Additional Information
Photo: Erick Faulkner
PAN M 360: Tell us about this new project. Who and what are Les Éditions Appærent?
Jesse Osborne-Lanthier: Pierre and I have been talking for a long time about starting a label to have a platform to help the community of artists around us. I was working for another label [Halcyon Veil] with our other partner Will Ballantyne, and then things went sour. So Will, Pierre, and I joined forces to start this new structure. Asaël Robitaille, who has been working with us for a long time, also joined the team.
Pierre Guerineau: We’re a whole team of friends and collaborators who’ve been working together on various projects for several years, and we wanted to pool our efforts. Every time we complete a project and release an album, we look for a label to work with, be they Italian, English, or New York labels, but often it’s not really our aesthetic, we have to deal with agendas, make compromises, so we wanted to have a platform that would allow us to represent our work, our aesthetic, and be in control from the source to the release of the record. To control all aspects, from composing to recording, mixing, design, and distribution development. So it’s a way to gather our strengths, and have something that reflects us.
PAN M 360: What are the objectives in the medium term?
PG: We already have a lot of things planned. We’ve got L’Exil, Bernardino Femminielli’s album, which will be released on July 14, and will give a sort of theatrical view of his exile from Montreal to Paris. So this record will be the first volume of a trilogy that will be released in 2020 and possibly 2021, we’ll see how it goes. There’s also a movie he made, in addition to all the videos. It’s a film that lasts a good hour. In the future, we’ll also develop something other than music. For example, Marie [Davidson, Guerineau’s girlfriend, with whom he’s teamed up in Essaie Pas] is currently writing a poetry book, and I’d also like to develop something with Madison Dinelle, Jesse’s wife and photographer. Otherwise, we have an artist from Cairo, MSYLMA, who’s going to release something excellent that we can’t wait to share. We also have bela, a Korean artist who lives in China. And right now we’re working with Montreal’s Anna Arrobas who released an EP that I mixed last year, and we’re talking about developing something with Alex Zhang Hungtai [aka Dirty Beaches, featured on the Feu St-Antoine album]. We also have a project with Heith, one of the founding members of Haunter Records, who lives in Milan… We have a lot of projects. Stylistically speaking, our vision is very broad, it goes from electronic experimentation to more dreamy pop stuff. We don’t restrict ourselves, we really go for it. So we’re pretty much in line for the year 2020 with all this big family.
PAN M 360: Let’s get to Feu St-Antoine, your first release on Appærent. The name of this project, which has been circulating for some time in Montreal, refers to the collective hallucination phenomena – and severe pain, similar to burns – that entire villages suffered in the Middle Ages following the ingestion of ergot from rye bread.
PG: Yes, I’ve been doing live performances under that name for the last two or three years. There’s a track that came out on a compilation, but this is really the first album I’m doing solo. I started composing the songs about three years ago and I’ve continued to do them occasionally without having the concrete intention of making an album, it was more like experiments that I was doing on my own in my spare time. After a while, I started putting the pieces together and finding an aesthetic that seemed coherent, to build an album. It really comes from a personal approach. It was an opportunity for me to try out new things in terms of composition and composition techniques. I think it’s music that really passes through the prism of memory and childhood memories. In fact, I dedicated the album to the memory of my mother, who passed away. So it was a work of reconnecting with a part of my identity. And I think the result is more emotional than what I’ve done in the past. I’ve always liked developing the hybrid side, with more acoustic or pseudo-acoustic sounds like string samples or guitar samples, so as to create a universe between something more electronic and something more kinematic or contemporary in terms of sound. The idea was to have a music that was both dreamlike and nightmarish at the same time, which comes more from my unconscious than my cerebral side.
PAN M 360: A word about the title?
PG: It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson that I thought was very beautiful and it goes like this – “Water is taught by thirst…”
PAN M 360: Was this record a kind of outlet for you?
PG: I learned a lot from making this record. I’ve been making music since I was really young, but I think I was really struggling, I was accumulating one demo after another without ever feeling like it was good enough to share, so in the end, it seems a little bit absurd because a lot of my job is to help people finish their album, to go from the demo to something fine-tuned. I’ve learned through this album to find my own language and finalise something that is worth sharing. But it’s thanks to the advice and support of those close to me, Marie, Jesse, Asaël, and all the people around me who’ve been involved in this album that I’ve been able to make it happen.
