Born just before the sleepy lockdowns of the early pandemic, Hank’s Dream emerged as the manifestation of singer-songwriter Henry Cobb. Releasing their eponymous debut EP in the summer of 2020, the band – now featuring Henri Bouchard on bass, Frédéric Ferland on guitar, and Zach Lalonde on drums – is on the verge of turning a fresh musical chapter with a brand new single, “All Over Now”. The band graciously extended an invitation to their practice session, just ahead of their eagerly anticipated launch show at Bar L’Escogriffe.
PAN M 360 : Hey thanks for having me here. Big show coming up.
Frédéric : Yeah, our first full band show since September. We’ve been playing like a couple of duo shows, me and Henry, but it’s been a while since we’ve had everyone together on stage. That’s really exciting for us.
PAN M 360 : You must have lots of stuff you want to show us!
Frédéric : For sure. We will play some classics, like from the 2020 EP. Of course we will play the single we release in June, “San Francisco”. But most of the songs we are playing now are unreleased and they are from an album that we’re hoping to get out in the summer.
PAN M 360 : So you’re getting to try out the new material in a live context?
Henry : I wouldn’t necessarily say like trying out because like we’ve actually had these songs written for quite a while now. There’s just kind of like a stockpile of songs that needs to be recorded.
Frédéric : We’ve been playing them since like 2021 pretty much. A lot of them. We have like a book of like 12 songs that are not released, and we’re hoping to get them on tape.
Henry : Yeah, but it is nice because, for example, the song we’re about to release, “All Over Now”, is one of the ones that people really like when they play at shows. And so because we’ve had it around for a while, it was easy to record quickly because we’ve played it a million times.
PAN M 360 : And so when you say you’re about to “release” the song, what exactly does that mean?
Henry : “What does it mean?”
PAN M 360 : Well I understand that it will be out on all the streaming services and everything, but people have to know about it, right? So it seems like a release has basically become an instagram post.
Henry : Yeah, it’s the way it is now. We haven’t really done any physical releases of any of our stuff yet. I mean I would like to, but I think the market for it is very niche. You know, like your friends might buy it, but except for my friends who drive cars I don’t know anyone who actually even listens to CD’s. I like records, but that’s maybe more long term.
But then again I don’t know, I think I used to be really attached to the whole physical medium aspect of music, but one thing that is really cool about streaming is how people all around the world can access your stuff. We had sort of a meme moment a few days where one of our songs was on a playlist in Finland. So suddenly we had a spike in the number of streams coming in. Yeah, it was probably AI bots or something.
Frédéric : It was the second country in the world that was listening to most of our songs. We had 300 listeners in Finland.
Henri : We will probably go on tour there now.
PAN M 360 : I suppose I was trying to touch upon how underwhelming it can be at times. Here’s a post and there you go.
Frédéric : And then it’s over. Yeah, it’s a big thing.
Henry : Well, honestly, we made a big deal out of it, though. We are doing a show on the same day and then we’re also releasing a music video that we’ve been working on for a long time. So I feel like you can make a big deal out of these things.
PAN M 360 : For sure, and I’m sure your fans are thrilled. Can you tell me about the new single?
Henry : “All Over Now” is a tune that I wrote in 2021, I believe. It was sort of in response to the passing of Norm MacDonald, who’s my favourite comedian. It’s kind of partially about that but I mean, like all of these tunes were written with the music first and the lyrics second. So, I had the tune for a little while and then I sort of play around with words till something fits, and in this case, the first line that just came was ‘it’s all over now’. And I wrote the rest of the song around it.
PAN M 360 : Is it exploring a different sound or theme than the other ones?
Henry : Well, it’s the same layout. In the sense that it’s like bass, drums, guitar, synthesiser, and voice, but it’s definitely got a darker sound to it. The synth has more of a pad-kind of role. I would say that this song is like really dream pop. If you wanted to put it in a genre, whereas “San Francisco” is more yacht rock.
PAN M 360 : Ha, is that what you feel best describes your music?
Henri : It’s pretty accurate. We had never heard that term before but then last summer when we released “San Francisco”, we had like a bunch of people saying, oh, this is really giving Yacht Rock vibes.
Henry : Yeah, anyways. I don’t know, I think it’s pretty poppy music. But that’s the thing, I feel like our tunes are really different like from song to song. Some of them are really easy to categorise, and some not so much.
PAN M 360 : And what about “San Francisco”, what’s the story behind that one?
Henry : I think it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek…I wrote it during the pandemic, which really sucked, and I guess it’s about this guy who has an immature idea that getting away to another city is going to solve all their problems and stuff like. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s kind of just like a stupid goofy song too.
PAN M 360 : I’m curious about everyone in the band’s favourite song to play.
Henri : I love when Henry plays solo tunes, and I get to cry on stage.
Zachary : I think maybe “San Francisco”.
Frédéric : Maybe “Just 23” for me, which is like a big super high energy song that we’ve been playing for a while. It’s super fun to play.
PAN M 360 : And what’s the next big thing for the band?
Frédéric : Well, I think the biggest dream right now is to get to do the record. I mean tell me if I’m wrong Henry, but I feel like it’s pretty much the next big thing that we’re looking to do. Right. And when it’s going to be done, I think it’s going to be super satisfying because we’ve been working on it for a long time.
PAN M 360 : So do you have a plan for that yet? Or is it kind of still just an idea for now?
Henry : Well, basically, for like the past six or eight months we’ve been in the process of applying for grants. So we’re sort of basing the production schedule off of that. If we get them, then we can hopefully start recording the album like in March, and then have it out by the summer. And If we don’t get them, then that’s like a whole other story.
PAN M 360 : As a band singing in English to you feel at a disadvantage for those opportunities?
Henry : I feel like actually the opposite. I was expecting that to be the case, but we play tons of venues that are maybe more francophone oriented and it goes really well. Like we have tons of fans that are francophones, maybe even more so than anglophones.
Frédéric: All of us are playing with other francophone projects too, so for us it’s like more like making links than separating people.
Henry : We did do a thing one time at our release show, and we had like a poll at the beginning about which language we should speak between the songs, and it was pretty 50-50 but French won.
PAN M 360 : Well no matter what language, Montréal is a city that loves music. Have an amazing show !
Blanche Moisan Méthé built her career as a trumpeter, tubist, and vocalist, collaborating with a wide cast of musical groups before embarking on the path of a singer-songwriter. Now performing under the moniker of BLAMM, she released her first LP, Balivernes, earlier this year. Her compositions, infused with much irony, are inspired by the music of New Orleans, the rich poetry and folk traditions of Quebec, and the urban wisdom that comes from living in a city like Montreal. We sat down with BLAMM to talk about her story, her first release, and her coming performance at Club Soda.
PAN M 360 : Hey BLAMM, thanks again for being with us. You released Balivernes about six months ago now. And I imagine that’s a very interesting place to be. To be six months after the release of your album.
BLAMM : Ohdefinitely.
PAN M 360 : Maybe you can tell us a bit about what that feels like?
BLAMM : Okay, well first of all, I really enjoyed those last six months. I got to tour quite a bit this summer. So as I was releasing Balivernes, I was also booking my summer gigs pretty much. You know I’m doing it all myself, and now that I’m back here I realise I didn’t spend any time booking for the fall ! So I’m going back to that and also working on some new ideas. I think I’ve got my mindset on starting the process for the second album now.
PAN M 360 : Yeah, I suppose you can’t rest on your laurels too much.
BLAMM : Well, it’s fun to do ! But I’ve been writing some new songs and that’s generally what I feel I should be spending my time doing when I have some time off.
PAN M 360 : So the experience of releasing your Balivernes was really a positive one? One that encouraged you to want to get back to it?
BLAMM : Yeah, definitely. But coming back from all the touring and having so many upcoming gigs, it’s like, oh, I have to get back to the grind of booking gigs and sending emails and applying to things, which is not the most fun part of it.
PAN M 360 : Well, I wonder when you release something, do you try to promote it as a way to play more shows, or vice versa.
BLAMM : Yeah, I suppose my goal is really to play more shows. And I think making an album is in service of that goal too, to play live. Of course I love being in the studio but really my biggest fun is to play shows.
PAN M 360 : So you think the artistry of BLAMM really comes together in the live experience?
BLAMM : I do really enjoy the studio though, but the process of making an album, the proportion of studio time is kind of small compared to all the work that you have to do. So the studio time is really fun, but a lot of the other stuff is administrative work.
PAN M 360 : And maybe you can just introduce the project of BLAMM to our readers.
BLAMM : Sure. It’s a singer-songwriter project. It’s definitely very Québécois. BLAMM is a sort of an extravagant character who speaks quite frankly, with lots of local expressions and lots of themes that I think are uncommon to the music we tend to hear a lot. A lot of things that are maybe considered too banal, or very simple things that everybody goes through, but nobody talks about, like doing your tax report.
PAN M 360 : Well, you do it in a very interesting like sonic universe too, you know, the way you choose to present these themes.
BLAMM : Well, I’ve been playing music for almost eight years, playing in so many different projects. And so I guess all those years of being an accompanist and an interpreter shaped my musical world a lot. Those other experiences are all somewhere in there. It’s influenced my writing for the music. And of course the album is centred on brass a lot.
PAN M 360 : So was a brass instrument your first musical instrument?
BLAMM : Yes, it was trumpet in high school. So I’ve been mostly a trumpet player and now I’m coming out as a songwriter all of a sudden.
PAN M 360 : Could you tell me a bit about that transition? Were you always inclined to explore this direction?
BLAMM : I’ve been singing for a long time, not my original songs, mostly like traditional jazz songs. And I’ve always had some mixed feelings about that because I really love singing those songs. I think they are amazing melodically, but the lyrics are not so, well I don’t feel connected to them quite so much.
So I’ve been wanting to write songs about what I want to talk about, and I tried a lot in the past and nothing was coming out at all. Until one day I was in New Orleans and I bought a banjo, a tenor banjo. I thought I was buying it for my friend who plays guitar in my band because I thought he could use it to play banjo in my band instead. But then I ended up starting to noodle on it and I really liked it and I never gave it to him in the end.
PAN M 360 : Is that the peculiar four string guitar that you play?
BLAMM : Actually no, we’ll get to that. So I started on this cheap banjo and as soon as I got the hang of it I started writing songs. Like, right away. I played piano before but it never inspired me to come up with songs like that. But then after a while of playing it a lot I began to think that the banjo is kind of stuck in one style, well not really, but it’s a very particular tone that doesn’t fit in every kind of music. I kind of wanted to go outside of those styles and I happened to have a friend who’s an amazing luthier and I had another banjo playing friend who was ordering a tenor guitar from this guy and I know this luthier likes to do them twice, two at a time because it’s more efficient that way. So I knew it was the time to order it.
PAN M 360 : Wow, so that’s the instrument that’s at the heart of a lot of these compositions?
BLAMM : Yes. Some of them I wrote on the banjo of course, but a lot of them I wrote on with the guitar.
PAN M 360 : And was your fascination with the music of New Orleans because of your love for brass?
BLAMM : Yes, it’s perfect music for brass. It’s festive, it’s happy, it’s contagious. Even those who’ve never heard that kind of music are going to enjoy it and I busk a lot, so I played on the street a lot with this music.
PAN M 360 : Yeah. It’s interesting to hear its influence on your creative work. Because you take this sound but then, as you said, explore these absurd banal themes.
