Biography
In 1982, Tibor Csebits and Philippe Alioth, 14 and 15 years old then, decided to leave their new-wave-rock band „curtzschluss“ (a typical, great pre-gymnasium band) and started making electronic music. They had 2 synths, a drummachine and a 4-track tape recorder… and plenty of ideas, phantasms and weird convictions. Most of their friends were convinced that this “beep –boomboom-blip-bloup-boing” music would not interest anyone… (which was true, in 1983, by the way).
But Tibor and Philippe were sure they were on the right track… they released a self-produced album (portrait) in 1983, which is one of the most wanted old-electro releases nowadays.
In 1984, Christoph M. (Philippe’s best friend back in 1984, today the producer of “gotan project) and Monique M., a french-speaking friend of the guys with a very nice singing-voice) joined the band, and some months later, in november 1984, another french speaking girl, “nin’s”, took over the microphone.
They changed the band’s name to “les Aigre-Doux”. They did not release any records, but won several international contests for young musicians.
In 1986, when Tibor, Monique and Nin’s definitely left the band, Philippe and Christoph changed their name again… from then on they were “touch el arab”, a band that is still known today, after having a huge European top-ten hit with “muhammar” in 1987.
In 1988, Philippe could not stand it anymore to be “famous”; he left the band and founded “SPARTAK”, while Christoph and the new guitar-player Stefan Hopmann released one more “touch el arab” single (civil war).
SPARTAK, a quite known electro-hardcore-industrial band with some kind of a stalinist-far-out background (true or just provocation?), released 4 albums from 1990 to 1996 (“golem”, “survival of the fittest”, “omagiu” and “blond mao”, all on darkstar/strangeways). SPARTAK were, besides Philippe, Helene Marchand (vocals) and Matthias Josch (synths, programming)… Philippe and Matthias are, by the way, both quite often in contact, speaking about making a new SPARTAK album.
Between 1993 and 1999, Philippe also produced other stuff; several “LACRIMOSA”-albums with Tilo Wolf, “blondes in space”, or several albums with Carlos Peron (Yello).
Since 1994 he has been working mainly with Alex Friedrich, a true computer- and music-genious; they are running a studio together, the “fort vox” in Switzerland, and they have founded “sonic content”, a leading swiss electro label.
Today, both Philippe and Alex are working on several projects which you can find in every good record store:
-“alioth & friedrich” , an ambient-newjazz-lounge project (www.aliothfriedrich.com)
- POP-3 , a 80s-electro-pop-disco-project (release november 2004), already getting massive radio-airplay in france (www.pop-3.org);
- H.M.S., a retro-electro-bossanova project, top-ten in many independent- and DJ-charts (www.h-m-s.org)
Artist descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
