The New Regime: Telepathe

The New Clairvoyants: Tuning into emerging trends and future sounds, Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais of Telepathe deliver experimental electro-pop to the mainstream.

Melissa Livaudais remembers the catalyst that jumpstarted a double leap into the music industry. “We realized that we’d been fired from every job we’d ever had,” says the boyishly beautiful half of Brooklyn’s Telepathe, adding, “We are pretty much incapable of doing anything else.” Focusing on the more productive sides of their personalities, she and bandmate Busy Gangnes, a former dancer and part-time yoga instructor, quickly graduated from “amorphous jam sessions” to calculated, sycophantic drones that borrow equally from Glass Candy’s minimal pop and the impassioned spoken-word poetry of Amiri Baraka.

Livaudais and Gangnes have garnered international acclaim for their basic hooks and unconventional pop sensibilities (among their growing contingent of admirers is their producer, TV On The Radio’s David Sitek), not to mention a holistic approach to their sound, which the waifish brunettes describe as “fresh, innovative and esoteric.” Okay, but why the Kreskin allusion in the group’s name? “To me, telepathy is a very subtle type of communication, not a literal reading of someone’s thoughts,” says Livaudais. “Our songs are like streams of water. You take them in and pass them on.”

Photo: Andreas Lazslo Konrath