One Saturday afternoon last fall, I found myself scouring YouTube for new songs to practice DJing with. I had recently taken up DJing as a hobby and was tired of hearing the same club hits over and over at bars around New York. After clicking through some techno-adjacent records from the 90s, I stumbled upon a video featuring Laila France’s 1997 debut album, Orgonon, and instantly fell into a pit of obsession. User Frager, who posted the video, often features largely unheard albums (like many other channels on YouTube), which has become a way to bring new life and cult fandom to out-of-circulation records like Orgonon. Laila’s melodious vocals are entrancing, from blasé yet seductively misandrist songs like “Trashy Like TV,” with verses like “This time I have my period, I don’t want to give a blow job…” to the tantalizing, dance-inducing “Trance Cocktail Airlines.” Sure, we’ve heard pop stars a la Doja Cat sing about how men “ain’t shit,” but where are the trance songs for our anti-blow job queens? I had found them, and I was hooked. I devoured articles trying to find any trace of her, but post-early 2000s, after the fall of Myspace, the trail stopped. So, where is Laila France now?

That fateful YouTube video, as of this article’s posting date, now has over 200,000 views. The comments are flooded with praise, with even former executives from Laila’s past chiming in to celebrate the album’s newfound fame. Marcus Liesenfeld, co-founder of Bungalow Records, the record label that Orognon was released under, commented that he is “so glad to see people rediscovering that album. Wasn’t a big “hit” when we released it in 1997. But looks like it has a new life now! We called the sound “coffee table drum’n’bass” back then… The real D’n’B nerds hated it!”

Momus (Aka Nick Currie), an accomplished producer, writer, singer, and frequent collaborator of Bungalow Records, was the visionary behind Orgonon. You may recognize his work from collaborations with the likes of Shibuya-kei classics such as POiSON GiRLFRiEND and Kahimi Karie. Momus’ website tells the story of Laila France’s inception, citing: “It all began in 1994 when Kahimi Karie…approached Momus…asking for five songs for an EP.” Kahimi Karie, who sings “DIS-MOI QUELQUE CHOSE AVANT DE DORMIR,” also has recently had a resurgence in popularity, serving as a soft pop core sensation on many TikTok feeds and Spotify playlists alike. In the 90s, her sound was part of the mounting trance music trend. Momus continues: “Around this time, an explosion began to happen…The roots of the music that we call Trance Cocktail started…before becoming known as Loungecore in America…and Neo-Eurovision in Berlin.” Seeking a new muse to follow this trend, Momus went on to post “an advertisement in [Paris]’s most adventurous magazine, Nova. ‘Girl singer wanted for an album of songs in the style of 1970s Italian soft porn films’, it read.” After some auditions, Laila got the role, and soon enough, Laila France was born. Laila was at the time “a 21-year-old student…[and] over the next year [they] wrote an album together, meeting every Wednesday in Montmartre.” Momus and Laila went on to create her debut and only album, Orgonon, “a record dedicated to the spirit of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who believed that orgasmic energy, correctly accumulated in little boxes, could save the world. The Italian soft porn themes are still audible, as is the presence of Kahimi Karie, Serge Gainsbourg, Klaus Nomi, Vince Clarke, Visage and Francis Lai. But there are also exotic elements of Drum and Bass added in London by Pantunes, and a haunting remix by techno artist Scanner.”

Laila and Momus’ last performance was on June 29, 2007 at La Flèche d’Or in Paris. Since I couldn’t find any trace of Laila past that era, I decided to send Momus an email asking if I could interview the two of them, hoping that he would be in contact with her. I reached out to Momus, and moved my thoughts elsewhere, as a watched pot seldom boils. After going about my day and heating up some pasta for lunch, I caved and took a peek at my inbox. To my surprise, he had responded within a few hours, saying that he had messaged Laila on Facebook and that she had agreed to answer some questions. The mystery surrounding Laila, whose presence online had disappeared for over a decade, was unveiled in a matter of hours. Needless to say, I was thrilled. My interview with Momus and Laila France, an iconic duo whose work together has resurfaced after 26 years, is charming, hilarious, and jealousy-inducing… I suddenly have the urge to move to Paris and perform in a bed filled with ravioli.

[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

Tell me about the process of meeting each other and creating Orgonon.

