Formed by Virginie Krupa and Alexandre Brovelli, OMR is a perfect duo: two souls that blend their strengths and doubts, their blinding brightness and their anguish in a single body in this music, conceived in perfectly equal proportion by both of them. Absolute artistic harmony: of those magical, inexplicable unions that come into being between heads that are on the same minute waves, connected to the same spiritual spheres. Two individuals coming from different places but united by a common desire for powerful emotions. Emotions that form a knot in your stomach, retranscribed and crystallised in the duo's original sound and compositions, in their delicate electronics in which robust melodies impose a fragile rule on a republic of machines, in which Virginie's voice acts as a very carnal counterpoint to their little experiments on printed circuits.

A miraculous union: from their initial steps in the public sphere, from the sending of the emblematic The Way We Have Chosen to Les Inrockuptibles for the CQFD contest, hearts began to flip over. Quick confirmation of the brightness of this star being born: the excellent German producer Mario Thaler (The Notwist, Lali Puna, Ms. John Soda…) agreed to produce their first album, the impeccable Side Effects, hatched in the spring of 2004; the wizard and wonderful electronics engineer Prefuse 73 and the excellent Console, DJ Vadim or Abstrakt Keal Agram saw them as worthy descendents and agreed to remix them, a very rare occurrence for such a young French band.

The oracles foretold that things would progress fast. Praised by the critics for Side Effects, OMR discovered the joys and virtues of touring, the demands of performing live, particularly alongside patrons of choice who excel in stage effort, such as the Californian Grandaddy. And rather than hiding behind their machines, which would have been too easy, too obvious a solution, a source of boredom and a frigidity factor, Virginie and Alex surrounded themselves by musicians as a way of breathing life into their pieces, of humanising them, of raising the tone and temperature. In the same period, and therefore in record time, they took part in a cinemix, composing a fantastical soundtrack for a film-lovers' classic, Victor Sjöstrom's The Phantom Chariot, continued their image-based inspiration by putting their sound to a short made by Mat and Spon, responsible for the The Way We Have Chosen clip, and finally began the gestation of their second album. This very active duo therefore became caught up in a creative whirlwind, a demand for efficiency and life urgency which would put their unique stamp on the sound of Superheroes Crash, their second album, sketched out in mid air in just a few months. "More than an album, Side Effects was a catalogue of pieces written over a long period ; some were over three years old", explains Alex. "Superheroes Crash, on the other hand, was made with a sense of urgency, with an idea in our head, a particular frame of mind, a desire for unity. We really wanted to avoid doing the same thing again, fencing ourselves in, lapsing into pure electro. We wanted it to become more human and organic, less surgical and more spontaneous. Accidents also contribute to forming the emotions".

So, while it is still vital, in Superheroes Crash, the machine is no longer the core of all things. Used as a simple tool, it is merely a factor of meticulousness and mechanical perfection that counterbalances the delicate grace of human fragilities that the seething flesh of Alex, Virginia and their musicians, Thomas Dupuis on drums and Louis Pouvelle on bass, takes by assault. Mario Thaler, who had achieved the perfect balance between electronic rigour and pop curves on the indefatigable Neon Golden by The Notwist or on Lali Puna's albums, is more their man than ever and produced the new album, recorded as a group, at his country studio in Bavaria. On listening to the first demo recording he clearly understood that OMR has further developed its ability to penetrate the rare sphere in which bodies and machines coexist peaceably, where the individual beauty of software rectitude and the mysterious circumvolutions of the soul merge together. A sign of the desire to bring human permanence and future ghosts together, the organs on the album were recorded in the mystical air and majestic setting of the Abbey Church of Saint-Michel-en-Thiérarche, on an instrument cast in the 18th century; one of the oldest in Europe.

So Superheroes Crash is the duo's first minor revolution. It bears Alex and Virginie's beautifully melancholic, sensual yet blunt stamp; it is more human than its predecessor and develops its troubling beauty within wide-open sound spaces. Composed with astonishing maturity and as solid a sense of melody as ever, the pieces take the time to breathe, allow themselves digressions, create their spatial, heady atmospheres through time, envelop the mind in long, complex instrumental arabesques. They gradually form formidable graphic worlds; their great feat is that they enable listeners, depending on the perception and mood of the moment, to make their own film as they listen and paint it in their own colours.

Watch the video of the making of the album (Quicktime)