BLAMM : Yeah, there’s a circus vibe to it. I didn’t want to just copy the style and make it French. I really wanted to go somewhere else with it.
PAN M 360 : And so your album is very Québécois at the same time, was that a big frame of reference in making this music?
BLAMM : For the music, maybe not so much. There’s not a lot of brass in our music. And I grew up listening to music from all around the world, not really so much Québécois music. Now I listen to way more of it. But for the words and lyrics, absolutely it was a big reference.
PAN M 360 : So for you, the lyrics were really quite an important part of this.
BLAMM : Absolutely and I think that’s why it took me so long before I started writing because I didn’t know what I wanted to say and it’s not a filler for me. I can just make instrumental music if I really have nothing to say. So it was important for me to like, even though it’s silly at times, it’s still something I want to say and I think that’s why I started writing. And I get some nice comments about my lyrics actually.
PAN M 360 : Well «Si hier était demain » and «Vie D’ange »especially are really powerful! So does Blamm feel something like an alter ego?
BLAMM : Yeah, for sure. I think I’m quite introverted as a person but I feel like this opens up a new side of me and I can say whatever I want, I can be super silly, make stupid jokes on stage, and like sometimes I’m sort of sassy too. I think I can be like that too when I’m super comfortable with close friends but like in a social context where there’s more people, not so much. I also feel that people know me better if they hear my music.
PAN M 360 : And so a lot of these songs started off as kind of core singer-songwriter songs. Did you then arrange them as well?
BLAMM : Yes, I did the arranging. Some of them, because I play a lot of the instruments that are on the album. Well I don’t play tuba on the album, but I do play tuba.
PAN M 360 : Oh how come?
BLAMM : Because we played it live and I hired the best tuba player in town, well one of the best for sure. And yeah, playing it live I can’t do both for sure. So I had to have someone else. But when I was arranging, I could play tuba and record it to come up with the parts because I know how to play the instrument. I made mock-ups of the songs like this and then came to write the charts and stuff. But also there was a bit that was also done just during rehearsals with the musicians. They have better skills than me.
PAN M 360 : I mean your band is very talented. That’s for sure.
BLAMM : I’m lucky to have a good network.
PAN M 360 : So what’s the main difference in what you would say between the music in the studio and the music played live?
BLAMM : I have performed a lot of shows solo, duo, trio, and some shows with the five piece. The album launch was with 11 people. And so of course, the arrangements are way more complex with everybody, but I really enjoy playing in the smaller bands too. I find for music with lyrics especially, it’s usually better with a bit less going on and you have a better contact with the audience.
PAN M 360 : And what’s the band for your show this month?
BLAMM : It’s going to be the five-piece. That’s kind of the core band I would say. And it will be a short show, it’s just an opening act. But it’s a big venue at Club Soda. We’re opening for JP « Le Pad » Tremblay, a singer-songwriter from Quebec.
PAN M 360 : Okay, nice gig ! So you’ve been doing some networking? Is that how that works?
BLAMM : I suppose so. I met the right people at the right time and they needed an opener !
PAN M 360 : And so how has your experi
ence been kind of as an independent artist navigating the industry side of things? Well, is there one?
BLAMM : To me, it still sounds like a myth. Like all those bookers and those, I’m like, where are they? Who are they? I’ve been a professional musician for like eight years and barely ever met anyone like that. With all the bands I’ve played with, we book ourselves. And now I’ve met some people who have bookers or are signed to labels and they’re not so satisfied with them either. So, as I was preparing the album launch, I was sending emails and trying to get in those things, but I mean, there’s too much demand for what they can take, you know?
But also after I did it all by myself, I was quite happy. I had 15 shows this summer that I booked myself. They’re not big shows in fancy places, but I don’t need it to be big. I really like the small venues and being close to people. Of course I wouldn’t say no to having people helping me doing those things, but I’m kind of accepting that it might not happen anytime soon.
PAN M 360 : What would you say it’s your biggest kind of dream with this music? Or where do you ideally want this project to go?
BLAMM : Or asking myself that a lot these days. But I think my main drive is to keep playing live shows. So I managed to do it last summer by myself. And I’m going to keep doing it by myself if some people want to give me gigs or have a deal with me, that would be sweet. But I’m not expecting that to happen. And there’s a lot of artists that I really admire that do it by themselves. And I feel like you have more power over what you get to do. And if things go wrong, you only have yourself to blame. You know, if the gig is bad, if whatever is bad, it’s your own fault and you don’t get frustrated with whoever you’re working with.
PAN M 360 : A sign of the times BLAMM. Wishing you all the best with your music and your upcoming show. We look forward to the next album !
The Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca company was created in 1993 by Martín Santangelo, co-founder, artistic director and choreographer, and Soledad Barrio, co-founder, choreographer and principal dancer. Since the 1990’s their production company has come to be lauded as one of the finest exponents of the flamenco tradition today. Their most recent offering is a very unique and captivating program titled “Searching for Goya.” This special production, the brainchild of company director, Martin Santangelo, promises to be an extraordinary exploration of the profound connections between flamenco artistry and the iconic Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Scheduled to perform in January in Montreal, we sat with Martin ahead of his many premieres and tours to talk about the show.
PAN M 360 : Thanks for being with us Martin. We’re very excited for this very special programme. Have you started premiering the show?
Martin Santangelo : Yes, we just officially did the world premiere in Seattle, Washington last week. And the week before that we had the official premiere. We’ve been working on it and workshopping it for the last year or so. And of course I’ve been working on it for the last four years. So we were very, very happy and relieved to actually do the world premiere. It went very well. I was very happy about that.
PAN M 360 : Well I wonder, in your view, what really is the measure of a good performance?
Martin Santangelo : It’s a very good question. A good performance for me is that the audience understands what I’m trying to say. That’s the first measure. That’s much beyond whether it’s a good show or a bad show, that the comprehension of what I’m trying to do gets across to the audience. And at the end of the day it is also extremely important that there’s something cathartic that occurs. Because catharsis is built into the flamenco. It’s part of the flamenco. It’s why the flamenco exists. It’s a way for people to go on with their lives in face of or in lieu of an impossibility.
The flamenco is a mechanism of catharsis. It’s a scream that exists so people can wake up the next day and go on with their lives. So my measure of success is one, what am I trying to do? What am I trying to make understood in my performance? And then second, am I using the flamenco in the appropriate way? And those two things occurred last week in the World Premier. So that’s my measure of success. Of course things can be better. Things can always be better. We’re going to begin rehearsing next week again.
PAN M 360 : Have you ever felt that sometimes this very real history behind the flamenco gets neglected? Perhaps it’s important to be aware of its origins to get the most out of the experience.
Martin Santangelo : I mean, it only helps to be aware. However flamenco is pretty global, in the sense that it was made by like 28 different cultures. It’s not just Spanish. It has to do with the Northern Africans, the Muslims, the Jews, the Sephardic Jews, the Christians, the Northern Indians who migrated into Spain. And they all kind of mixed together for 900 years. And many of those cultures were repressed and they screamed out and they created flamenco. So of course, it can help to know the origins of this tradition… At the same time, we’re seeing…we’re seeing a lot of oppression of cultures all over the world now. So things historically have not changed. So in one sense, you can identify with what’s going on with the flamenco in the present time as well.
And so if you have the chance to go into the origins, great. If you don’t and you’re just exposed to it and if it’s done correctly, I’m pretty sure that you’ll feel it. You’ll get an understanding. An intuitive understanding.
PAN M 360 : And of course, this program has a special kind of Goya twist. Was this your brainchild?
Martin Santangelo : Yes, I fell in love with Goya about four years ago during the pandemic. I knew of him somewhat, but I didn’t know about him deeply. And you know there’s a great quote from an art critic that we put in the program – “to see Goya is to see ourselves” – and it’s quite true. Goya really reveals who we are, our human nature, our inadequacies, our brutality towards other human beings. And animals too, which is interesting, because he goes into the whole world of bullfighting. He calls it out. He calls out the violence that human beings have towards animals. Something he dealt with all his life. He really loved bullfighting but he hated the violent part of it. And so he really makes us see what violence, what war, what brutality does to one another, the effects of it. Of what we do to each other.
PAN M 360 : Was there one piece in particular that opened the doors so to speak?
Martin Santangelo : Yes there was! It’s called ‘the Follies’, or ‘Los disparates’ in Spanish. It was a series he did towards the end of his life, which many artists today say as the beginning of modern art and abstract art. And it’s a drawing or a lithograph, an engraving of a woman on a horse doing a magic trick or doing a show for an audience. And you look at the lithograph, the image, and you see the first thing you see is an audience. So you’re watching an audience, watching… a show. And it is, it’s amazing. It’s a little voyeuristic. We do it in the show and it’s a woman dancing on top of a horse and there’s a moment that she does that in the show. It’s extraordinary.
And you see this demolished, under nurtured audience watching one of the most beautiful shows in the world. And it’s like a, you know, a magic world for them. So it’s, it’s, it’s really quite a compassionate painting of watching these townsfolk from who don’t have much education witnessing an incredible show. And that’s my dream, you know, to be able to do art for people who really need it. So that was the beginning for me, it opened the doors as you said.
PAN M 360 : And what was your process in translating, you know, a visual medium into a flamenco choreography?
Martin Santangelo : What wasn’t the process! Yeah, I’ve tried everything and anything because it’s a very new thing for me to take a visual artist and translate it into dance or song. What it boils down to is to get a deep understanding of what Goya wants to say. And then, with my language, with the music, the song, and say, all right, how can I say that? Because I began doing the typical thing, which is an imitation of the original images, but it was a bit of a disaster. Because you can’t really do it. But I could steal certain things like his sense of composition. Because he’s a genius in that sense.
After about a year of working on this project, I realised I couldn’t just imitate the images because it didn’t really say anything new. I had to find a meeting point between the emotional storytelling of the flamenco and the narrative storytelling of Goya, of what his images are telling us. And then I began to find my way or at least I’m beginning to find my way.
PAN M 360 : And what can you say of Soledad’s role in all of this?
Martin Santangelo : Soledad’s role in this has been instrumental. She’s been very patient with me, because I’ve spent so many months and weeks and hours talking and talking and talking with her about ideas. And we go back and forth. I talk, she dances, she dances and I watch. She converts a lot of what I have in my mind into physicality. So that’s been, you know, a real gift for me. She’s extraordinary. And we understand each other, which is great.
As far as the other part, the music part, I usually work on that by myself with the musicians. And then I give it to her as a map, the music that’s mostly done, about 90% done. And then she’ll take that and take my ideas and come out with some extraordinary choreography. So we’re co-creators in this process. Absolute co-creators.
PAN M 360 : I see. It must be incredible to finally see your vision come to life after all this time. How many shows do you have lined up ahead of you?
Martin Santangelo : Right now we have a lot of shows in New York. I think about 20 or 25 shows, which is great, because it’ll be like working out the muscles. Now that we’ve broken the ice we are going to keep working the show and just perfect it. There’s so many more things that I’d like to do.
PAN M 360 : So each performance is always a bit different?
Martin Santangelo : A little bit, yeah. And, you know, when we do a show on a Wednesday and a Thursday, I can rehearse on Thursday what we did Wednesday.
PAN M 360 : This sounds exhausting. Especially for such a demanding and cathartic tradition as you say. What’s your secret Martin? Yoga?