Momus: My song publisher, Martin Heath, knew that I was having hits in Japan with Kahimi Karie and thought we should try and replicate that with “a cocktail singer” in Europe. Since we were friends with the Radio Nova DJs Ariel Wizman and Edouard Baer, I placed an ad in Nova magazine for a singer who could do something like 1970s soft porn soundtracks. Loungecore was a thing at the time, we were listening to Alberto & Dario Baldan Bembo, Francis Lai and Serge Gainsbourg, as well as people like Pizzicato 5 and Fantastic Plastic Machine from Japan.

Laila: In the prehistoric times of the internet when it was just used to send one’s first emails, we still read a lot of magazines to get information. At that time, in Paris, a trendy magazine called Nova Magazine appeared every month. It was definitely the magazine to read if you wanted to feel very Parisian and cool. I was 19 years old, when one morning, while leafing through my favorite magazine, I read the lines of a classified ad published by a Scottish guy, who was looking for a French voice, to sing in English, on melodies inspired by the ’60s soft-porn aesthetic… Okay… A singing casting ad couldn’t be more bizarre and intriguing than that, right? That’s why I decided to introduce myself, because, even if I had never sung in my life, and my tastes were really very far from this musical vibe, I wanted to know more. I wanted to meet this person, Momus, whom I had instinctively identified as complex, daring and funny. Responding to this ad was also responding to a part of me, which remembered my childhood, and certain moments in life that seemed completely worthless, sad, and boring to me. The one who, as a result, had fantasized in a cute but super naive way that, one day, just like that, thanks to extraordinary luck, she would become a popstar, and that it could instantly teleport her into brilliant dimensions of existence, like owning beautiful clothes, having fans and signing autographs, occupying super chic hotel rooms, and eating and drinking as much as you want… In short, I only introduced myself out of nerve and naïveté.

Did you have a lot of people respond to the ad? Was there some sort of audition process?

Momus: A handful. I auditioned one singer in my Montmartre flat who was very good, technically, but when I met Laila I thought she had a funnier, quirkier personality, Audrey Hepburn looks, and a name which sounded like Francis Lai in verlan (the French slang which reverses syllables)! Also, being half-Thai, she fitted in with the “jet set” imagery of Loungecore. And she was an art student who did performances. One was called Ravi Au Lit (“delighted in bed”) and featured her and her boyfriend in a bed covered in ravioli.

What was your favorite song on Orgonon to work on, whether it was a fun song to make or you’re proud of the finished product?

Momus: I think the “David Hamilton” song was the best we made. It was so good that both Kahimi and my wife Shazna got jealous, saying: “Why don’t you write material like that for us?” Kahimi actually recorded it first, as a duet with Laila, arguing that the song was based on a T-shirt she’d issued with a David Hamilton photo on it, and that she therefore had first dibs on it. The song mocks Hamilton for “gilding the lily.”

Laila: It’s been ages since I listened to my album, but I just did, to be able to answer the question. To be honest, I’ve always had a hard time coming to terms with this record, even today. I have a lot of super conflicting emotions about this record. There are things that I find completely worthless and inaudible and which make me extremely tense when listening. Then other aspects of the record that I find mischievous, daring, and which almost make me nostalgic. You should know that when I met Momus and he gave me his first demos to perform, we were very far from the final result (an unexpected fusion between drum and bass and 60’s-inspired cocktail music). At the time, he was obsessed with the style of Serge Gainsbourg’s compositions, but I listened to The Pixies and Bjork’s Debut album on repeat. We couldn’t be more opposite. The only thing that brought us together was a common passion for Japanese pop from the 90’s, and our interest, for example, in the eccentric productions of a Japanese group, Pizzicato 5. I loved their ‘Made in USA’ album so much (1994). In short, at the beginning with Momus, we were swimming in full musical syrup. The sounds came from samples and loosely associated keyboards. Momus has always embraced and celebrated his taste for ‘raw’, ‘lo-fi’ productions. Me, much less. The line between a ‘raw’ sound and a ‘cheap’ sound can be very thin sometimes. We bickered a lot, we didn’t often agree on the subject of ‘good taste’, but we also laughed a lot because Momus has a fine mind and a sense of humor. One day he suggested that I write my own lyrics. And I think it unlocked something in me. I started to believe that we were really going to be able to release something. I agreed to put my voice on titles that I didn’t really like. In return, I wrote my own texts, and that allowed me to feel more involved and responsible for the creation. Also more motivated to take on the challenge. There are 2 songs that I particularly like on the album. “Japanese” especially: It’s the first song I wrote, so I’m attached to it. The starting point was an anecdote that I had read in the press at the time, about young Japanese girls who sold their already worn panties to Japanese men with fetishes. Reading this story caused a lot of upheaval in me, a mixture of feelings between embarrassment, laughter, fascination, enthusiasm, and disgust too… Perfect ingredients for a song, isn’t it? In terms of arrangements, I like the pop and slightly hysterical side. When I was a teenager, I fantasized a lot about being the lead singer of a pop-rock band, jumping in the air, shouting, disturbing by being provocative and casual. This title could work for this ambition. “Sensations of orgasm”: I find the lyrics of this song (written by Momus) sincere, deep, and accurate. They can question us, at every age of life, about the quest for pleasure, in sexuality or elsewhere, and how pleasure can take control of our lives in a disastrous way. On the other hand, I was impressed by the arrangement proposed by Robin Rimbaud (DJ Scanner), and that it was retained by Momus. I thought this arrangement had a melancholic modernity. The trip-hop spirit flirted with dignity with the productions of Massive Attack or certain remixes of Bjork, and I was quite flattered to have put a little toe into this musical universe. Today I read some comments from recent fans on YouTube, who associate the sound of the record with Pizzicato 5, Cibo Matto, Björk, without this having been officially communicated. Well, damn, that makes me happy, 30 years later!

