Additional Information
Antoine Corriveau is 40 and still flying through the night. Almost 5 years separate the release of Oiseau de Nuit and Pissenlit, also on Secret City Records, which marked a substantial change in his orchestral style. The release of Pissenlit was preceded and followed by a series of landmark concerts, and then…
After a series of existential, even depressive, transhumances, the artist finally extricated himself from the shadows and restarted the engine of his creation, thus inviting some fifteen musicians from different horizons, most of them from the left-field of Montreal culture – Stéphane Bergeron (drums and co-producer), Marc-André Landry (bass), Simon Angell (guitar, saxophone), Sheenah Ko and François Lafontaine (keyboards and synthesizers), Cherry Lena, VioleTT Pi, Rose Perron (vocals), Taurey Butler (piano), Éveline Grégoire-Rousseau (harp), Pietro Amato (horn), Émilie Fortin (trumpet), Kalun Leung (trombone), Laurie Torres (piano), Mat Vezio (drums), Ariel Comtois (saxophone).
To mark the release of his fifth studio album, Antoine Corriveau grants this interview to PAN M 360, conducted by Alain Brunet.
PAN M 360: This album is really part of a change already seen in 2019, shortly before the release of the album Pissenlit (2020). Back then, you started working with Simon Angell (Thus Owls), Stéphane Bergeron (Karkwa), Pietro Amato (Bell Orchestre). This time, they’re still with us, but some fifteen musicians have collaborated on Oiseau de nuit. Over the past five or six years, your musical culture has really changed.
Antoine Corriveau: You’re right. During the pandemic, my friend Marc-André Landry created a little listening group when we couldn’t leave the house, confinement was at its most intense. One of us would select two albums that we’d listen to together via What’sApp, then we’d comment on what we were listening to. It made me discover a lot of things.
PAN M 360: I see from your biographical profile that your discoveries were quite extensive, for example Makaya McCraven and Georgia Ann Muldrow.
Antoine Corriveau: I discovered them there, in fact.
PAN M 360: I’m one of those people who believes that the musical framework, the arrangements and the production make the difference between a generic song and a musically visionary one. There are plenty of people out there who can come up with good melodies and chord progressions, but that’s a limited universe, whereas the rest of a song depends on infinite creativity. And you, Antoine, have clearly understood this, i.e. your music has evolved since the beginning.
Antoine Corriveau: I still think this approach is dangerous, because it’s easy to turn your back on the idea that a song should be in its simplest form. I have my own studio, so it’s easy for me to fall into arrangement and production. It can be easy sometimes, I find, to go on a production trip when there’s no song behind it, there’s no text that holds together, there’s no music that holds together, there’s no (chord) progression that can.
PAN M 360: Yes, you have to find the right balance, avoid dogmatism and make sure the song holds together. A song that doesn’t hold together can’t count on a nice coating.
Antoine Corriveau: Well, I’d say the arrangement can’t be done if the song falls apart along the way. It’s very exciting, but…
PAN M 360: What was the creative core of the album?
Antoine Corriveau: It’s very much me and Stéphane Bergeron, who co-directed. We’ve been playing together for ten years. In the last few years, he started playing around a lot with recording, adding pedals, using compressors, producing beats. He’d say, “Send me some stuff,” and then he’d put his money where his mouth was. I got him involved because he was working a lot on my songs. Over the last few years, he’s evolved enormously and continues to look for new business. We’ve done some stuff together, and we’ve done some cool stuff with this new album.
PAN M 360: Working method for Oiseau de nuit?
Antoine Corriveau: A grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres enabled me to invite a lot of people into the studio I was recording in order to create material for myself at the start of the process.
Initially, I wanted to make a record of samples; I’d got hold of a collection of vinyl records. I started playing around with it, but I felt a bit limited, not being a real beatmaker. I thought it might be cool to make my own custom samples; a recorded one-tone chord would allow me to continue with instrumentalists and singers.
Then we had to reuse these recordings in the songs. After that, we recorded with Stéphane, Simon and Marc-André Landry, with whom we also recorded a week of jams. Several songs came out of these sessions, where I’d come up with a riff around which we built.
PAN M 360: A number of English speakers worked on the project, so it’s not strictly the indie-keb family. There’s also a cross-cultural, multi-genre mix, including instrumental hip-hop and jazz, which are very important in the final result.
Antoine Corriveau: Yeah, it kind of reflects my listening habits over the last few years.
