KRAAK FEST 2025 HIGHLIGHTS: Shitty Shed
Gabber the French way, as if drained from the swamp: lurking in Villefranche-de-Rouerge is Judith Bassuel and her demented electronic alter Shitty Shed. Constructing rhythms through mad dactylographic prowess, Shitty Shed draws you into her den of saturation with the deceptive straightforwardness of heavy drum machine distortion. Here we get a small glimpse of what drives her and her music to a dizzyingly contagious frenzy.
Tell us about your musical background. How did Shitty Shed start out?
I've been making music and performing since around 2002, with several different projects.
At the beginning, I was DJing at rave parties in the south of France, then practicing bored me, and I started learning scratching. Scratch is a practice that developed my rhythmic skills in my hands and down to my fingertips, which naturally led me to finger drumming.
In the meantime I also did concerts with Notre-Dame des Lourdes, a solo project in which I play synth, drums with my feet, and I sing very badly but with a lot of conviction! It looks like a synth dungeon black mass.
The music you make is very harsh techno/gabber coded. Are these musical scenes you have an affinity with?
I come from the French techno scene, but I haven't listened to techno at all for years. What interests me and what I kept from it, it's the violence of the rhythms in their raw state, all this stupid and nasty side that makes me jubilant, without superfluity.
It seems that most of your musical output is taken from live sets. Is this a personal preference of yours or do you also enjoy recording in non-live settings?
I consider that what I am offering with Shitty Shed is more interesting to watch than to listen to. I offer “human” techno; that is to say that unlike the machine, I have technical failures!
Sometimes I screw up. It's part of the show! But on a CD, it's not very pleasant to listen to...
This is also why I prefer to record live performances. There is this warm side of the crowd which encourages me and reacts to the mistakes!... unlike midi recordings, which I can quantize and make clean, but it's too cold and that's not what I want to do.
Do you ever collaborate with other people on different projects? Is that something you’d enjoy?
Not really...maybe in a grunge band some day...
What’s next for Shitty Shed?
More concerts, more tours, new compositions....
Shitty Shed has some stuff on Bandcamp and is on Instagram. She'll be amping up energy levels at KRAAK Fest this Saturday March 8 🙀