New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Music artist, producer, poet and video creator Benedict Sinister releases new single 'Spitting Rhymes From Debbie Harry', his homage to the
Blondie icon.
Benedict Sinister is a French/Australian music artist, producer, poet and video creator. Sinister chooses to conceal his face, preferring to take a back seat to the other artists that he pays homage to in his work. "I seek invisibility in order to make my idols more visible," he says. "I'm not interested in taking the limelight for myself. I don't want or need fame. I'm a modest vessel channeling the genius of others."
Before his recent notoriety, Sinister spent 20 years working as an itinerant musician and performed all over the world, from DJing at beach bars in Senegal to playing covers of The Smiths in Mexico and of
Leonard Cohen in Japan. "I figured I'd leave busking to the likes of
Ed Sheeran as I was pretty certain that was never going to be my path to success!" Sinister said, "I preferred to totally compromise my integrity as a musician, in exchange for free drinks and a wage. Between playing I was usually reading a book or was wasted as I really didn't want to attract too much attention."
Nonetheless, Sinister did start attracting attention after he moved to US and to hipster Brooklyn in 2018. The creative hub saw his immersion in the music of other artists lead him to start creating his own unique musical genre he terms "Platform," "Meta," "Adaptations," "Old School Post-Modernism" and "Inappropriation."
Sinister's first single used lines from 16 songs by septuagenarian art rock fixture
Bryan Ferry arranged into rhyming verses. Los Angeles based DJs Miss Beltran and Christian B released lounge and club remixes under the titles "Ne Dramatise Pas" and "16 Lines from Bryan Ferry," the latter making No 5 Breakout on the Billboard Dance Club chart last year. Sinister's videos for the songs were the world's first to use footnotes, combined with pastiches of other videos - from the lyrics video for the Chainsmokers' "
Paris" to "Blurred Lines."
His follow up, "Your Parents," an electropop track inspired by a French cabaret song by
Vincent Delerm, came accompanied with a hilarious animated video he also created, packed with so many witty references (from Trump to Spiderman and climate change to Last Tango in Paris), that it reached over half a million YouTube views in two months.
Benedict Sinister's last single, "I've Come to Tell You I'm Going Away", is his homage to the great break-up songs. It is a translation of a 1973 single by French musical legend Serge Gainsbourg, written while he was recovering from his first heart attack. Gainsbourg's song references romantic poet Paul Verlaine, and in turn Sinister has added a new spoken word part which name checks 10 artists who have memorably addressed break-ups, from Hemingway to Lana del Rey. The accompanying video shows Gainsbourg's house in Paris over the course of a decade, as each year a new covering of graffiti replaces the artworks underneath - a visual testimony to the impermanence addressed by the song.
Benedict Sinister is an artist for our time, precisely because he is out of tune with it. Cosmopolitan in an era of nationalism and isolation. A sophisticate exploring culture high and low, old and new, guitar ballads and EDM, when around him the world is being pigeonholed into hyper-specific "identities." A seeker of anonymity in a society dedicated to heightened social media profiles. A truly unique and original artist in his rejection of the concepts of the unique and the original.
