Interviews

For more than twenty years, the digital revolution has not ceased to make our environment evolve at a frantic pace and this is more and more out of step with our natural biological rhythms. Unknown to us, this new virtual extension can in return slow down the development of a more vital, more buried, more instinctive and more vibrant aspect of ourselves. In the not too distant future, this artificial evolution, now out of control, may force us dangerously into its own downfall, or conversely, show us how to refocus on the path to truth.

With the pandemic, the feelings of over-connection and relentless acceleration have been amplified and even turned into universal feelings. Presented on August 24 and 25 in preview at the SAT as part of the 22nd edition of the MUTEK festival, the new Montreal collective BEATS attempts to transform this global phenomenon into a transdisciplinary scenic experience. Combining contemporary dance, visual projections and sound creations, the performance retraces the path of the human being caught in this dizzying whirlwind of technology in search of his hidden eternal essence.

Equipped with a stethoscope and a self-contained light stick connected to the sound and visual compositions, the three performers Yuki Berthiaume, Hamie Robitaille and Molly Siboulet-Ryan each communicate their art through a choreography conceived by Stéfania Skoryna and form a whole with the help of custom-made devices designed by Ganesh Baron Aloir. PAN M 360 met with the team behind the ambitious multidisciplinary, technological and immersive BEATS project.

PAN M 360: The project was publicly launched on March 8 during the pandemic. How did this project start? What triggered it?

Hamie Robitaille: Our meeting was quite the trigger. It started with a desire to do a show with Yuki that would mix dance, music and visual elements. We quickly realized that we needed more help with the choreography. That’s when Stefania joined us to do the project. We wanted to make the creation feminine I think and to bring the subject of the incessant work, the daily life, the pressure of performance. We wanted to do this all three of us even if we were very busy.

Stefania Skoryna : I entered the project when there was already a first version of ten minutes. I asked Molly Siboulet-Ryan to participate, I found it easier to be outside to see the choreography than to be inside.

PAN M 360: For the staging, we can see in the video a slightly retro soviet set. Why this choice?

Stefania Skoryna: It came by itself. We are in the work, in a task, the chosen costume is China and the music is very mechanical.

Hamie Robitaille: As for the scenography, we knew that we were going to go towards something techno and industrial. When we talk about industrial, the codes are the line work, the barrels, the mechanical look. That’s probably where the Soviet side comes from.

PAN M 360: Yuki, you are in charge of the sound composition of the project. You have a foot in the garage rock scene (I.D.A.L.G., Jesuslesfilles), still rather analog, how do you feel about this transition to digital via the BEATS project?

Yuki Berthiaume: I did a year in electroacoustics, but it’s my only experience in this field. In the bands I play for, I always compose my part on the synth. But I had never really composed a whole piece of music, it was really new. I did it, but I don’t really know how (laughs). I managed to compose 40 minutes of material. I tried a lot of things, it was really experimenting, I don’t master the technology I use. But I thought it was interesting to have a bit of a punk approach, more intuitive. I don’t master Ableton but it doesn’t matter, I did it the same way, it was bound to give something. I learned from that, not to do like everyone else or not to master the instrument. It even becomes a strength.

PAN M 360: Your project is presented during the MUTEK festival at the Satosphere. How is the 360º experience going?

Hamie Robitaille: For MUTEK, we were offered a difficult choice: either Place des Arts or the SAT dome (laughs). Since we had already had the chance to present a rather frontal and classic show as part of Code d’Accès, we thought we could bring it to the SAT dome at 360º. Since the visuals are quite compelling, the immersion was relevant to the subject of the show. Feeling overwhelmed by the visuals around us helps to amplify the subject of the piece. It was a nice challenge. Eventually, we would like to be able to do it completely 360º. It’s a bit of a hybrid, the show remains frontal.

PAN M 360: You talk about a sense of time accelerating. One of your goals is to transform this universal feeling into a stage experience. What gives you this feeling of constant acceleration? Who do you think accelerates, the human or the technology?

Hamie Robitaille: It’s really the chicken or the egg. One of the first reflexes is to say that it’s technology. From my side, I’m not sure. Technology was developed to serve a human need, a need for adrenaline, to go faster, to be more efficient. Humans have created technology but in the end, we have lost control. Technology is the element that exacerbates all this. We saw it with the pandemic, we were extremely connected and it amplified this feeling. In the end, this need for adrenaline is human and the ability to do tasks over and over again is more the role of the machine.

Stefania Skoryna: For example, I don’t have internet data on my cell phone but I feel that there are things that go faster than me. Do we have to accept this? I take the choice to push it back. I remember to use it as a tool.

PAN M 360: You use a connected stethoscope to transform heartbeats into sounds and images. In concrete terms, how are heartbeats transformed into digital material?

Hamie Robitaille: The stethoscope was made with the help of Ganesh and Youtube (laughs). It’s a little tie microphone that is plugged into the stethoscope and that allows us to hear the heart. The sound is passed into Ableton and filtered. This heartbeat can make the visuals react in real time, it’s really a creative tool.

