Le Motel

Hailing from Brussels, Le Motel’s world is a vortex of sight and sound that takes in the many and varied corners of the planet. As a music producer and film composer his versatility has taken him to festivals and clubs in every direction as naturally as he has ventured out to the less accessible areas of the globe as a field recordist. It’s somewhere in between these spaces that Le Motel operates, gathering unique experiences and sounds to channel through his studio.

With a background in graphic design it’s not surprising that there’s a visual trace element across all of Le Motel’s music. And it’s perhaps why he’s so readily adapted to composing for film. Whatever the pace of the track, whatever template you might think he’s experimenting with and slowly revealing, the evocative collages that swarm around the rhythm is what marks his productions and sets them aside from the crowd. Blissfully organic elements come up against the hard surfaces of the woozy synth-work that you’ll find across his discography, pulling the listener in close in order to gently blow them away. Stacking up early notable releases on LA’s TAR label with a set of tracks that put his spin on footwork, Le Motel’s breakthrough moment came in the form of an album for New Zealand’s Cosmic Compositions back in 2015. Titled ‘OKA’, the record was picked out by Gilles Peterson for special attention as album of the week on BBC Radio 6. Effortlessly fusing juke, hip hop, techno, and with a jazzy strain throughout, the album deftly captures the wide array of styles and scenes that Le Motel moves between.


The intervening years have seen Le Motel take time out from his own productions to step in and pilot some of Belgium’s biggest hip hop artists into their hard-to-miss fame. However, he’s now out to present his own unique work that he’s been brewing all this while. With a new EP titled ‘Transiro’ that reflects the state of transition that his life has been in, and a new label to call home, Le Motel is about to reignite and restate the direction that his previous album started to lay out. Maloca, his newly minted label, will take its first steps with ‘Transiro’ and will continue to focus on incubating different links between different influences and cultures. A capsule for this new mission is his collaboration with Brussels-based artist Antoine De Schuyter, who has worked with many musical artists at the cutting edge of AV design. Together the pair have put together a fully modular AV show to be performed live, and to be kept in a constant state of evolution. Alongside this, Le Motel continues to build his repertoire as a formidable DJ.