hardcore heroes (# 2 of....) - Guillaume Leroux

Better known - although not as widely known as should be - as Renegade Legion and DrMacabre.

Also trading as Lunatic Asylum, Mob, Major Disaster, Slut Burger (!) and more ...

Third cornerstone of the gloomcore triumvirate of Marc Acardipane and.... another fellow who will be coming up very soon in this series.

Don't know much about Monsieur Leroux - this is a not fabulously informative interview, with replies that tend towards the flippant and bird-flipping...

But the music speaks for itself

A hero, nay, a god, above all for this tune - perhaps the greatest gloomcore tune of all time?

"Death-ray riffs strobing your flesh and subsuming the dancefloor in a phosphorescent frenzy", if you'll pardon me quoting myself.


This next one is also immense.

From the same Danse Macabre E.P.




For my money it's only the Renegade Legion / Macabre stuff  that  seriously rivals Acardipane's output when it comes to the combination of punishment + atmosphere, menace + musicality. 

I'm not sure I can distinguish what separates the DrMacabre tracks from the Renegade Legion output as regards an alter-ego sound-signature.

Despite putting out his greatest track "Torsion" as Renegade Legion, for some reason he's only ever released two things under that name. The first, a 1993 EP for FNAC called Friends Or Foes? has some already promising titles - "The Weeping Wastes" and"The Renegade March" - totally on the PCP / Cold Rush vibe!  Disappointingly, the title track and "Weeping Waste" are a bit trance ordinaire, but "Renegade March" is pointing in the right direction.





And then in 1996, "Dark Forces" b/w "Torsion" for Dance Ecstasy 2001.  




Never as possessed by the A-side as by "Torsion", the b/w.

So the greater part of Guillaume's greatness,  gloomcore-wise, emanated from the DrMacabre identity.

















































Paranoid Archives, you've got to love it.

And here are some useful mixes - this guy Guillaume has got some diehard fans out there....








His other main PCP-constellation aligned alias was Lunatic Asylum. Which output never grabbed   me as much, although listening again, it's more than solid....





Makes sense it would go on Dance Ecstasy 2001, whose output generally had something of the clinical glisten and frictionlessness of the other kinds of techno  coming out Frankfurt in the middle Nineties.  I don't know if that was the intended positioning of the sub-label, but it certainly sounds like it was trying to plough a path between hardtrance and hardcore.

A collaboration with the maestro himself



Useful mix of just that single alter-ego's output.




Leroux seems to have put out a bunch of straight-down-the-line bassdrum-pummeling gabba but even here the production has a polish and finesse - and there's a tinge of that gloomcore hallmark, the cavernous reverb.



Guillaume Leroux's Facebook seems active and there appear to be some recent mixes on there.