Martin Santangelo : Ha, well I swim a lot. That’s my meditation. And yes, it’s exhausting but it’s also so nurturing, this work. Because, first of all, you understand deeper things in life with artists like Goya. I began to understand things, see things in a new way because of him. And of course each performance gives me a lot of energy back. You know, I would be lost without this work.
PAN M 360 : I see, it’s really a give and take. It’s been so interesting to hear you speak about this project. It’s really clear you’ve spent a lot of time trying to get inside the world of Goya. And I find with these sorts of endeavours, at the end of the day, you never really know how these artists truly felt, or where they were really coming from. Sometimes, I wonder what they would think of us.
Martin Santangelo : That would be fascinating.
PAN M 360 : Imagine if Goya was in your audience!
Martin Santangelo : Yeah. I don’t know if he would get up and leave or take me out for a glass of red wine!
PAN M 360 : I like to think he would! It’s been a real pleasure Martin. I’m extremely excited for this performance, I wish you and the team all the best with your performances.
Martin Santangelo : We’re looking forward to it too. Thanks a lot.
Nurtured by the rich cultural mosaic of Montreal, singer-songwriter Gabrielle Cloutier has always been adept at embracing diverse musical styles and forging close connections with numerous musicians. Now, at the cusp of her inaugural release, Chamade, her band has coalesced around seven talented musicians. Together, they have crafted a unique sound that blends vocals, violin, viola, cello, double bass, santuri, and accordion. The gentle, enthralling, and melancholic melodies lie at the core of this invitation to be carried away by the words and melodies.
PAN M 360 : Thanks for being here Gabrielle. And congratulations on the upcoming release of Chamade! Is the album releasing immediately after your show?
Gabrielle Cloutier : Yes, the show is the album launch and it’s also the first performance of this band. We formed this group to record the album and so we haven’t really played together in a show circumstance before. I don’t think people have really heard us yet. I only put a little clip on Facebook here and there. So it’s going to be great to finally play this music for everyone.
PAN M 360 : Well I’ve seen you perform before, so I know the vibe and a bit of what to expect. Your musicality is very interesting. It has this lovely folky, chanson, baroque quality to it. Can you maybe tell us a bit about your background?
Gabrielle Cloutier : Actually I started with a classical background. I studied music in CEGEP. I did a bachelor’s in classical singing and after that, I did my master’s degree at McGill in baroque singing and contemporary classical singing. So I like to touch on a lot of influences in my music.
At the end of my studies at McGill, I got to meet a lot of people and was chilling with musicians from the jazz world, from the Arabic music world. In Montreal, it’s like this, you know. You always meet a lot of musicians from so many different styles. Some of them wanted to start a band during the pandemic, and they thought about me. They had the music written but not really the words and melodies. So we began to jam and, coming from a classical background, I never really did that. The songs came together and we started to have some gigs and residencies and finally I started to really enjoy composing. So my road has changed a bit, but I can use what I got from the classical world and transpose it in my own music.
PAN M 360 : That I can hear. And when I saw you perform, you were playing the accordion and singing too!
Gabrielle Cloutier : Yeah, so this project actually started with me playing accordion with an upright bassist. But finally I decided I just want to sing. So I asked my friend to play accordion in the band. Because the accordion is a very demanding instrument. If I was an accordionist first and then a singer, it wouldn’t be so bad. But to start as a singer and then to learn accordion it’s not the same thing. I want to be free when I sing, and it’s a hard instrument if you really want to be in the moment and fully in connection.
PAN M 360 : Well you sounded quite at ease when I heard you the last time!
Gabrielle Cloutier : I was so stressed!
PAN M 360 : I think you can give yourself a little more credit, but I can understand that! And so do you play other instruments too then?
Gabrielle Cloutier : I play some mediaeval instruments actually, like the chifonie. It’s a rectangle box with only three strings and some notes but it’s basically like a simplified hurdy-gurdy. And I play the citole as well.
PAN M 360 : Okay, so not your typical singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar?
Gabrielle Cloutier : Not really, but I started like that. After all those challenges of learning different instruments I feel like my place is to sing for now.
PAN M 360 : Is the lyrical aspect of songwriting a big draw for you in this project?
Gabrielle Cloutier : Yeah, yeah, but it might be different for me. I really see this project as like…a certain period of a time of my life where these songs just came out really naturally, really easily. I think as artists we live some stuff and the lyrics come to reflect how we are situated in our souls and how we feel at that time. So now I’m somewhere else and might have something different to say.
PAN M 360 : That comes across in your album title, Chamade.
Gabrielle Cloutier : It’s the beat of your heart. There’s an expression in French, “mon coeur bat à la chamade”. It’s like your heart is really full of passion, you know. It’s about the tempo of your heart, it’s a bit kitschy maybe. But that’s what I was feeling and what came to mind.
PAN M 360 : So does it feel like it’s been like a long time coming, this release, or does it all feel new to you?
Gabrielle Cloutier : It’s like new and old at the same time. I’m excited to let go of this album, because it’s been a long time that I’ve spent with these five songs. We have new songs, and I’m excited for those and to see how we can go further with this project. Some people can maybe wait two years before releasing an album. Actually I had a discussion with my bandmates from another project, and we were talking about recording another album in December. And some of them were talking about taking our time and releasing it maybe a year after recording it. I think for me I couldn’t wait that long!
PAN M 360 : And of course do you feel like 2023 is an incredibly weird time to be releasing music into the world?
Gabrielle Cloutier : For sure, and I made a lot of prints of this album, so I don’t know if people will buy it. But it’s kind of like there’s people, there’s society, the industry, but then there’s also your own road. I did it for myself at the end of the day, and I think everyone has to be doing it for themselves. It was a challenge for me as an artist to see if I could make this record, even if it’s received or not. And it helps to have a record, it’s good to have something to show and give people.
PAN M 360 : So how was it navigating the actual logistics of an album release and distribution?
Gabrielle Cloutier : I really learned a lot about this. I didn’t know that I had to take care of copyright stuff, of SOCAN, of distrokid, printing an album, and even choosing the right person to do the mastering. All of that was fine in the end, but the part that was the hardest to deal with was to get some press, from labels, from magazines. I’m just like a small fish in this huge sea you know. And our music is very acoustic you know, not the most pop stuff that will sell.
PAN M 360 : So what can you tell us about the launch show?
Gabrielle Cloutier : It’s definitely going to be more on the soft side of things. The other two bands are also really acoustic, and they fit in the same universe with the music we will perform. To start the evening there will be a string quartet, Quatuor Bazar, and they will actually play a composition of a friend of mine, Nominoë,who arranged a song on the album. He’s going to be playing in the second act, which is a duo performing folk songs from Greece and Turkey.
PAN M 360 : So a lot of different stuff but all in the same chamber universe. And you will play Chamade front to back?
Gabrielle Cloutier : Maybe not in that order, and we have a few more songs. We’re going to have some solos and interludes from the different instruments, yeah, all the musicians are amazing. I’m really grateful that they are in this project with me.
PAN M 360 : You must be really excited for this performance. Do you deal with nerves still?
Gabrielle Cloutier : I’m feeling really fine. I was more nervous when I had to all the logistical work that I didn’t really understand, but now, since yesterday when I went to go to the printer to print the last posters, I’m chilling.We have one last rehearsal, everything is going well, I’m happy, and I think it’s going to be good.
PAN M 360 : We think so too. Thanks again Gabrielle, have a wonderful show!
This Sunday PM at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, AWR Music Productions and GFN Productions present Distant Worlds: music from FINAL FANTASY, the official tour of the FINAL FANTASY Symphony Orchestra, brought to Montreal by the now renowned Orchestre FilmHarmonique.
Launched in 2007 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of FINAL FANTASY, Distant Worlds features music from composer Nobuo Uematsu’s acclaimed FINAL FANTASY video game series, including music from the latest cycle, FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE. Over the decades, other composers have also contributed, including Masayoshi Soken.
These works are performed by a symphony orchestra, a choir, vocal and instrumental soloists drawn from the famous video game. In this case, the conductor is GRAMMY award-winner Arnie Roth. Needless to say, HD images from developers SQUARE ENIX are projected onto giant screens, all in phase with the interpretations.
PAN M 360: What are the qualities of the works on the program, taken from Final Fantasy, a mythical video game that has been around for over 35 years? Arnie Roth: I can answer this by pointing out that in the Distant Worlds concert productions, all of the scores we perform aim to be as close as possible to the way they appeared in the games. We will represent music from the entire 35 years of the FINAL FANTASY series on this concert, and we are including scores from FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH, and the premiere performance of FINAL FANTASY XIV: The Final Day, on this concert.
PAN M 360: Who wrote the arrangements and orchestrations on the program? How was it put together? How do we take the music from video games and transform it into orchestral works? Arnie Roth : The answers would require 3 different in-depth discussions. The Distant Worlds arrangements are put together by teams in Japan as well as by our own arrangements by Eric and Arnie Roth. Many of these are actually original versions from the games, and as such they were supervised by the composers involved : Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, Masayoshi Soken, and more.
PAN M 360: Do you always work with the same scores ? Can the scores evolve over time? Arnie Roth : Yes, in fact we have over 160 FINAL FANTASY scores in our Distant Worlds library. It is a constant process of adding new scores all the time. No 2 concerts have exactly the same repertoire.
PAN M 360: In your opinion, what is the added value of symphonic arrangements of music for video games? Arnie Roth : There are so many. First, understand that one of the unique qualities of all of the FF videogames is the extreme variety of genres and ensembles used on the OST of each game – Rock, Jazz, Symphonic, chamber music ensembles, choral ensembles, solo vocals, and more. The use of the symphony in these concerts comes from the template created first by Nobuo Uematsu in the earliest FF concerts in Japan.
PAN M 360: You work with a number of different orchestras with the same repertoire, so are there any differences in interpretation between the orchestras you work with? If so, what are those specificities ? Arnie Roth : Of course each orchestra we work with around the globe has different strengths. There are many factors including how much rehearsal time we have, what venue we are performing in, etc. However, I can confidently state that there are no discernable differences in interpretation, since I am guiding that specific thing myself in each case.
PAN M 360: Have you ever worked with the FilmHarmonic Orchestra? What do you know about this orchestra?
Arnie Roth : Yes I have, and they have always done a great job, and a pleasure to work with.
PAN M 360: Does your audience consist mainly of gamers who are proud to hear music from their favorite games acquire symphonic luster?
Arnie Roth : Yes, that is mostly correct, though I would make sure to take note of the strong sense of the FF community that takes place with each concert.
PAN M 360: What are your next projects as maestro and musician?
Arnie Roth : We have many Distant Worlds and A New World concerts throughout 2024, some with new themes. There are also many new projects for 2024, and I unfortunately cannot divulge anything at this time.
PAN M 360: Do you think that this symphonic music can interest audiences in the classical, modern and contemporary repertoire for symphony orchestras?
Arnie Roth : Yes, definitely. And I have to say that we have been performing Distant Worlds at the most important venues and orchestra’s for 16 years.
PAN M 360: In any case, your audiences are having a great time with this new orchestral music. Is it more than enough for you to bring happiness to these video game-inclined audiences? Arnie Roth : YES! But do not underestimate my own joy at performing these fantastic scores with musicians all over the globe! PAN M 360: Thank you so much for your collaboration!
Air Conditionné heralds the first release from up-and-coming artist ROM1, the moniker of Romain Peynichou who left his native France to immerse himself in the unique urban fabric of Montréal. Characterised by raw vulnerability and adventurous sonic exploration, his album plays much like a sonic coming of age story. We sat with Romain to learn how it all came to be.
