by RUPERT BOTTENBERG | More Jazz Festival: Four Tet » Paul Anka » Ramachandra Borcar

The phrase “swing meets electronics” no doubt dredges up sour recollections of Jive Bunny and Lou Bega’s “Mambo #5.” The idea can work magnificently, however, and the evidence is Swing-Swing, the sample-based solo outing by France’s Nicolas Repac. He’s known foremost as Arthur H’s ace guitarist, though he’s loath to associate himself primarily with that instrument.

At 20, Repac dreamed of becoming the world’s greatest jazz guitarist, but soon realized that wouldn’t pan out. For a decade, Repac let his six-string gather dust and focused on electronic production, until an offhand remark in the studio by Monsieur H got him noodling on a guitar again, and with renewed vigour. “I no longer tried to be a guitarist,” says Repac. “I was simply playing music. It permitted me to open my spirit—I would never be a virtuoso, so I could develop other things, imaginary things.”

That imagination is in full swing on Swing-Swing. The tunes are at times playful and comic, at others tough, dark and very film noir. Some are little lower-case moments, others big, bold and brassy. And they draw on the many years and permutations that what might be called “swing” went through. “What I like about this work is that I can make pieces cohabitate, a piece from the ’20s with another from the ’50s, or the ’40s or ’60s. It takes the machines into a somewhat poetic realm, because it allows meetings between people who would never have met.”

There’s also a nutty inventiveness that suggests Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott, as musical instruments imitate horses and trains, while voices imitate instruments. “I’m a bit of a singer, so I’m always singing things as onomatopoeias. I have a natural rapport to music, because I’m self-taught, so I think that, fundamentally, I’ve created myself an imaginary musical language. I really work only with my ears.

“Put into loops, the samples become something very different from what they originally were. Multiplying those on several tracks, one makes a monster, a bit like Frankenstein—it’s dead matter, it gets plugged in, kneaded and mixed, and all of a sudden, it gets up and walks.”

With Eloi Brunelle at Club Soda on Saturday, July 9, midnight, $20.50

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