Last Night In Paris like to keep you guessing. They call themselves an arts collective, but primarily they push piffed out, slow-jam hip hop with a bomb of mid nineties R&B crushed into the mix. If you probe to deeply into details of their real names or where they’re all from – they quickly change
the subject. As the clan flood into the basement of Red Bull Studios for their Wonderland shoot hood-clad and late, it’s almost impossible to work out who to chat to first. I file it down to two of the twelve that fork out to pick through the Calvin and Cavalli draped across the space. Jordon Wi-Fi and Tauren Roye – the collective’s co-founders – started reaching out to friends and contacts from their old flat in Sydenham, south east London in 2011. The aim? To start a local-to-SE collective that’s aesthetically consistent across the board: from art direction to music videos, live performances, dress sense, sound, it’s all carefully, lovingly executed and unfinished ’til it’s done.

“They’re all as important as each other,” says Wi-Fi, whose marble-smooth vocals coloured the group’s self-released
June 2013 debut EP, Roses. “We’ve got so many members and people contributing to one idea. Vocalists like KC, Taurean, Collard and Danny Seth and producers Fwdslxsh & MD$ crafting the soundscapes are on the music side of things, but generally we try and keep each medium as high as the other.” Christian Newell – an SE-based graphic artist and painter who now looks after much of the band’s art direction – was contacted on Facebook and asked to join the group. “Christian’s artwork needs to be as good as our music and our music needs as good as our visuals – it’s a good example of how things work here,” Wi-Fi says.

The video for Roses track “Keep You” is an insight into their carefully executed image: the strictly black-bloc guys lollop around a loft bar with its windows boarded. Meanwhile a tender pours a tar-thick dark liquor into a tumbler of vodka, blacking out the glass as Roye slow-raps in a woody timbre. Stunning singer Katya Des-Etages, who joined the now-ex LNIP member Rainy Milo as one of the clan’s few female members, pours it up with the rest from a tan leather bench. As we chat, the group are readying their debut mixtape (set for a May self-release), and are currently rallying attention from the states – it’s big news. “GOOD Music (Kanye West’s label) hit us up and the head of the label flew out to meet us,” he says. Roye remains typically nebulous about the hook-up, though. “We need to attack it at the right time. It needs to be right.”

Taurean

Katya

Vonnie

Christian