PAN M 360 : Hey ROM1, thanks a lot for being with us today. You’ve just had your first release and it’s clear to anyone who listens to your record that it was a very personal undertaking. There’s a lot going here and so perhaps we can get started at the beginning of this project?
ROM1 : My goal really was to find my own voice. After playing in bands for a long time as a drummer, making other people’s music, it was a time to get alone in the studio and have my music being made with like no compromises.
PAN M 360 : So did you have some idea of what that voice was to begin with or was it really a process of discovery?
ROM1 : Well, there was a lot of exploration for sure. I kind of knew where I was going in the way of having my references and a particular sound in mind, but there was definitely a lot of exploration to get there. And a lot of learning for sure.
PAN M 360 : Can you tell us a bit about your background as a musician?
ROM1 : Yeah, I started playing drums really early because my brother was playing guitar. You know I got into a lot of classic rock music, soul music, always kind of from a drumming perspective, but early on too I was hooked on really nice songs. Some Bill Withers tunes, some Zeppelin riffs, a lot of Chili Peppers as a teenager. And then as I went more deeply into listening to music I discovered more dense, more intricate productions and I think that’s where it really hit for me.
PAN M 360 : What kinds of bands were you playing in?
ROM1 : So a lot of funk bands, rock bands and some jazz. I was at jazz school for a bit.
PAN M 360 : It’s interesting to hear you say that because I felt that even if your album doesn’t necessarily touch on those influences, it was made by someone who has experience in a lot of different styles. But at the end of the day it’s a producer-songwriter album.
ROM1 : Yeah, that’s the music that I love. I love funk music, I love rock music, I love jazz, but the one music that really resonated with me has always been more produced, personal, vulnerable, intimate, more like headphone music rather than live music.
PAN M 360 : Was there some sort of sound in Montréal that you were trying to find?
ROM1 : Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons why I moved to Montréal was for Half Moon Run. In my high school years they were one of my favourite bands and they just represented this city for me. The Dark Eyes album was so impactful just in terms of the songs and the vibe and I got really attached to that record for a bit. And then coming here I listened to a lot of Montréal made music, a lot of Montréal producers, and the feeling of knowing them from afar, sometimes knowing them personally, seeing them around is something that I really value. It makes me feel like I’m part of the city and I think it’s really beautiful to have art that I love around me.
PAN M 360 : And how did the Air Conditionné kind of aesthetic manifest itself?
ROM1 : I had this very specific walk when I was working on the music very deeply, from my old apartment to the studio that I was working in. And yeah, it was just on this walk that I did every day that I noticed different things and I started to see a lot of air conditioning units. And that image just stuck with me. Then as I thought about a lot of the lyrics and the themes started to unveil themselves, it was a lot about growing up and what the process of being conditioned to be a certain way brings about. I started therapy kind of when I was deep in writing lyrics so a lot of that came through and I liked that the title Air Conditionné had different layers of meanings.
PAN M 360 : For me the album title was suggestive of work, the work always needing to be done on ourselves in a way. And that we’re building and repairing and installing ourselves kind of all the time.
ROM1 : Yeah, I really like that too. It wasn’t my original one but it definitely works. For me it was about how an air conditioner regulates the temperature of a room and you know regulates the atmosphere. And for me that’s a lot of what music does also, you know, like listening to a lot of music in public spaces and restaurants and bars and seeing how different music can impact a room in different ways. The power that the music that you choose has. That for me is very interesting. Air Conditionné could be interpreted in different ways. It can be light but there’s also a deep meaning there and I also liked the idea of an era of time. In French we say “l’ère du temps” also, which means just a period of time, which I thought was also cool.
PAN M 360: Was there any reason in particular the whole record is in French, for someone who is perfectly bilingual and kind of at ease with both cultures?
ROM1 : Well I started writing in English at first. The very first demos were in English and it just didn’t resonate with me as much. And then as I was working on the music, the Hubert Lenoir record came out, PICTURA DE IPSE : Musique directe, which is the record that completely changed everything for me in terms of what I wanted to do. I was writing in French already a bit but that just sealed the deal. There’s still some parts of the record, especially some voice memos and everything that are in English, because English is a huge part of my life, it’s about 50-50. But because a lot of the record is about me growing up and what that was like, that was all in French, so it made sense for me to do that.
PAN M 360: Can you tell us more about the composition process exactly? Your songs have a lot of intricate detail and moving parts and I’m wondering how you worked it all out.
ROM1 : A lot of the songs started with a synth patch that I really like, a bass line, sometimes even just drums. I’m not in any way a pianist or a guitar player. I don’t really compose music. It was about creating textures and creating grooves and making those landscapes and then making a song at the end, with the parts and dynamics and lyrics. It wasn’t really like sitting down at a piano, figuring out a chord progression, a melody over it, and then recording it and adding stuff. I was really interested in the production part of the process and that’s what I had the most fun with. And then the lyrics and the melodies came pretty much at the end.
PAN M 360 : I imagine this whole process must have been very cathartic almost, but from start to finish, did you feel you underwent a sort of transformation to bring your vision to life? You said you wanted to find your voice and do you feel like you did?
ROM1 : Yeah, absolutely. I mean now the music that I want to make is a bit different than what I’ve made in the sense that I’ve learned so much and I think I would want to do things differently moving forward. But it’s super liberating to me to have finished this project, because I’ve been wanting to make music for myself in this very personal way for as long as I can remember I never really did it. I never had enough faith in myself that I could do that and now that I’ve proven to myself that I could make something of that size, I’m way more confident in my ability to do it again and better and to just keep doing it.
PAN M 360 : Was there anything that surprised you in the process of making an album from start to finish?
ROM1 : Yeah, well the sharing process has not been what I expected. I mean I’m just thinking about that now because that’s what I’ve been doing recently, like the record came out a month ago. While I was making the album I was also really looking forward to sharing it and promoting it and it turns out I really don’t like that part. I think it was probably the most difficult part for me. I thought that the most difficult part was going to be the isolation and being really strict, having really strict discipline to get that record done especially when you’re an independent music maker but it turned out the promotion and putting my face out there and really like showing myself in this really vulnerable way. It was important for me to show myself authentically and to be very vocal about what this record represented to me and that was extremely difficult.
PAN M 360 : Well I think it was worth it! So what’s next for ROM1?
ROM1 : Some… maybe a little bit of disappearing at first. I’m really excited to open a new chapter of my life, I just moved to a new apartment. I was telling my friend last night at dinner, for three years it felt like I had two jobs, my regular job and my music job that didn’t pay and that I had to finance my second job with my first job. And now I’m happy to only have one job and there’s already new music that I’m excited to work on but I think I’m going to do it differently and hopefully I get another record out there in a few years and hopefully some songs before then.
PAN M 360 : And maybe just to end on, could you tell us what your favourite song is on the album? Or the tune that means the most to you?
ROM1 : I think the song that I’m the most proud of is J’ai rien d’autre à vivre, which is the last song of the record. It’s the song that I had the most significant moment with. It’s the most songlike song on the record and it’s perhaps the only song that was really written as a song, like I had the whole parts before I produced it. I’m really attached to the lyrics because that’s something that I was feeling very strongly when I was working on the album. I think that’s probably the most meaningful one to me.
PAN M 360 : For me too. Thanks again ROM1.
As the energy of the M for Montréal festival reaches its crescendo on closing night, we had the privilege of sitting down with the psych-rock outfit Hippie Hourrah! Comprising of Cédric Marinelli on voice, Gabriel Lambert on guitar, and Miles Dupire-Gagnon on drums, the band shares insights into their sonic journey just before hitting the stage for a night of transcendental musical exploration.
PAN M 360 : Hello Hippie Hourrah! Thanks for making the time before your show. You’ll be on stage in a few hours, does the band do anything in particular before a gig. Any kind of pre-show ritual or something?
Gabriel : Well I don’t know. We just goof around.
Miles : Yeah, but then again a ritual means it happens everytime, and sometimes we don’t.
PAN M 360 : You don’t get particularly nervous or anything?
Cedric: We’re getting too old for that. We know what we’re in for,we get disappointed if it’s shit but we just try and have fun out there.
PAN M 360 : As a “psychedelic” rock band, do you make room for a lot of spontaneity in the live set?
Gabriel : For sure, there’s quite a bit of that. We kind of have some organised jams, and sometimes we surprise ourselves by going other places entirely, just going off script.
PAN M 360 : Has the script been to play mostly off of Exposition Individuelle? Have you been trying out some newer material perhaps?
Miles : Did you see our set earlier? We play most songs from our latest record and then some from the previous record.
Gabriel : I mean the album came out in April so not too much newer stuff yet.
PAN M 360 : How did your earlier set go?
Miles : Wellwe played just a 30 minute set.
Cedric : Yeah for the music business. You know music business people.
Gabriel : Yeah it was an industry show but I would rather play an industrial show
PAN M 360 : And what exactly is the industry these days? Do you find that it’s still relevant or it’s becoming more and moreirrelevant?
Cedric : That’s the big question
Gabriel : Yeah big question. I was just talking about it with some people last week. It’s like there’s kind of a two-speed industry right now. The old industry that’s still going and that’s trying to keep the fire alive, and then there’s everything else and so it doesn’t feel so coherent anymore.
MIles : I would say that everybody has good intentions but I don’t find that the priorities are to get the money to the right people. I mean musicians are always the last ones to get something, which makes sense in a bureaucratic way, but musicians are the ones who need the money.
Cedric : At the same time, when we started, there was nothing for us to start from. We started during the pandemic. Miles had broken his arm. He told me I have some time, and together we started trying out some stuff and now we’re a band. It’s cool, in the sense that we have a good team with us, we work really hard, we do a lot of touring. Sure we’re new, and so nobody knows us, but we’re going to keep making music and when it works, it works, and when it doesn’t work, well, we drink.
PAN M 360 : I’d love to know the story behind the band name. Was it easy? Because usually that’s the hardest part.
Cedric : Well we were still not a serious band yet and I just said it and we thought it was kind of stupid, but still it just took on.
Miles : I’ve met a lot of people that don’t really like the name actually.
Cedric : But what’s funny is that on Instagram, there’s like a bunch of hippies that follow us because of our name. That’s so funny.
PAN M 360 : Speaking about Instagram, do you find that it’s a necessary tool for the band? Miles : Well it seems to be the only thing….It used to be like, even just three years ago with Facebook, that you were on tour and there was an event for your show. Okay, there’s 250 people interested. But now there’s just nobody there..
Cedric : I try to do DIY stuff. Like to promote the arty side of the band. Like the covers, stuff like that, all the visuals, that’s what I do. To maintain our identity.
PAN M 360 : Your music is most often described as ‘psychedelic rock’, well ‘nonchalant psychedelic rock’ for this program, but I mean do you think that’s a descriptor or do you resent it a bit?
Miles : I don’t think so. It’s just rock.
Gabriel : The danger is that if you call it psychedelic rock, then people have a really kind of clear picture in their minds of what to expect. And while we touch on those influences we’re not exactly Paisley rockers from the 60’s.
PAN M 360 : Well anyone just needs to listen to “Pur sang rouge”. Awesome song.
Cedric : Thanks. I personally don’t want to do just one thing. When I started doing the demo for that with Gab, he gave me a little keyboard and I wanted to do a kind of rap tune, and the guys laughed at me, you know, whatever. In the end even if it’s not rap, we compromise, and we find something that sounds cool.