PAN M 360: The line between the organic world and the digital world is becoming more and more blurred, not only in relation to new technologies, but also in our daily experience. Can we say that you try to find life through the machine?

Hamie Robitaille: We don’t try to give a soul to the machine, we try to find humanity in all this whirlwind of technology. Molly embodies the human in the play.

Molly Siboulet-Rya: It’s more of a reunion than a transformation. In the show, the human has lost a part of himself and finds it again through a journey.

Yuki Berthiaume: It is also to illustrate that when we push ourselves to the limit, the body lets go.

Stefania Skoryna: The goal is to regain control before reaching that point, to take a breath.

PAN M 360: The glow stick is influenced by the sounds and visuals but it also influences the sounds and visuals in return. This autonomous process can be likened to the biological concept of homeostasis, a regulatory process that tends to keep variables around a certain equilibrium. How does the stick feedback loop work?

Ganesh Baron Aloir : The stick is bidirectional, we can send it commands to change the type of ignition it will have. Conversely, we have information on its angle, its rotation, the speed of its movement that we can attribute to different visual or audio effects. 

Hamie Robitaille: For the show, since it is still a prototype, we are concentrating on the movements of the stick that make the visuals react and on the audio that makes the light in the stick react. But eventually, if we get funding, we’d like to refine it and make it available to other creators. It could even react to the weather, the air pressure. The possibilities are really endless. In the future, we will continue the research. We are working on the new prototype, it is now two meters long. It has 220 LEDs, a micro controller and four batteries to power it. Ganesh is super good with technology but he had never made a 100% connected object. He had to learn how to 3D print and program in obscure languages (laughs).

PAN M 360: The stick kind of has its own life in the middle of the show. Why did you decide to give it its own autonomy? 

Hamie Robitaille: That’s a good question. We had been toying with the idea of this glow stick for a long time but we didn’t really know what it meant. It slowly turned into a question: what drives us in the end? It’s a little bit the soul in the show, something immaterial. It is a stick that lights up, that reacts, that is sensitive. It’s not always lit up as much from one part of the piece to another. At some point, I think we all put our souls aside to work. In the show, other people sometimes control the stick, manipulate it. In the end, we want to find that soul. That’s why it has its own life in the show. It was important for us to have a slightly different and majestic object.

Yuki Berthiaume: It’s like its self, its essence, its light. It’s the sense of the sacred.

Photo credit: Maxyme G. Delisle

PAN M 360 : Vous parlez d’un sentiment du temps qui s’accélère. Un de vos objectifs est de transformer ce sentiment universel en expérience scénique. Qu’est ce qui vous donne ce sentiment d’accélération incessante? Qui accélère selon vous, l’humain ou la technologie?

Hamie Robitaille :  C’est vraiment l’œuf ou la poule. Un des premiers réflexes est de dire que c’est la technologie. De mon côté, je ne suis pas certaine. La technologie a été développée pour servir un besoin humain, un besoin d’adrénaline, d’aller plus vite, d’être plus efficace. L’humain a créé la technologie mais finalement, on a perdu le contrôle. La technologie est l’élément qui exacerbe tout ça. On l’a vu avec la pandémie, on était extrêmement connecté et cela a amplifié ce sentiment. Au final, ce besoin d’adrénaline est humain et la capacité de faire des tâches à répétition est plutôt le rôle de la machine.

Stefania Skoryna : Par exemple, je n’ai pas de données internet sur mon cellulaire mais je le sens qu’il y a des choses qui vont plus vite que moi. Est ce qu’on est obligé d’accepter cela? Je prends le choix de le repousser. Je me rappelle de l’utiliser comme un outil.

PAN M 360 : Vous utilisez un stéthoscope connecté pour transformer les rythmes du cœur en sons et en images. Concrètement, comment les battements du cœur sont transformés en matériel numérique?

Hamie Robitaille : Le stéthoscope a été bidouillé avec l’aide de Ganesh et de Youtube (rire). C’est un petit micro cravate qui est branché dans le stéthoscope et qui nous permet d’entendre le cœur. Le son est passé dans Ableton et est filtré. Ce battement de cœur peut faire réagir les visuels en temps réel, c’est réellement  un outil de création.

PAN M 360 : La limite entre le monde organique et le monde numérique devient de plus en plus floue, pas seulement par rapport aux nouvelles technologies, mais dans notre ressenti même au quotidien. Est ce que l’on peut dire que vous essayez de trouver de la vie à travers la machine?

Hamie Robitaille : On n’essaie pas de donner une âme à la machine, on essaie de retrouver de l’humanité dans tout ce tourbillon de technologie. Molly incarne d’ailleurs l’humain dans la pièce.

Molly Siboulet-Ryan : Il s’agit plus d’une réunion que d’une transformation. Dans le spectacle, l’humain a perdu une partie de soi et la retrouve à travers un cheminement.

Yuki Berthiaume : C’est aussi pour illustrer que lorsqu’on se pousse à bout, le corps lâche prise.

