Miss Kittin Turned Deadpan Speech Into a Club Vocal

The most influential thing Caroline Hervé ever did was refuse to sing. On Frank Sinatra and 1982, both from a 1998 EP made with The Hacker, she talks: flat, unhurried, unimpressed, over minimal electronics. That delivery became the sound of electroclash, and it has been imitated continuously ever since.

She was born in Grenoble in 1973, started her first mix in April 1993 and was DJing by 1994. In 1997 she met DJ Hell in Marseille, which produced the Champagne EP the following year and put both tracks into circulation.

Why the Flat Voice Worked

Dance music before that point mostly used vocals in one of two ways: as a soul or house performance, or as a chopped sample. A speaking voice, delivered in real time and audibly bored, did something neither of those could.

It let a track carry actual sentences. A sung line has to fit a melody and tends toward the general; a spoken one can be specific, funny and slightly cruel, and it survives being played very loudly in a room where nobody is listening closely. The style also solves a practical problem, since it can be performed live by a DJ standing at the equipment.

The wider effect is easy to trace. The deadpan spoken verse is now standard equipment across electronic pop, and a great deal of what gets called hyperpop uses the same trick with more processing on top.

The Records With The Hacker

First Album arrived in 2001 on International DeeJay Gigolo Records and sold more than fifty thousand copies worldwide, which for a European electro record on an independent at that point was substantial. Two followed in 2009 on her own label, with the singles PPPO, 1000 Dreams and Party in My Head, and Third in 2022.

Three albums across twenty-one years with the same collaborator is an unusually durable partnership for a scene that mostly dissolved within five years of forming. The Hacker’s productions are spare and cold by design, which is precisely what a spoken vocal needs; a busier arrangement would bury it.

The Year Everything Landed

2001 was the year the style broke out. Alongside First Album, she released Or with Golden Boy on Ladomat 2000, which produced Rippin Kittin and took number one on the UK dance chart. She also featured on Felix da Housecat’s Kittenz and Thee Glitz, including Silver Screen Shower Scene.

Being simultaneously present on three of the records that defined electroclash is what made her its representative figure, and it is also why she has spent the twenty-five years since being introduced as an electroclash artist regardless of what she was actually releasing.

Going Solo

I Com came out on NovaMute on 31 May 2004, twelve tracks running just under an hour, produced with Thies Mynther or Tobi Neumann, the latter having also worked with Chicks on Speed.

The titles keep the tone: Professional Distortion, Requiem for a Hit, Happy Violentine, Meet Sue Be She, Kiss Factory, Clone Me, 3eme Sexe, I Come.com. Three singles charted modestly in Britain but did better on the Belgian dance chart, where Requiem for a Hit reached six and Happy Violentine nine.

Metacritic settled at 73. Drowned in Sound praised its attitude of independent energy and its cerebral edge. AllMusic described it as arranging the best pieces of post-everything genres into a newfangled data stream. Pitchfork was the dissenter, arguing that some of her lyrical deficits undercut the production.

Requiem for a Hit, featuring L.A. Williams, is the track that best illustrates the method: a play on a line about beating somebody with a bat, released as a single, and ranked thirty-eighth among the year’s best by Les Inrockuptibles. XLR8R’s review noted that she knew how to live on charts worldwide, which reads as a compliment about calculation as much as about songs.

What Frank Sinatra Was Doing

The two tracks that made her name are worth separating, because they work differently. 1982 is nostalgic in structure, a list delivered without any of the warmth a list of memories normally carries. Frank Sinatra is satirical, using the vocabulary of celebrity and excess in a voice that refuses to be impressed by any of it.

Both were on an EP rather than an album, released on a small German label, and neither was designed to reach beyond a specific set of clubs. That they became the defining records of a genre is a reminder of how European dance music actually propagated before streaming: through DJs playing imports to rooms of a few hundred people, repeated across a continent.

It also explains why electroclash was over almost as soon as it was named. A style built on a small number of records circulating among DJs cannot survive being described in magazines, and by the time the term was in general use most of its originators had moved on.

Her Own Label Since 2004

She founded Nobody’s Bizzness the same year I Com appeared, and it has carried most of her output since: BatBox in 2008, Calling from the Stars in 2013, and Cosmos in 2018, the last released simply as Kittin.

Alongside those sit the mix compilations, which for a DJ of her generation were the primary format: On the Road and Radio Caroline Vol.1 in 2002, A Bugged Out Mix in 2006. A commercially released mix was how a DJ demonstrated taste before streaming made every set disposable.

Running her own label from that point is the same decision Röyksopp reached when they stopped making traditional albums: an artist with a distinctive method concluding that the release format should follow the work rather than the reverse.

What She Was Actually Listening To

Her stated influences explain the range better than the electroclash label does: Serge Gainsbourg and Daft Punk, Depeche Mode and Prince, and the Detroit techno of Drexciya. That is a French pop tradition of spoken, sardonic delivery crossed with American machine music, which is a fair description of what she does.

Gainsbourg in particular is the missing reference in most accounts of her work. He built a career on half-spoken vocals delivered with studied indifference over arrangements that did the emotional work, and transposing that into a club context is essentially what happened on the Champagne EP. Once the lineage is pointed out it is difficult to hear the records any other way.

Three decades after her first mix she is still touring, still releasing on her own imprint, and still identified by a vocal approach she arrived at before most of the people now using it were born.

The undervaluation is structural rather than personal. Producers who invent a vocal style rather than a production technique tend to be remembered as performers instead of as authors, and the innovation gets attributed to the scene rather than to the person. Nobody disputes who made Frank Sinatra; the argument is only ever about whether talking over a track counts as writing.

On the evidence of what pop now sounds like, it does. The flat, specific, faintly amused spoken verse is one of the most widely used devices in electronic music, and it entered the vocabulary through a French DJ on a small German label at the end of the nineties.