PAN M 360 : And is that how the songs come about, kind of with a jam or something?
Miles : No, not really. It should though, haha.
Gabriel : Yeah, it should, but it doesn’t.
Cedric : I think every song has its own story behind it.
Gabriel : I think that if we were jamming to play songs, we would just record hours and hours of just improvised music. I would have a hard time limiting it to just five minutes you know.
PAN M 360 : I know the visual element is really a big part of the band, do you make an effort to bring that to the live shows?
Gabriel : Well, tonight we are going to have some projections actually, which is pretty cool. And I don’t know if you’ve seen Cedric, but there’s something going on there. We’re doing some stuff with our costumes, and that’s something we can do on tour too, because bringing lights is costly.
PAN M 360 : All your albums have been really well produced with a tight kind of pop-production. You’ve got a bunch of overdubs and stuff. Do you feel the need to compensate in the live show with more energy, more jams, or something.
Miles : Well It can be different, too. Personally, I see the live set as a different album, a different creative aspect. I mean, a live show that sounds exactly like the album, personally, would get bored of it.
Cedric : Yeah, I mean we already tracked it. We want to do something different now.
PAN M 360 : So does a song like “Pur sang rouge” open up more in the live show?
Miles : Ha, that’s the only one we play kind of as it is.
Cedric : I think it’s great that we have one song that finishes. Because we just tend to do the opposite and just have perpetual jams going on.
PAN M 360 : Fair enough. So what’s next for the band?
Gabriel : We’re hoping for Mexico. It’s not sure but we all just did like five interviews with the press in Mexico. So it seems there’s some interest. We’ll see!
Vancouver-born indie darlings Winona Forever released their third album, Acrobat just earlier this year, but they haven’t shown any signs of slowing down. Coming off the back of an extensive US and Canada tour, plus their first foray into Europe supporting Ginger Root, the four-piece is headed to Quebec to play the M for Montreal festival. PAN M 360 caught up with Ben Robertson (guitar, keys, vocals), Rowan Webster-Shaw (guitar, vocals), and Alex Bingham (drums) prior to the show to learn more about their unannounced new album, their process, and the journey from a DIY Vancouver group to an international tour-worthy band.
PAN M 360: You’ve just wrapped up your first European tour and a big American tour, right? What was that experience like?
Rowan Webster-Shaw: It was really fun.
Ben Robertson: Yeah, Europe was really fun.Ginger Root had a really good crowd. A lot of people spoke English, which I guess I could have been assuming, but it was pretty okay to navigate. We were driving on the other side of the road for a bit there. And like, the wheel’s on the other side, but it was really cool.
PAN M 360:How did it feel to be touring alongside Ginger Root after semi-knowing each other virtually for so long?
BR: Yeah, we were supposed to play together before COVID, as with many things that we were supposed to do before COVID. I’ve been a really big fan of them for a while, and I was kind of waiting for their moment to really pop off which happened with “Loretta” (2021). And thankfully, we’re on the same label. They’re cool people. And it came about that we were kind of hoping to get to Europe, and they were able to get some dates locked in. So it feels really lucky.
PAN M 360:Were there any dates in Europe that felt especially memorable?
Alex Bingham: In particular, the first place we played was Utrecht which was outside Amsterdam, and it was a pretty cool place.
RWS: I think we’re all in agreement that the Netherlands was our favourite place.
BR: Yeah, we like the Dutch sensibility, you know? About their dam approach, that’s pretty cool. Their biking, all their canals.
AB: I bike a lot, so I appreciated the crazy amount of biking.
RWS: They have like one and a half bikes per person.
PAN M 360:Have you mostly been playing songs off of Acrobat and Feelgood, or are you working on any songs we haven’t heard yet?
AB: Yeah, we’ve been playing a few new songs that we recorded this past year. And then some older stuff.
BR: It’s almost like a couple of songs per record. Like we still play stuff from our first record. Only a couple, but it helps to keep some of that energy. Which is interesting, because it’s like old vibes. But also, for people who haven’t seen us before, they get to see a bunch of stuff we’ve done. Right? The eras.
PAN M 360: You guys obviously started out in the Vancouver scene, then had a stint in Montreal—what do you find are the biggest differences between being a band in each city?
RWS: I mean, I feel Vancouver is just smaller. With us being from here, like, we have a little bit more of a community around playing music here. And a lot of our friends who play in bands and stuff are still here. So that was definitely part of why I wanted to come back to Vancouver. And also just kind of being ready for a change again, because we’d been in Montreal for a few years, which was the reason we basically went there in the first place.
BR: Yeah, we were ready for a change having played the same places a lot here in Vancouver.
AB: And then all those places are closed now.
BR: Yeah, little did we know that would be a long break. But I think in Montreal, we were starting to get our footing, and then COVID hit, so then we made a record instead. And then one thing I’d say is that we’ve been lucky with some of the grants in BC. I think in in Quebec, they’re obviously a little more geared towards Francophone artists, which makes sense. But we weren’t really taking advantage of that. We’ve kind of been able to be an export artist from BC, like through Music BC and Creative BC to get some funding. And that’s been really helpful, because there are certain things we didn’t really think we could do, and then there’s actually money for it. And so that’s kind of cool. I think it was healthy for us to try something else. And we did our first US tour from Montreal. We were trying to push ourselves in a few ways. And then now we tour the US from here, but I never would have thought we could. I don’t know. It’s just kind of a mentality thing to keep changing it up.
RWS: I feel like we’ve got to do a bunch of things that I definitely wanted to, but kind of never thought that we would be able to do. Like going to Europe, doing a month and a bit in the US. It’s been pretty crazy.
PAN M 360:Vancouver is known for its DIY scene when it comes to shows—janky house shows, illegal venues, and community-run spaces—do you have a favourite memory of a show in the early days of the band?
RWS: I remember them being really fun. Definitely a lot sloppier. (The three of them crack up.)
BR: I remember one time, we were gonna play a new song Rowan had written—it was “Shrek-Chic.” And I think the man drank about a whole bottle of wine. Our friend had recorded the show, and it was just unusable. But in the best way unusable. I think that it’s something we keep in mind. The energy from those shows was really fun. There’s a place called The Matador that was like a literal basement of a house. And the 60 people that could fit in there felt like a huge amount of energy. So I think that’s where we started. And we couldn’t really just keep doing that forever. But it’s also still, like, the kind of thing that we find fun. Our last show before the pandemic was a house show. It was really fun. I remember climbing all over Alex’s drum kit and just like, electrocuting myself on the mic.
AB: Yeah, getting to play shows like that is some of the most fun.
RWS: They’re both cool. I think it’s definitely something we try and translate when we play larger spaces and more legitimate things.
AB: It is hard, though. When the crowd isn’t like, falling over themselves at the show.
BR: It’s a little bit more of a mentality than a reality. Maybe you bring a certain energy on stage, even though the crowd isn’t so directly responding right in your face. But we played a couple of shows on this Europe run where the crowd was kind of right there, especially in Copenhagen, where we were in this little fishbowl of people. And if I said something on the mic, they could respond and it was pretty intimate in that way. So I don’t know—if someone is to like, jump in the crowd or be kind of weird, some people would really like that. They’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve never seen a band do that.’ And it’s like, ‘Oh, man. That’s all we do.’
PAN M 360: Talking now about Acrobat as a whole, was there anything about making that record that really surprised you? Any challenges that were new to you?
AB: Uh… Yes. (They all laugh.)
BR: Dude, it was so easy. (Laughs)
AB: For me, at least, it’s a lot easier to know what a song is supposed to sound like if we’ve played it live before. I personally get a sense of what the song is at that point. But all of this stuff was kind of just recorded in our basement, and no one had heard it. We had played the stuff together, but it was a lot of re-recording stuff and searching for what this song was. And it took a long time.
BR: Yeah, it probably shouldn’t have taken us that long to make nine songs.
RWS: But we kind of had unlimited time too, and the home studio.
BR: Rowan and I were also learning more about production. And then we had ideas and trying to get piano sounds was new. It was certainly a bit of a head-scratcher to try something new. And to Alex’s point, there isn’t necessarily a goal of like, ‘Oh, man, I gotta do this, and then it’ll translate on stage,’ or whatever. It was kind of just in the bubble of recording. So I think I think we didn’t make it that easy on ourselves. But we did persevere to get some tracks that I still think were a good use of time. And we play the ones that feel good to play live. And some of them, we haven’t really played live, but people like them online or what have you, and that’s cool too.
To contrast it, I don’t know if we’ve announced this, but we have another album. We’ve done like 17 songs since then that we all just cut live, just to really feel differently about that. And the results are really different. Kind of. I mean, not that different but it feels much more like we edited by playing together versus editing by being producer people. So yeah, I think I think it would have been pretty different. But yeah, I don’t know. We had a Rhodes and a Wurlitzer and a piano and different rented stuff on Acrobat and experimented, and I think we tried to keep it interesting.
PAN M 360:Listening through the album, you can tell a lot of editing and refining went into the process. Was there a lot of music that didn’t make the cut for it or ended up being better for your soloproject?
AB: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that didn’t… That we didn’t finish.
BR: Yeah, there’s stuff we didn’t finish. There are a couple of things we were doing live that we dropped. I also had some extra songs that I just made into my own EP. The ones that kind of stuck through were, I think, kind of the best ones. But some of them were just getting tricky, so we stopped working on them. I think that was probably a product of the mentality. I know people who didn’t have much creativity at all during the pandemic, like, it’s not really a super inspiring time. Especially in Montreal, where it was kind of locked down around 7 or 8 PM. Not a super normal time.
PAN M 360: Speaking of that next thing, how far along in the process are you for the new album?
BR: It’s into mastering! We tried to just do it a lot quicker, tried to make more, and get more past the finish line. And that’s felt a little bit more like how we used to make records. We did our first album mostly live, and so there’s something intuitive there. I mean, we’re a band that has live chemistry, and we can record live. Although the first couple of tracks we did for that one, I was wondering, like, ‘Can we do this?’ We’d just been in editing mode for a little bit, which is cool. I like music that sounds like that. But I also like music that sounds really raw. So we got those first couple days of tracking done, and I thought it sounded great. So that felt really cool to know that we could do either.
AB: We’ve sort of always wanted to do something new every time we go to make whatever the project is at the time. So I think any approach is valid, and we’ll see.
RWS: A live thing is pretty nice because it’s just so fast.
BR: We’ve had a few different workflows, and they’ve needed to change over time. It used to be that Alex would handle all the recording and mixing because he went to audio school. And Rowan and I would be like, what, mic is that? Why are you doing that? And slowly, we kind of learned our own takes on things, and now the process is a little bit more democratic. But also going to a studio is nice—someone else does that stuff and you get to just be like, ‘Alright, are we locked in together? Are we playing the way we want to?’
We recorded in New Westminster at a place called Little Red Sounds on Gabriola Island at Noise Floor. And both had good engineers and producers that worked there, so we got to just kind of go and be the band.
RWS: And that was something we hadn’t done before.
AB: We did a decent amount of pre-production on some of it. And then other stuff was more in the studio. And that was kind of fun to just be able to focus on like, what you’re playing and what sound you’re putting into it instead of, having to think about like, ‘Oh, how am I going to mic this drum?’
PAN M 360: Did you find that any of the music shifted as you went through that process, or did it feel pretty locked in?
