After a three-year hiatus, during which Vince Fevrier got involved in several local musical acts, Unschooling returns with a new single ‘Perform’ out on Howlin’ Banana Records. The song moves on a mechanical rhythm and a groovy bassline, with angular guitars and a subtle dissonant tension. Pylon and A Certain Ratio are never far away, but ‘Perform’ ultimately follows a logic of its own: everything seems perfectly in place, until the gears start to grind. As its title suggests, the track plays as much with control as it does with the moment when that control begins to slip away.
Unschooling, Vince Fevrier’s project, first emerged on the French independent scene in 2019 with Defensive Designs, a self-release nine-track cassette written in Montreal, where he had been living for some time. Back in Normandy, Vince recorded all the instruments and vocals himself, following a method that was as rigorous as it was chaotic. From this first release, one of the project’s defining guide began to take shape: building songs around constraints while leaving plenty of room for accident, much like a collage, relying almost exclusively on analogue recording techniques.
In 2021, the EP Random Acts of Total Control (Howlin Banana, later reissued by Bad Vibrations in 2023) confirmed the instincts behind the first release and quickly took Unschooling beyond France’s borders, establishing the project as one of the most exciting new names on the post-punk scene and leading Vince Fevrier on a tour across Europe and the UK with his backing band. In 2023, Unschooling released its first full-length, New World Artifacts (Bad Vibrations), this time recorded partly as a band. Acclaimed by French and British critics, the album firmly placed the project within a lineage of post-pop and art-rock agitators from Chrome and Swell Maps to Sonic Youth and Women.
For more information on Unschooling please check their instagram and bandcamp.