Distilling a wide range of sounds down to their essence, his aim is to reconcile and harmonize opposing sounds… — Montreal Mirror, Québec

Stephen Beaupré is a master sampler. To his ears any sound source is fair game, any noise a potential instrument. In the Buddhist tradition, the term Foe Destroyer refers to a student who has abandoned all delusions of worldly importance, through training on the path to enlightenement. Fittingly, Beaupré strips his sample sources of all but the most fleeting remains of their origins. He then weaves them into complex percussive networks, and imbues the results with a wide array of personal reflections and memories. Described in this way, Beaupré’s creative process seems closely related to the manifestos of Akufen and Matthew Herbert, associations which, during Foe Destroyer’s danciest moments, will be clearly audible to discerning ears. In contrast to the work of the aforementioned sampling savants however, commitment to process seems to take a back seat to reveling in the diverse emotions of life’s many twists and turns in Beaupré’s work. His meticulous editing clearly shows he can splice and filet his samples with the best of them, easily overcoming the worn out clichés of what too often gets passed off as intelligent dance music. Somehow though his songs always seem closer to one-of-a-kind handicrafts then well oiled future music machines; his rhythmic structures more a kin to a house of cards then a Tokyo sky scraper. It is exactly this sense of fragility, the feeling that each song might collapse upon itself at any moment that marks Foe Destroyer as a unique creative vision.