RWS: Some of it was fairly locked in. But some of it, especially towards the end of the process, was more like, we had ideas but they only really came together as we played.
BR: What I noticed was like, let’s say you’re overdubbing just bass on something or just guitar. You do your three-minute take, and then you hear back one thing. And if you’re tracking the whole band, and you’re all just fine-tuning on the song—like, okay, let’s lean back here, let’s really push this harder—and then you hear the whole song back through the speakers, and you’ve been in control of the whole song. That kind of puts power in the band to be in control of the whole thing, instead of getting into a loop of changing parts or overdubbing something, and just doing things one at a time. It’s just a little bit different.
RWS: Definitely. Being able to listen to everything and not just focus on if what you played is perfect. Focusing on whether everything feels good together and being okay with letting some things go if it’s the right call.
BR: You bring the control into the room when you’re just like, ‘Alright, let’s all play.’
RWS: You know if everything is working, or if it’s not.
PAN M 360: What else can we expect from the new album?
BR: Well, there’s no piano. Well, it isn’t noticeable. It’s a bit of a return to some more guitar vibes and some higher-energy stuff. I think the feeling that it has cohesively is sort of live-off-the-floor. It’s a range of songs—including some songs that Rowan and Ruby (the bass player), and I wrote lyrically together. We would sit here with acoustic guitars and write together, and that’s something we haven’t done for a while. Or ever. Usually, maybe one of us would bring a song and then we collaborate with the rhythm and kind of go from there. But yeah, some group vocals, stuff like that. I think there’s new territory on it for us.
PAN M 360: When you’re working on something new, do you ever struggle with making it fit a certain ‘Winona Forever’ sound? Or do you feel pretty comfortable letting the band’s sound evolve as you do?
RWS: I think we generally just want to keep moving forward. So I don’t really feel any kind of drawbacks about bringing an idea to this group, and it can be different.
BR: I think it’s kind of a mentality. I find it tricky sometimes. But if you’re an artist, you might be like ‘Oh, here’s my next idea. And it’s really different.’ And then their best friends are like, ‘Alright, it still sounds like you.’ But you can’t see that. You’re doing the same kind of melodies and chords, and it’s got a different energy, but I’m still seeing the throughline. Playing the Acrobat stuff live, I think I had the kind of moment when I was playing the Wurlitzer live. And we now have a moment in the set where we’re kind of rocking out a bit, then do the Wurlitzer stuff, then a pretty slow song, then rock out a bit more. And that’s been fun. And I think it’s kind of funny to still play some of the stuff that we’ve played for years and years. But then once you’re playing it, it kind of brings that same feeling that the band’s had for quite a while now. And I think it’s pretty cool that we still have that.
When continents collide, they make a thunderous sound. Al-Qasar create the soundtrack to that fission. Arabian fuzz, they term it, a vision that’s brazenly electric and deeply connected to its roots. The band was started in the Barbès neighborhood of Paris by producer Thomas Attar Bellier, who brought together musicians from France, Lebanon, the USA, Morocco, Algeria, Armenia and Egypt.
PAN M 360 : Hey Thomas, thanks for taking the time. Are you tuning in from Montreal then?
Thomas Attar Bellier : Yeah, we just arrived a couple hours ago. I don’t know if you know it but I’m at Biftek Bar.
PAN M 360 : Of course. Is it the band’s first time performing in Quebec?
Thomas : It is yeah, and even for me it’s my first time performing in Canada actually. Even though I lived in the US for so long, we’re very excited.
PAN M 360 : And so are we. Al-Qasar is a really interesting project that you have. Did you always have this vision of making Arabian desert rock?
Thomas : Well personally I come from the psychedelic scene. This is the scene I grew up in, this is the scene I started touring in when I was a kid. I grew up in France, moved to California at a pretty young age, and then I was immediately exposed to the whole stoner, psychedelic stuff. But at the same time, I did always have an interest in North African music. Growing up in Paris, I was exposed to a lot of, you know, really cool oud players, percussionists, singers, and so on. So that was, you know, that was a bit of my bipolar musical upbringing.
And there came a time where I was in LA, collaborating with a Jordanian poet. His name is Farid Al Madain and he came up with the idea, he said, man, why don’t I write some radical poetry in the style of Ahmed Fuadnag – the revolutionary Egyptian poet – and you can compose some really cool psychedelic tracks to go with it. We can do something completely new where we can have this psychedelic rock project with influences from North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, with radical lyrics where we use classical Arabic in a way that it’s rarely been used before.
That was the first version of the idea and then the idea grew to include even more influences because I was really into the Turkish psychedelic scene at the time, which is a scene which was already kind of accomplishing that fusion of old Turkish poetry and old Persian poetry, and mixing it with more like Western psych rock influences, you know?
So those were the early beginnings of the band and that was five years ago now, since then the project evolved a lot. But yeah, the first sessions were very, it was just organic. It was like Farid was just writing poetry and he would just translate it for me and it would just inspire the musical aspects and we would just go back and forth a bunch. But the thing is, Farid’s only a poet, he’s not really a singer. So I had to be really, you know, on top of the musical and melodic aspects.
PAN M 360 : Well your album really shines in those respects. Hobek Thawrat and Sham System especially are some bangers.
Thomas : Thanks, that’s really cool because actually on “Hobek Thawrat” the singer is Alsarah. And we’re actually performing with her here in Montreal. Because you know, at core this band is a collective and the idea is to always collaborate with different artists as much as possible, try to rotate the lineup, perhaps some guests and so on. And Alsarah is someone we’ve been working with a lot lately. We did six festivals with her last summer in Europe and Africa. And she’s back with us in Montreal for two gigs. So that’s really exciting. Because she’s Sudanese, but she lives in New York. So it made sense to invite her for these gigs.
PAN M 360 : I saw that Lee Ranaldo played on Who are We?, that must have been really cool. How did that happen?
Thomas : Yeah, the connection with Lee happened through a mutual friend of ours, the gonzo poet Ron Whitehead from Louisville, Kentucky. He’s a guy I have collaborated with over the years. He’s like the last of the beat poets, you know, he’s like this old school guy who’s like carrying the flame of Ginsburg and Kerouac. He used to hang with all those guys and so on. And when I sent him the demos for this new album we’re doing with Al-Qasar, he was like, man, you’ve got to get Thurston or Lee on this record. And I was like, man, I’m into that.
So he made the connection and Lee immediately said, yeah, I’m really digging this sound,
I’m in. That was really cool and he must have sent me like more than 20 guitar tracks. He recorded so much material for the track and it took me I think three days to sort through it and you know just like produce it. At the same time it was breaking my heart because I had to cut a lot of stuff so you know I got all these secret Lee Ranaldo tracks sitting in my hard drive.
PAN M 360 : Amazing. And It’s amazing too just how many moving parts there are in this project. It must be a logistical nightmare.
Thomas : Of course that’s what a lot of people say and I totally agree. But at the end of the day it’s so worth it. You know this project is so fulfilling, in terms of the musicianship we get ot exchange but also culturally, like I feel it was really important for me to do something that was a bit more representative of who we are today as a society you know, like how multicultural we all are. I’m not even talking philosophically, I’m talking like in our daily lives, you live in a big city today, you’re going to interact with people from all over the world. And their culture will permeate in the vibe of your neighbourhood, your city, and so on. And eventually, it’s gonna be part of your life too.
I think that Paris is a really good example for this. Paris has been a very Arab city for about a 100 years, you know, and it’s really a place where in every field, you know, from arts to food, to language, where Arab culture is really present, and I feel like the mainstream is trying to repress it. But at the same time in their daily lives, they totally still eat couscous.
PAN M 360 : Well in Montreal we just had the Festival du Monde Arabe and it was nice to see a lot of people there. And after hearing a lot of traditional Arab styles it’s very cool to hear it in this rock context. It pushes things forward you know. I imagine people must really dig what you do on stage. What are the logistics of getting this band playing live?
Yeah so the band’s been touring a lot more this year, worldwide, so we’ve decided to simplify a bit the lineup with Sacha Vikan who’s a French Armenian drummer, Guillaume Théodin who’s a French bass player, and Sibel Durgut, who’s a Turkish singer, and she also plays percussion and kawala, traditional flute, and lead vocals, and myself on saz and guitar. The band started with more musicians on stage, but it was really hard to make it happen and it wasn’t that viable financially. So we just had to simplify, but now it’s like the simplification doesn’t feel like we’re losing some quality or whatever. It’s actually the opposite because now it’s really solidified into a core lineup of people on stage.
PAN M 360 : And in your live performance, do things kind of naturally get more kind of jammy and loose compared to the record, which is kind of relatively tight you know.
Thomas : Yeah man you’re absolutely right. That’s a bit my style of production in the studio. I like things to be super tight. You know every transition to be a slap in the face. But yeah you’re right in the sense that having this core lineup and having played with them a lot lately has made it a bit more like second nature to easier to introduce jams in the show.
PAN M 360 : And so what can we expect at the Montreal performance then?
Thomas : So it’s going to be Alsarah on vocals, as I mentioned earlier, so we’re definitely going to do this “Hobek Thawrat” track from the last record for which she wrote the lyrics. And yeah, we’re going to do a set with her that we’ve been working on all summer. It’s going to be really good, it’s actually going to be all Al-Qasar songs except one, which will be one of her tunes. We love playing with her. Last time we played with her was in September, we played in Tunis, a really cool festival in the old Medina. And then before that we were on a European tour together and it’s, you know, like getting back on stage with her is just like, you know, the vibe is at 110%.
PAN M 360 : Do you notice a difference in the reaction from the crowds in North Africa versus Europe or the States?
Thomas : Oh, for sure. It’s really interesting because it’s pretty subtle sometimes. Some interesting shows we played were like Egypt and Tunisia, where obviously Secret Service was present in the audience. And it’s like, you know, you’re being watched, but also like audience members know they’re being watched, too. So you feel like people are trying to stay pretty composed and measured, but others just don’t care. And they just want to enjoy and have fun, you know.
But even, you know, through Europe, we so many different behaviours, depending on the country. What’s cool with the band is that we’ve been invited to seated jazz festivals, but we’ve also been invited to like electronic music festivals where we play at 3am. And I love that, you know, it keeps you on your toes.
PAN M 360 : I mean, if you’ve never played Montreal before you’re going to love it, because we love our music here. And you’ve got two live shows in fact. You must be tired!
Thomas : I mean touring is really hard and you get really tired. But the cool thing with this project is that we’re really just like a group of close friends. So the vibe is always super positive, you know. And it’s a privilege, actually, to be a touring artist. Whenever I want to complain, I just need to remind myself like, dude, look at the life you’re living. This is a privileged life guy, like, enjoy it to the max, enjoy it to the fullest.
PAN M 360 : Thanks Thomas, we know it’s going to be a really great show already.
‘Selfhood’ is the debut EP from Montreal DIY artist Everly Lux. Recorded and produced with a women/non-binary-only team, this 7-song journey is an ode to becoming and belonging to yourself. Using poetic lyrics, each song is a story that aims to dig deep into the dichotomies of love, grief, violence and reality.
PAN M 360 : Hey Everly, thanks for being here. Congratulations on the release of Selfhood. For your first release you already have such a strong artistic persona. Maybe you could tell us how it all came to be.
