Being on stage with Fritz Helder last Saturday night was a fucking blast. The club was beyond packed, the crowd was loud, hot, magical. Thank you all for coming and for a great night.

Enjoy a few photos below by Zan Dean

My buddy Fritz Helder, formerly from Fritz Helder and the Phantoms and now smashing everything with Azari & III, came to Paris yesterday and will be staying over for a week before heading to concerts in Germany, Italy, and Holland. Crazy times already started! Check Azari & III here

Interesting fact: it was Fritz who’d taught me one of the dance moves you see in the Slutterhouse Blues video a couple of years ago in Paris!

R

When Vincent Vargas and I, on a drunken afternoon in Paris, decide that we want to buy the Star Trek Assault Phaser Masters Replica from a comics store, we are willing to do anything for it.

R

Hey everyone!

We’re so glad to be representing the wonderful MINI cars in the Middle East this upcoming year for their brand launch in the region.

The first event is going to take place in Beirut on October 23rd and will feature live performances by a few artists, and will be headlined by Slutterhouse.

Check MINI’s press release below or on http://www.mini-me.com, and to all of you people in the Middle East, participate in the competition and win tickets to Beirut to watch us!

Lovelies,

We are putting together a killer online street team to help us out with spreading the word through defined missions. Goodies await all future members!

So all of you hardcore Slutterfans out there who are interested, please send an email to streetteam@slutterhouse.com and you will be sent information about the missions and goals as soon as possible.

Much love to all,

R

Slutterhouse performing “All the Time” in Beirut’s BASEMENT on the 5th of August 2010.

Video shot by Ziad Boustani.
Special thanks to Gerald Ladoul.

Slutterhouse performing “Illegal Thoughts” live in Beirut’s BASEMENT on Thursday the 5th of August 2010.

“Illegal Thoughts” is the opening track of Slutterhouse’s debut album “Made in Dance”.

Video shot by Ziad Boustani.
Special Thanks to Gerald Ladoul.

Beirut: Slutterhouse, or more precisely front man, Rabih Salloum, could never be said to shy away from the limelight. The promotional poster for Thursday night’s gig – a naked Salloum, heavy-laden with eye makeup, striking an Aphrodite pose with a homoerotic bent – is as bold and confident as the man it captured staring directly at the camera.

The show in the cavernous cellar of Beirut’s Basement club is the band’s first gig in Lebanon in 2010 and the partisan audience consists mainly of people Salloum knows personally.

“I don’t really like playing in front of my friends and family,” Salloum said. “On the other hand I feel more love when I’m on stage in Beirut than I do anywhere else,” he reflected just before he sauntered on stage looking like some lupine back-of-the-tour-bus progeny of Robert Smith and Marc Bolan.

Slutterhouse are the aforementioned Rabih Salloum, who writes the songs, and Nabil Saliba – brains behind former electronic act Trash Inc. – who produces the synths and beats.

The singer and producer are domiciled in Paris and Beirut respectively, and Salloum has arranged a live band in France who have been touring with him over the past few months around the French and British summer festivals.

Tonight he has hired the help of a few friends to fill the void. They are equipped with all the portable gadgetry (iPads, laptops, etc.) required to play a striped down version of the tracks from Slutterhouse’s 2009 superb debut LP, Made in Dance.

Salloum was joined on stage for three songs by guitarist and childhood friend, Ramy Tibi (from Rama’s Whisper), who adds a few over-zealous metal guitar effects that work for a while but begin to sound a bit incongruous against Slutterhouse’s rock electro sound.

They play a few new tracks, including Here goes the moon, which was introduced with the proviso: “we only wrote this the other day and don’t have a second verse so I’m just going to sing the first one twice!”

“I grew up listening to old rock and roll – stuff like T-Rex, Aerosmith, so when I met Nabil I was not really into electronic music,” Salloum explained. “One day we made a song together just as a joke and we posted it on the internet and it made a big buzz.”

The resulting sound is polarized between Salloum’s rock-influenced vocals and Saliba’s digital production, which gives firm nods to Italo disco, French electro, and Detroit techno. But it never strays too far into the esoteric, maintaining a sold disco pop backing to Salloum’s heavily modulated vocals that are digitally contorted from a Lou Reed croon to a Brian Molko whine.

“We went to record some tracks with a few girls and one of them was reading [Kurt Vonnegut's] Slaughterhouse Five so we thought we’d call the band Slaughterhouse Blues. It eventually morphed into Slutterhouse,” said Salloum.

Whether by accident or design Salloum has taken up the mantle of its contemporaries in France, where he has lived for eight years. His world-weary vocals are, when unmodulated, reminiscent of those of Paris’ Poni Hoax, while their synth club sound has the trappings of early Black Strobe’s electro-house, before they decided to burn their career by releasing a goth-metal album, ironically titled “Burn Your Own Church.” Giorgio Moroder’s, now-global eurobeat genre, Italio disco, flashes out of much of the sound, probably a hangover from Saliba’s previous musical project, Trash Inc.

Salloum plans to break his band out into the “international scene.” He has been diligent in getting Slutterhouse’s memorable name into the wide world through playing live and promoting via social-networking, and with some success – their songs have been played on US commercial radio and they have signed to British label, Ringside Production, and are being promoted by AnR Worldwide, which have been responsible for promoting La Roux and, God help us, Lily Allen.

The front man has a “love-hate” relationship with his homeland.  Asked if he has a specific connection with Lebanon he exclaims: “God no! It’s not my priority. Musically, I think it’s too restrictive.”

“People always look down on you because you’re from Lebanon. When we first started I didn’t even want to say where I was from l because you always get the condescension from the western world which is when they say ‘Look at these people in Lebanon! They do some good shit sometimes’.”

His plans for Slutterhouse are not without reason. They played a tight show to a captive audience and Salloum is nothing short of magnetic as a front man. Under the strobe-lights during Inside the Station, the song played just before the encore – a brilliant cover of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence – Salloum betrays his leviathan aspirations for his band: “All God’s creations deceive me,” he croons. “But all the world will know my name.”

- Arron Merat, for The Daily Star

Date: 7th of September 2010

Place: Walimat Warde, Hamra, Beirut.

Rabih Salloum from Slutterhouse and Ramy Tibi from Rama’s Whisper reunite ten years later to offer an exclusive acoustic “back-to-the-roots” performance. Two guitars. Two voices.

Photos by Karim Tibi.