PAN M 360: Let’s review a few songs from Oiseau de nuit. We start with “Suzo”, which builds on a piano motif. It’s a declamation akin to rap or slam, it’s barely sung.
Antoine Corriveau: Yes, the first part of the song is very similar to rap productions. I liked the economy of means, choosing no more than three or four elements. It was a challenge, you know; sometimes, I have extremely dense songs with big arrangements, but sometimes it’s also a question of taking on fairly minimalist parts; instead of adding, you have to cut. That’s something I’m a bit proud of on this record in terms of arrangement, as you can see in this song.
PAN M 360: Let’s talk about Suzo’s text. We meet in Palermo, and “Suzo” is the character whose story you tell.
Antoine Corriveau: This character came into my head one morning, I don’t know exactly why. Things weren’t going so well in my life, I was in a kind of existential crisis. I imagined myself fleeing to another country, with the idea of erasing my life and starting all over again.
PAN M 360: “Jardin” is very influenced by jazz.
Antoine Corriveau: Yes, that’s right. It’s a song where I got these words from a book, sometimes I do that to help me write. This time, it took me back to my childhood memories, because we had a big garden at home. In fact, there’s something chronological about the order of the songs. “Suzo” was a kind of setup for what’s to come, and then I start with the song that’s perhaps a bit more about my childhood, childhood memories. Musically, I really wanted something softer than “Suzo”, and in the end, the drum and double bass groove is close to jazz, especially Makaya McCrevin. You can hear it. Then there’s a very long guitar solo by Simon in this song. It’s funny because Simon and I are guitarists, and we sometimes find the guitar “boring”. Then, when he recorded this solo, we removed an effect pedal with each new take. In the end, it’s the completely clean sound we wanted, super natural.
PAN M 360: Yes, there are some “roots” moments like that, even if the album is highly produced overall. And there’s a lot of improvisation!
Antoine Corriveau: As I record a lot of improvisation, it’s present, even if there’s a lot of processing and collage of sounds. Something deeply instinctive and human.
PAN M 360: Moscow Mule is about repression, AND it’s not going well for the narrator!
Antoine Corriveau: No, it’s not going well (laughs).
Well, this is a jam. The whole first part of the song is the original jam recording. I just started playing a guitar riff, the band got on board, and then we held it for a while. I really, really liked that energy.
Yes, I wrote this sort of story not really knowing what I was writing. But I was having a lot of fun! I was writing this narrative, I had ideas, they came out, I wasn’t worrying about what I was talking about. A friend to whom I had read the first version said to me, “It seems that in this text you’re telling how much you can lie to yourself in your life, but not in art.” I found that an extraordinary comment, and it enabled me to finish writing the text. It’s a song with a lot of ideas that echo things I’ve experienced for real, including a character from the American West Coast. After that, I talk about crossing over to the East, and I actually lived in the American East for a while. I was looking for something, I wasn’t doing well and I was driving to get better. So there are lots of real elements and others that serve the story, that put meat around the bone.
PAN M 360: And the title?
Antoine Corriveau: I had the word mule in mind and came across an article about a San Francisco bar that had removed the word “Moscow” from its drinks list, in support of Ukraine. So I imagined arriving at a bar and ordering a Moscow Mule as a password to access the basement where something was going on. Underground, a little hidden, which corresponded to this idea: what we reveal about ourselves and what we hide.
PAN M 360: Pastorale starts with a blues riff and then becomes orchestral.
Antoine Corriveau: Yes, a big jam that lasted 30 minutes and that I tightened, tightened, tightened until it was 9. It’s super bubbly and it’s the same riff all the time. It’s simple and lasts 9 minutes, during which a lot happens. There’s something unique and beautiful about this slightly cacophonous, ambitious affair.
PAN M 360: When you think of Pastorale, you think of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the Pastorale, which has nothing to do with this song.
Antoine Corriveau: “Pastorale” is a word I thought of maybe two years ago, because I thought it was beautiful, and I even considered it as an album title. Then I did some research and the first association was religion and choral singing, something to do with my youth. And then there’s this notion of the countryside or nature before human intervention. What would it be like if it weren’t altered by human society? What would we be without social alteration? Wild animals?
PAN M 360: And so on. We won’t do the full review, but we already have an excellent idea of the project.
Antoine Corriveau: This album is a mixture of imagined lives and real memories. Sometimes, I even feel that my memories belong to others, and I cross that line between fantasy and reality and everything blends together.