Everly Lux: Well this has all been really interesting to me because I wasn’t necessarily planning on releasing acoustic folk music. I wasn’t even listening to that much folk. I have always been a part of a lot of other projects, more pop sort of stuff. I played in an indie-rock band for a while but none of none of these projects really worked out, and then while I was studying music for about six years, I was kind of too busy to really think about an artistic identity and all that. Finally I hit some sort of crossroads and I said, okay, I’m going to try and get myself some grants and focus on my music for a year and in that time Everly Lux was created.
PAN M 360 : So was this folk style a new direction or something you’ve explored for a while by yourself?
Everly Lux: It’s sort of a recent thing. I think it was like in early 2021 that I wrote “Is it True” which is the one song that I’ve written that was different from anything else I had done. It felt like a new project, a new sound, a new identity. Soon after I went on a huge road trip. I drove to LA for three months and it was during this time that selfhood kind of began to take shape. This word just stuck to me, and then when I came back with all of this baggage I wrote all the other songs.
PAN M 360 : It’s interesting you call your album Selfhood when you took on a whole new persona of Everly Lux. How do you reconcile these two identities? Do you see Everly as your alter-ego or more your true self?
Everly Lux: Yeah, well, good question. I mean one of the themes of this album is truth, like there’s a lot of mentions of that and I think my take is that there are many truths and I feel Everly is just one of my true selves. Selfhood is not only about being your static self but it’s a behaviour, it’s an action, it’s an act of becoming yourself. So it implies change, it implies that it’s a process and something that will always need to be done.
PAN M 360 : Of course a big part of the Everly identity seems to be this weird and wonderful sort of aesthetic. So where does your draw to the surreal come from?
Everly Lux : I think I have always felt like an alien and I think that comes across musically too. I wanted to make something different and more experimental than most of the pop music I was hearing. I have a bachelor’s in contemporary music composition too, so I was exposed to super dissonant super weird stuff, but then that stuff was not very accessible because people don’t relate to it. So I wanted to like take that kind of dissonance and edge and put it into something more digestible and also beautiful. One of the most important things for me is originality, so I care a lot about doing something different.
PAN M 360 : How do you go about writing your songs? Do you have a process or not really?
Everly Lux : Yeah, I have many, like, different approaches, but I work a lot with titles. I will brainstorm until I arrive at some sort of word or concept. And then musically there’s always things I want to explore like oh I want to explore this key or this style. Sometimes I’ll get obsessed with one track from another artist and be like I want to do something like that. I feel melodies come naturally to me and chords is like the easy part, so I spend a lot of time on the lyrics and the poetry. It’s very important to me, I hope people read them. That’s why I make these booklets.
PAN M 360 : Did you have any qualms about writing in English versus French or anything like that?
Everly Lux : My first solo project was more bilingual for sure. I’ve always been into languages. I lived in Germany and I speak German and have even made some German music too. I think when I created Everly Lux there was some notion of like trying to make it financially sustainable and you know how the market is. But also just thinking about the artists I listen to and what languages they sing in, not too many of them are singing in French. The industry in Quebec too is just all the same dudes plugged into like three labels. I wanted to get away from that and so a big part of my vision is to work with female and non-binary artists.
PAN M 360 : We all know how dire the industry is these days. As a newly independent artist who do you see as an exemplar of what the independent musician can do in 2023?
Everly Lux : I thinkevery artist has their preferences. Some artists really love studio recording and working on albums and others prefer to play live as much as possible. One artist I really like is Aldous Harding and she plays so much, I mean she tours like insane. And that’s kind of what I’d like to do, play shows like all the fucking time. A lot of artists I like are based in the UK, like Anna B Savage. She just released an album and it’s really amazing. Lisa O’Neil too, she’s in Ireland. And here, of course there’s Helena Deland. I admire what she’s achieved and she also tours a lot, she’s going on tour right now.
PAN M 360 : How did you feel about distributing your music? Did you have your reservations about putting it on streaming services?
Everly Lux : I don’t support Spotify, but everyone else uses that, so I put my music on there.
I think at this point I need to be visible, so the exposure is worth more than anything. It’s kind of like how it goes. You have to play shows.
PAN M 360 : And you have a show coming up soon?
Everly Lux : Yes, I have a show on Monday at Ursa with William Duval. His music is very touching and heartbreaking. And Holly McLachlan. It’s going be really lovely, we named the show ‘Folk-Arc in Three Acts’.
PAN M 360 : Will you be playing songs mostly off of Selfhood then?
Everly Lux : Yeah, but actually I’m going to play a new song that I just wrote this week. It’s really exciting for me right now because I’m going back into the creation phase of writing more music and I’m grateful that I’m not despising music after releasing my album. I’m just excited and enthusiastic in spite of everything, in spite of the industry, I’m glad.
PAN M 360 : We’re glad too. Thanks, Everly.
Mamadou Koïta is a singer-songwriter, virtuoso percussionist and heir to a musical tradition handed down from generation to generation. A very active musician, he has already performed numerous times across the country and elsewhere, and over the years has joined forces with several musicians who are also well known on the Montreal and Quebec music scene.
Tomorrow, Mamadou Koïta will be launching his first career album, in what promises to be one of the most exhilarating concerts of his career! This first opus, entitled Terry, brings together songs that continue the storytelling lineage from which he comes from while tackling subjects that are close to his heart and that touch him more personally.
On the eve of this concert launch, PAN M 360 spoke with Mamadou Koïta about his album, his inspirations, and the people who have accompanied him since the start of his musical career in Quebec.
PAN M 360: Hello!You come from a musical family, correct?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: Yes, I come from a family of griots. When we say griots, we mean people who give out messages. It was the griots who played for the village chiefs. In my family, my grandfather did it, then my father, then me. And it was these people who gave messages on behalf of the village chief: if things were going well, if things were going badly, if a child was lost…
PAN M 360: What led you to create this project, Terry? What is the origin of this project?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: It’s a bit of a family story that led me to this project. Today, I’m a father and a son. In my family, everyone is a musician, my brothers, my sisters… Everyone sings, everyone dances. Making music wasn’t a question, but a project like this, I wasn’t expecting it at all!
PAN M 360: So Terry is your first album?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: Yes, it’s the first time I’ve been able to work in this way in Quebec, the first time I’ve been able to do an album launch. I’m so happy! I don’t know how to describe it. And I have to thank everyone who helped me make this project possible.
PAN M 360: How did you meet the people you collaborate with, and how did you come to work with them?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: I arrived in Quebec, Canada, in 2011. A lot of people helped me get here. I was invited on tours, and when I came here I really liked it. And then there was Nuits d’Afrique, which gave me a lot of support. Since my arrival, not a year has gone by without me doing a concert with them. For me, it’s a real opportunity. And then there are all my musician friends I’ve met who have also worked very hard and helped me with my album.
PAN M 360: So the title of your album, Terry, is a reference to all these people…
MAMADOU KOÏTA: In our language, in Bambara, Terry means friendship. Without friendship, nothing works. That’s why I named the album Terry.
PAN M 360: When we listen to your album, we can hear that tradition you were talking about, but there are also instruments that sound very modern. There are electric guitars, synthesizers… Why did you want to mix these two elements?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: My father was a traditional musician, so I learned from him. When I travelled and heard music from the West, I also wanted to mix things up. Instruments and languages. I wanted to give my music a different colour.
For me, music knows no boundaries. So guitar, balafon, kora, goni or djembe, for me, all go together. Because everyone loves the vibrations they give off. So I tried to do something different from my father. My father never did that, so I tried.
PAN M 360: Would you say that’s what characterizes your music?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: Yes, because a lot of people can relate to my music. Because, in theory, that’s what friendship is all about. Without friendship, there’s no love. And without friendship, we could never work together. You have to be able to get along to work together. So the album, with all these different sounds mixed together, represents something very important for me in my life, and I hope it will be just as important for the people who hear the album.
PAN M 360: What other themes inspired you to compose your album?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: I often talk about adventure in my compositions. Adventure, because I left my country and came to Quebec. And I’ve met a lot of good people here, and I’ve learned a lot too. My song “Wawana” is about that. I say, “Mom, I know it’s very hard to be away, don’t cry, I’ll go back, so say a good prayer for me in your heart.”
Often I find myself thinking about things I don’t like to see, for example, the war at the moment, which is everywhere, everywhere. Everyone’s protecting themselves and doing everything they can to avoid finding themselves at war too. Some of my songs also come from these thoughts.
PAN M 360: Basically, this is a very personal album. You tell us about your life, your journey, your thoughts…
MAMADOU KOÏTA: Yes, and also about the things I’ve seen and experienced here that weren’t there in my country. You have to learn to be patient in life. You can’t close in on yourself. You have to be open to others. For example, when I arrived here, I didn’t understand the Quebec language very well. I think it’s really incredible to have managed to get through that and to be able to teach people things here.
PAN M 360: Let’s talk about the launch concert tomorrow. How did you imagine it?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: I can’t wait! The way I see it, it’s a big open door for me and for the musicians who helped me. I can’t just talk about myself, I have to talk about the musicians with me too. This is the first time in my life that I’ve done this. And I hope it goes well and that people enjoy the day as much as I do because I’m happy here.
PAN M 360: Can you tell us a bit more about tomorrow’s concert?
MAMADOU KOÏTA: I’d like to keep it a surprise, but I can say a bit about it! There will be surprises that people don’t expect. I hope that everyone can come out, Quebecers, Canadians, whatever, and support me and all the musicians. And really, this is the first time in my life that’s happened. And one thing’s for sure: there’s going to be dancing! We’ll have to fasten our seatbelts!
PAN M 360: Thank you very much for your time, and I wish you an excellent concert and a great launch!
MAMADOU KOÏTA: Thank you! I’d like to thank everyone who helped me make this record, and I invite everyone to come and dance and enjoy these first days of the album launch.
Mamadou Koïta will launch his album Terry on Friday, November 10 at 9 pm in concert at Club Balattou. Information and tickets HERE!
The second chapter of his inspiring path, Motewolonuwok, was first inspired by a poem by Cherokee writer Qwo-li Driskill. “From the heavy wreckage of loss, we emerge together”. Jeremy Dutcher sings in Wolastoqey, his mother tongue native language, without any backward-looking attitude.
Classically trained as a tenor singer, Dutcher achieved a multi-referential music and songwriting through an exploration of contemporary indigenous identity, more precisely Wolastoqiyik Wahsipekuk Nation – New Brunswick, Quebec and Maine, along the Wolastoq river – St.John river according to the colonizer official name. His reinvention of his own cultural heritage, mixing it with western classical music, jazz, electronic music or chamber pop, is simply brillant.
Jeremy Dutcher’s 2018 debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, won the Polaris Prize and a JUNO Award. Without a doubt, it’s now a reference album for Canadian contemporary culture. On this new recording, He sings also in English because he sees this bilingual choice it as « a powerful invitation to collective healing and understanding, a direct line of communication to convey his community’s stories of healing, resilience and emergence to all who listen. »
Reached in Paris, where he was touring last October, Jeremy Dutcher granted PAN M 360 a long interview that we put online just before his new concert.
PAN M 360 : How are you doing?
Jeremy Dutcher : I’m doing fine, man. Greetings from Paris. Cool. How are you doing?
PAN M 360 : Very good. About Paris?
Jeremy Dutcher : Oh my God, this is fantastic! I mean, the city is amazing. I just did a radio interview. We’re kind of doing some press for the new album all over here. And I have a show in a very intimate venue, L’Accord parfait, in the 18th arrondissement.