What was the response to the album when you first put it out?

Momus: Since Martin Heath was now head of Arista Records in London, it looked as if they’d put it out. But he wasn’t convinced by the demos and kept asking whether we couldn’t make it “30% better”. In the end Bungalow, a Berlin indie label I was close to, released it. Holger and Marcus totally understood the project. I think the press was a bit confused by the Wilhelm Reich theme: Orgonon was the fraudulent Freudian’s compound in Maine, where he busied himself accumulating orgasmic energy in the adapted Faraday cages he called orgone accumulators. Woody Allen spoofs them in Sleeper. Of the reviews, I really just remember a British one that said something like: “Momus has finally found collaborators in Paris as immoral as he is.”

Are you both aware of the current resurgence of Orgonon?

Momus: Bungalow told me it’s trending on Spotify. Which is interesting, because the same thing is happening with another project I produced earlier in the 90s with The Poison Girlfriend. I think themes resonate with the times because they’re somehow made necessary by other developments in the culture. Maybe Orgonon sounds fresh and daring in a time of resurgent puritanism, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just funny and silly: “Little fish in little shoals are better than a pack of pills.”

Laila: Yes, it was pointed out to me that someone I don’t know posted my album on YouTube. I thought that this youth album was far behind me, but I also know that the return of Drum & Bass on the current music scene made it possible, through purely algorithmic miracles, to make my record reappear as a recommendation. I find it cute to read all the comments. They are all super nice with the record. It makes me happy, I have to be honest.

What do you think is the key to successful collaboration?

Momus: You have to have common enthusiasms, obviously. But really, you just have to start. “If you want to make art, just start,” I like to say. Laila would come round on Wednesday afternoons, and we’d work on songs together. Making songs like Japanese Especially was reckless fun. That one was obviously about Kahimi, who’d become Laila’s friend. I could hardly believe it when Laila came up with the line: “I was very concentrated like you are when you masturbate…” Times have changed, but good pop music is still mostly about sex.

Are you still making music now? What are you up to these days and what is inspiring you as of late?

Laila: Today, I no longer do anything related to music. I managed a musical events production company and organized numerous clubbing events in Paris, with several performers such as DJs, musicians, singers. I stopped 15 years ago because working mostly at night is exhausting. I have no plans to publish new works. The act of creation is such a huge amount of work, with too much of an emotional roller coaster. I’m too lazy to go back. But if there’s a wave of love coming back to me, and people are screaming at me to do new stuff, maybe I’ll reconsider! I lead a discreet life in the countryside, with my husband and my son. I run several businesses but from the countryside. I chose this life because I love the incredible pleasure of becoming like a tourist in Paris again, of seeing things again with sparkles in my eyes, of enjoying the cultural and trendy Parisian life for a few intense days, and then, returning to my life, most of the time, contemplative. Free time is the real luxury. Lately, here’s something that fascinates me: playing with artificial intelligence. I love spending hours writing prompts on ChatGBT, playing with the nuances of scripts, and adding poetry, or nonsense. When you press “send”, you think that nothing extraordinary is going to come out of your chaos of words. But in fact YES, against all odds, the A.I. often succeeds in coming up with something interesting. There, I am in heaven. I can’t wait to listen to the next mega global musical hit, 100% delivered by artificial intelligence, because this mega hit will have been propelled from the human writing of a prompt of genius.

You can find Momus at imomus.com. You can find Laila offline, as she says “to live happy, live hidden :)”