Inventeur [/ɛ̃vɑ̃tœʁ/] :

1. Personne qui par son ingéniosité invente, imagine, créé quelque chose d'original.

2. Personne qui découvre un trésor, un objet, etc.

"Inventors". Front 242 invented, in the French sense of the word, as they both created and discovered Electronic Body Music. At the dawn of the 1980s, these four young men —Richard, Patrick, Jean-Luc, and Daniel— set out to shape the electronic sounds that others had only recently begun to tame. Four young Belgians, then aged 18, 23, 24, and 27, took these seemingly inhuman sounds and worked to make them organic, animalistic, trying to breathe life into machines that, at the time, stood in stark contrast to "classical" instruments due to their inert nature. Their goal was to give life to this raw material, to set it free in order to master it.

In 1981, synthesizers and sequencers were nothing more than assemblies of printed circuits, capacitors, transistors, and resistors, combinations of mindless components with no memory, losing everything they had been "taught" with each power cycle. A perpetual fresh start. While the machines forgot, the band never stopped learning. Learning to tame these machines, learning from them, and ultimately, learning more about themselves.

Forty-four years after the emergence of this sound and the EBM spirit, at a time when their mechanics had become almost autonomous, when their sets ran like a perfectly tuned Belgian clock, oiled by sweat, both theirs and their audience’s, fueled by an energy both indecent and meticulously controlled, the band decided to turn off their machines. Not as punishment, but because the time had come to breathe.

Four weeks after their final concert, four weeks after experiencing that ultimate fusion of joy and sorrow, emotions shared equally by the audience and the band over nearly two hours, leaving devoted fans collapsed on the floor of Ancienne Belgique, stunned, shaken by the raw energy of the show and the unprecedented feeling of a "last time", we wanted to check in on these forever-young men and steal a bit of their time to ask them a handful of questions that seemed essential to us.