NOTE FROM THE EDITORS
They don’t know what they’ll play until they walk into the room.
Occupation Favorite is a Paris-based electroacoustic improvisation collective that builds entire sets from nothing — live, every time. No rehearsals, no setlists. Just collective intuition and whatever’s in the room: instruments, machines, modular synths. Tamino Edener (drums, modular) and Daniel Jouravsky (synths, machines) founded the collective in 2023, both jazz-trained at the capital’s Conservatoire, and both determined to leave that formalism at the door. For each performance, they assemble a different lineup — anywhere from two to seven musicians — drawn from a rotating cast of collaborators who share a common musical language. The ensemble only meets on stage. Whatever emerges, emerges together.
But what emerges can’t be classified.
The approach is jazz — except that word barely holds. Tamino and Daniel are wary of it themselves, because the energy in the room is closer to something else entirely: a rock-scenic physicality, a trance-like forward motion that pulls you in before you’ve had time to name it. What you’re actually hearing is jungle and breakbeat colliding with minimal house, techno, ambient — held together by improvisational jazz logic and a performer-to-audience feedback loop that most bands never attempt.
That’s why no two sets have ever sounded the same. Some nights lean deep into club energy. Others open up into something more contemplative, almost meditative. Neither is planned. Every set is born and dies in the same room, never surfacing again in the same form. People who caught them at Poush, Print or with Minor Proof speak about those nights with a particular enthusiasm — vivid recall, no proof to show for it. Just the memory of being in a room where something happened that won’t happen again.
We wanted to change that. In the basement of L’Usine, a warehouse space in Paris, REVOLUTION 9 filmed two of their sets. What happened down there will be on this page shortly. Consider it a document of something that was never supposed to leave the room.