with the Guiness Book of Record to ensure a smooth attempt and an Official Guinness Judge adjudicated the event on site. Repertoire touched on recognizable songs from all eras and styles of music, in new and surprising arrangements. There was no repetition of material during the attempt. As Gonzales himself said “I will break the record without sounding like a broken record”. The record attempt took place at the theatre of notable French film director Claude Lelouch, Theatre Ciné 13 in Paris. The attempt in its entirety was streamed live on the web and achieved #2 Twitter Trend status at its peak.

The misunderstood masterpiece

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‘Z’ is a mutated « Best of » : Chilly Gonzales covering Chilly Gonzales by re-recording his own songs from scratch in new styles, with new guests, and with all new vocals and music. Guests Feist, Peaches, Paul PM, Taylor Savvy, Louie Austen and Princess Superstar.

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“The great Gonzo’s first pop album, a record of such sparkling joy that it makes that S Club Juniors single look like one of Thom Yorke’s suicide poems. Gonzo fans will be aware of his repertoire since European electro whimsy, piano, and balladry were all stirred and twisted on his full length debut « Über Alles », while digital hardcore, hip-hop, mop-styled craziness and snoop-derived rhyme patterns were all fucked up on the classic follow up ‘The Entertainist’. And here, as was hoped, the two meet”. www.playlouder.com

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He looks like Jon Spencer but sounds more like Eminem, with a lo-fi 808 nightmare pushing Dr. Dre out of the producer’s chair. Still, Gonzales is definitely not the worst MC, as he styles himself on a track heard on his first pure rap LP, The Entertainist. He’s actually a great rapper, as iconoclastic and inscrutable a figure as Kool Keith or Ol’ Dirty Bastard, with an irresistible sense of rhythm, hilarious lyrics, and a raw, kinetic production approach that benefits on several skeletal tracks from Digital Hardcore colleagues Patric Catani and Bomb20. One of the best productions, though, was actually recorded by Gonzales’ associate Peaches. The track, “Futuristic Ain’t Shit to Me,” appears to set out the Chilly Gonzales agenda (“Being futuristic these days means being futuristic on your own terms”), though subsequent lyrics (“Being futuristic means loving worms/Saving your sperm/Wearing your pubes in a perm”) resist any attempt at analysis. Besides rapping white-boy nonsense like Beck or MC Paul Barman (“Jimmy Carter in the place to be!/Hangin’ with Chilly G!”), Gonzales also pokes fun at the legion of sex-crazed rappers out there, with amusing parodies (we’re assuming) like “Candy” and “Cum on You.” It’s unclear whether he’s attempting to save rap from the mainstream blahs or ridicule it out of existence, but The Entertainist is a brilliant left-field hit for fans of oddball hip-hop production and zany lyrics. allmusicguide.com

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BERLIN 2000… where it all began… the re-released “Director’s Cut” with two previously unreleased tracks from back in the day

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