The lauded, Paris-based Bromance Records has carved out a reputation for darkly charged subversion, making it the perfect home for new signing Ateph Elidja. While the slow-burning R&B-inflected sound of the French artist is less beat-heavy than label mates Gesaffelstein and DJ Brodinski, Elidja's creations are layered with all the same reverberating noise expected of the techno renegades. 

“It’s repetitive, brutal and almost primitive.”

For his debut release, “Zkhal,” Elidja enlisted video artist Anton Bialas, who created a dystopian, drone-filled landscape for the rising electro star. 

“It’s repetitive, brutal and almost primitive,” says Bialas, who was inspired by a confluence of “90s rave, bored kids, shaved heads, BB guns and animal-like dance moves,” as well as French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou’s book A Theory of the Drone. 

“After watching drone footage from the US army, it seems that the ground it’s flying over is nothing less than a playground for a horizontal manhunt,” observes Bialas. “It’s almost ‘cute’ as an object, but how it captures what it sees, how it enters ‘your’ space, it works like a predator, analyzing behavior without integrating the human factor.”