
Polaroids

Polaroids Remixes

Promise I Won’t Regret This
Électriciennes is the solo project of writer, bassist and producer Charlie T.
Born in Argentina to Italian immigrants, growing up in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Charlie was too busy exploring the big family library to notice that there was no music whatsoever in the house. No cassette deck, no turntable, no radio. It would take a summer vacation in Brazil, an underground vinyl store and the opening chords of “The Queen is Dead” to change all that. It was 1986 and the music scene in the UK was in a feverish state of affairs (meanwhile the US was largely occupied with hair bands, of varying degrees of ‘bad’).
Alas, the war in the South Atlantic between Argentina and England was still too fresh in the collective mind, and British (in particular) and anglo (in general) music wasn’t easy to come by. Those were years of rampant smuggling to keep up with everything that Mute, 4AD, Island Records, Rough Trade et al were churning out. Charlie took to the task like a scholar, researching and reading and guessing, importing album after album. Sometimes they would take weeks to arrive (“London Calling” took the best part of a year to obtain).
In the meantime he joined some local bands, but his eyes and ears were always somewhere else. In 1994, having joined Warner Music as a young marketing executive, he moved to New York. In 2018 Spin Magazine named it the best year of the 90s – and what a year that was: Seattle and Manchester were about to blow out, and these different styles would embody the topical themes that Charlie would embrace to these days: the SOUND of electronic music (warm, introverted, intellectual), and the EMOTION of indie rock (dark, gritty, gregarious, sexual). This amalgamation defines the very essence of Électriciennes.
The next two decades found Charlie focusing on image making and media, working on promoting other people’s talents – launching television and radio stations in the US and Latin America, traveling, exploring, absorbing, learning. He met and worked with musicians, writers, filmmakers, designers, chefs – it was all a true cornucopia of creativity and genius.
Fast-forward to NOW. Charlie does not think of himself as a musician (the very name ‘électriciennes’ comes from a television interview where a guitar legend called a DJ in the show ‘an electrician’) but a storyteller. A well-read, well-travelled, discerning storyteller, but storyteller nonetheless. As such, he uses music the way an architect or movie director use their vision to dream up stories. His thirst for popular media, his natural critical taste and his contacts in the music world keep him in the right path.