PAN M 360 : You know, my partner and I we did a 3 weeks road trip through your homeland in New Brunswick and also Nova Scotia. And when I was driving and resting in your area, I thought about you and your previous record.
Jeremy Dutcher : Nice! Well, especially from the first album. That music is so connected to where I come from. I’m glad you got to experience the beauty of that area.
PAN M 360 : Further in Nova Scotia, we had a few brief but nourishing conversation with Mi’gmaqpeople in Cape Breton. Also visiting some museums, we’ve acknowledged some aspects of your heritage and of course the legitimate concerns of First Nations in the Maritimes.
Jeremy Dutcher : They’re very nice people over there. I’m glad you get to hang out with them.
PAN M 360 : Yeah, we learned things !
Jeremy Dutcher : It’s eye opening. I hope every time that non indigenous people engage with indigenous people they get a new perspective. Look at the place and the space in a different way.
PAN M 360 : Well, probably we are late in this process, but at least some of us changed their mind about our history. Because we, French Québécois, were oppressed by English for a couple of centuries, we tended to forget or ignore that we were at first colonizers when we came to this continent.
Jeremy Dutcher : Well, don’t worry, guys like me are here to remind people it’s okay. It’s like taking the guilt away from that conversation, because we’re all now here on this continent together.
PAN M 360 : Yeah. We have to live together now.
Jeremy Dutcher : That’s it. Nobody’s going back to France or Europe, maybe just to visit, but nobody’s going anywhere. In Canada, we’re here together, and we got to figure out a pathway forward.
PAN M 360 : Exactly. And we’ve got to share the culture of each and mix, we have to embrace your culture and vice versa.
Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah but, that’s the thing, too. I think indigenous people have been doing the vice versa for a very long time. On the other side, that wasn’t exactly the case. When Europeans first came to North America, they thought we had nothing to teach them. They thought they had everything to teach us because they were Christians.
PAN M 360 : Yep.They thought Christian religion was the best. And their superiority with the weapons (guns) made them feel they were more civilized than indigenous peoples.
Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah, but I think it was more than this, it was also an ideology. For example, take feudalism, kings and queens, uptight hierarchy, frontiers, this is not really something we had. This is kind of a very different ideology than we have in our social structures. But yes, it is for sure the weapons, and it is for sure the Christianity..
PAN M 360 : Of course, First Nations social structures were already a pre democratic concept.
Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah! We may have even invented the thing !
PAN M 360 : When I was a teenager in the 70’s, I remember reading « The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State », an essay by Friedrich Engels published in 1884, based on Karl Marx’s notes on Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropological studies of traditional societies.There was a substantial part about Iroquois society structure and it’s progressive qualities regarding democratic participation and matriarchy. Jeremy Dutcher : Wait, what? Engels wrote about indigenous society ?
PAN M 360 : Of course, yeah.
Jeremy Dutcher : Oh, my God. You’re blowing my mind right now. Thank you! I’m going to go look this up right now.
PAN M 360 : You’re quite welcome ! Now let’s talk about our main topic : you 2nd album.
Jeremy Dutcher : It actually came from my experience with the first album, the first album all in Wolastokey. I created that first album very much for my people and there were no translations provided. But understanding too that with the notoriety and the attention from the first record, a lot of non indigenous people also were listening too, for me it was about speaking to them in a direct way and telling our stories in a way that is going to make sense to them. And hopefully change their heart and impact their thinking about native people.
PAN M 360 : Yeah, your values have to be understood by anyone, beyond your people.
Jeremy Dutcher : We actually need that. What we’re missing right now is the context in terms of how we got to where we are in our society. In Canada, we always talk about the two solitudes, but this is not true, there’s so much more than that. Because if we understand that the differences within indigenous communities are fundamental based on our ways of thinking and knowing and that healing of our own ways is also hopefully going to invite other people who are non indigenous, into that way.
PAN M 360 : You’re absolutely right. We have now to share values and find a different path together.
Jeremy Dutcher : This is always a hope, our elders say it has always been a welcome song. And by that she means we’ve always been welcoming people. And that has never changed. Maybe sometimes to a fault, maybe too far, but we’ve always been that welcome and we can’t change that now. And really we say that for us, but we say that for everyone, which is to say that we don’t build walls.
And we’ve created this canadian pluralist society, Africans, Europeans, Asian people, indigenous people, the whole world then is gathered in Montreal, in Toronto, in these cities where we can actually get a lot of work done together because we’re there with each other. So I think it’s known that, as much as Canada can frustrate me sometimes, the potential is very high because the ways in which the world is gathered in these places is very unique. It’s not like that wherever you go in the world.
The vision of Canada was always or could have always been this inclusive, pluralist society. And now for the first time, we actually can build. We’re if we’re humble enough to say, oh, I don’t know or yes my ancestors fucked this all up, we can do right.
PAN M 360 : We may be not responsible of our ancestors, but we’re responsible of what we do now.
Jeremy Dutcher : Exactly. Yes. And it’s not about carrying this guilt or this blame forward, but it’s about empowering people. To make better choices.Go in better ways.
PAN M 360 : Obviously, this is the stream of your own path as a singer, songwriter and musician. So what did you do differently this time? I observe more choir music for example. There’s a lot of voices overdubs, I also see different kinds of music, even some jazz chords sometimes. Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah, We’re going in many different directions with this one.
PAN M 360 : Can you describe it briefly? Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah, for sure. With the first record, it was very small. There was just myself and a couple of strings and a couple of singers. It was a very kind of a small chamber ensemble. Now for the second one, I wanted to blow that up and expand it, take it all the way. So that string quartet is going to become a full orchestra and those couple of singers become the choir.
For me, the second record felt like a sonic expansion of the first album, but that’s either way, so it’s getting all the way big, but it’s also going all the way small. And for me, there’s a couple of moments on that record that are playing with the nuance and the small space and the delicateness of our stories, and then there’s other songs that are going way over the top and really being dramatic. So the truth is probably somewhere in the middle there. So I hope people can listen and find themselves in some of that music, if not all of it.
PAN M 360 : Yeah, and if we can be more specific, maybe we can pinpoint a few titles and just see how it was crafted.
Jeremy Dutcher : In the first record all the songs are based on the same source material. So they’re all kind of looking at the Ancestor songs. Now with this one, with the new record, it’s very kind of pulling and weaving together all of these different inspirations and kinds of influences. So it kind of does sound different and it came together in different ways.
So, for example, the first song on the record is called « Skicinuwihkuk » which is actually a phrase that I found when I was doing archival research on the first record. I found this quote, and the quote from the ancestor became the lyric for the song. So in that way, I didn’t do much. I wrote the music, of course, but I didn’t necessarily come with the lyrical content.
PAN M 360 : Can you explain the lyrical content of that song?
Jeremy Dutcher : So this means as long as there’s a child among my people, we will protect the land always and forever. When I introduce myself in my language, I might say I’m an indigenous person. Yeah. Sothis is the place of the native people’s land. For me, it’s like a statement of sovereignty. All those years back, that’s a quote from 1763, and they were still saying that same thing of like, we are here and we are protecting the land.
Throughout history, our people have stood up and said, no, actually, we’re going to protect this place and we’re not going to let you do that. I think about Oka, I think about Wet’suwet’en and all of these different sites where our people have stood up and said no, you’re not going to build a fucking golf course here or you’re not going to cut down all of these old growth trees. There’s something more important than development and consumption.And so I think yeah, we just have to keep reiterating that, because it’s clearly like, I think as a country, we have this way of putting the blinders on or turning away from stuff we know is wrong.
PAN M 360 : So this album is a true invitation to open up our minds.
Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah, but like I said, it’s always been a welcome song so it’s not about shaming anyone for not being with us. It’s an invitation to say we’re doing something else over here so you can come and hang with us. And we’ve got stories and we’ve got songs and we’ve got all this beautiful thing that we want to get you to know. So come and hang with us.
Now, if you contrast that to a song on the second half of the record called « The Land That Held Them » , it’s very much my words, talking about the hard reality that is often following us as indigenous people right now, but done and captured in a beautiful way. And so for that track, we have a brass quintet, and it’s all orchestrated by Owen Pallett. He kind of did all of these really lush, sick orchestral arrangements.
And so this is something that I’m a singer and a pianist, but I don’t really work with an orchestra in that way. And so kind of relying on the friends and community people around me to say, hey, what are you really good at ? Maybe you could come over here and do it. So it’s kind of drawing together all of these different influences.
PAN M 360 : And if we go on, let’s take one or two picks about other songs you’ve crafted because it’s very diverse, multi genre. It’s not only one kind of predictable indie pop, it’s very diverse.
Jeremy Dutcher : We musicians can sometimes put ourselves in a box to create something that’s maybe palatable or interesting for everyone. And it’s like, well, you’re never going to do that. So just create what you want to create and hopefully that’s going to connect. For me, it’s like weaving together all of those different musical aesthetics that I’ve been taught. Right. So it’s like the traditional element, the classical element, the choir element, bringing that in. For a song like « Sakom », which starts the second half of the record, it’s all a cappella voices, just singing.
And it’s the power of the voice and the power of collectivity and how that aids in our healing together when we sing together. I think this was kind of a unique one too because I knew I wanted the choir on that record. But are they a background, just a Greek chorus kind of like commenting on the thing? Or are they a real voice in the room on the record? For me, I wanted to give them almost the centerpiece of that record.
Because you know, it’s the least amount of music that’s being played and yet those voices kind of are centered and this choir is so beautiful. This is not an existing choir, these are just real friends of mine. I said, hey, come and sing with me. So there’s twelve people in that choir, coming from all different places, some from church choir, other people from music school, other people from jazz scenes. So it’s kind of a melee of all of these different ways of singing. But then they came together and sounded so beautiful together. PAN M 360 : How were you involved in the production aspect of this album? Jeremy Dutcher : It was kind of a coproduction of a me and a couple of people. So Owen Pallett really produced those string sessions and the band sessions, and then we had some post production together. My producer from the first record, actually a Montreal based producer named Buffalo, was involved in the post production as well and bringing it together. I also think about people like Basia Bulat. She’s such a nice person. She helped me write one particular song called « Take My Hand » and this one is really a co write experience between my friend and an elder back home and myself. And we all kind of wrote this together. So there are different collaborators on this record that brought it to fruition.
PAN M 360 : Do you perform a lot in your homeland?
Jeremy Dutcher : I don’t find myself there too much these days just because I’m on the road so much. I don’t have a home there. This is where my parents are and my brothers. Before 2026 comes. I want to have a little home in the woods in New Brunswick. But actually right now I spend my time in Montreal these days. PAN M 360 : Oh, you live here permanently now. Jeremy Dutcher : Yeah. I think it’s a good choice. I got to work on my French.
PAN M 360 : It will come naturally if you make the effort to do that. But we, French Québécois and others, should make an effort to learn indigenous languages too.
Jeremy Dutcher : There you go. Right? Because it’s about extending ourselves towards each other. You start to learn one indigenous language and then you understand, oh, this is related to all of the other ones around. It’s cool to see those connections. But now I’ll teach you one word in our language for now, and it’s just our word for merci and it’s wooliwon.
PAN M 360 : Cool! Wooliwon to you too!
JEREMY DUTCHER IS PERFORMING ON THURSDAY NOVEMBER 9 , BEANFIELD THEATER, 8 PM. INFOS & TICKETS HERE
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