Stefania Skoryna : Le but est quand même de reprendre le contrôle avant d’en arriver là, de reprendre sa respiration.

PAN M 360 : Le bâton lumineux est influencé par les sons et les visuels mais il influence également en retour les sons et les visuels. Ce processus autonome peut se rapprocher du concept biologique d’homéostasie, un processus de régulation qui tend à garder des variables autour d’un certain équilibre. Comment fonctionne la boucle de rétroaction du bâton?

Ganesh Baron Aloir : Le bâton est bidirectionnel, on peut lui envoyer des commandes pour changer le type d’allumage qu’il va avoir. A l’inverse, on a de l’information sur son angle, sa rotation, sur la vitesse de son mouvement qu’on peut attribuer à différents effets visuels ou audios. 

Hamie Robitaille : Pour le spectacle, comme il s’agit encore d’un prototype, on se concentre sur les mouvements du bâton qui font réagir les visuels et sur l’audio qui fait réagir la lumière dans le bâton. Mais éventuellement, si on a du financement, on aimerait le peaufiner et le rendre disponible à d’autres créateurs. Il pourrait même réagir à la météo, à la pression atmosphérique. Les possibilités sont vraiment infinies. Dans le futur, on va continuer la recherche. On est d’ailleurs en train de travailler sur le nouveau prototype, il fait maintenant deux mètres. Il comporte 220 LED, un micro contrôleur et quatre batteries pour l’alimenter. Ganesh est super bon avec la technologie mais il n’avait jamais fait d’objet connecté à 100%. Il a dû apprendre à faire de l’impression 3D et à programmer dans des langages obscurs (rire).

PAN M 360 : Le bâton possède un peu sa propre vie au milieu du spectacle. Pourquoi avoir décidé de lui donner sa propre autonomie? 

Hamie Robitaille : C’est une bonne question. On caressait l’idée de ce bâton lumineux depuis longtemps mais on ne savait pas trop ce qu’il voulait dire. Il s’est tranquillement transformé en question : qu’est ce qui nous anime au final? C’est un peu l’âme dans le spectacle, quelque chose d’immatériel. C’est un bâton qui s’allume, qui réagit, qui est sensible. Il n’est pas toujours autant allumé d’une partie à l’autre de la pièce. A un certain moment, je pense qu’on a tous mis notre âme de côté pour travailler. Dans le spectacle, d’autres personnes contrôlent parfois le bâton, le manipulent. A la fin, on veut retrouver cette âme-là. C’est pour ça qu’il a sa propre vie dans le spectacle. C’était important pour nous d’avoir un objet un peu différent et majestueux.

Yuki Berthiaume : C’est comme son soi, son essence, sa lumière. C’est le sens du sacré.

Crédit photo : Maxyme G. Delisle

Born and raised in Toronto, Uproot Andy (Andy Gillis) is a young producer/DJ very active in New York’s electro-tropical scene. Around 2015, he became friends with Montreal’s Pierre Kwenders, and started a steady collaboration. Two new songs of theirs have been released this week and will be performed at the Mural Festival in Montreal, with a DJ set from 6PM to 11PM, also with San Farafina, Jelz and AKAntu,   all regular Moonshine collaborators.

PAN M 360: Could you first tell us the story of your friendship and artistic collaboration?

Uproot Andy: Pierre and I came out to play together for Moonshine parties and others in Montreal. We became friends and I used to stay at Pierre’s house when I came to Montreal.  So we started to work together on  beats, songs and remixes – for example, I’ve been partially involved in Pierre’s last album. We made music at Pierre’s house, cooked food, and hung out all day. Pierre also came out to perform in New York City, where I am living now. We started collaborating like that, and ever since, we meet up in different places and make music wherever we are. 

PAN M 360: This most recent project was completed during the quarantine. How did it go?

Uproot Andy: Yeah, with the pandemic a lot of things changed, we had to exchange information online. We got stuck at home and for me, that kind of changed the way I felt producing music. I mean, the forms of pop music that are really quick, getting to the hooks, I didn’t feel it made a lot of sense because things kind of slowed down and changed. So I felt like making some music with a really patient and deeper approach. Also, more emotional and melodic. Both of the songs on this EP, “Ofele” and “Baluka”, reflect this need for longer developments in music.

PAN M 360: What is the common ground between you and Pierre?

Uproot Andy: I think we work very well together. We have similar tastes and similar influences, even if we have different backgrounds. I know he’ll understand my suggestions.  So I make some stuff, send it to him, then he sends his work to me, and so on.

PAN M 360: Let’s talk about the new stuff.

Pierre Kwenders: The single “Ofele” is an amapiano song, amapiano is a South African style of music. Andy and I are fans of this style, which is a very hip sound in new African music, it was already happening before the pandemic. We  play that style a lot at our Moonshine parties, so Andy and I wanted to have fun with this amapiano beat. “Ofele” means “free”. Why? Without wanting to be clearly political, the message  of the song is a shade thrown to the politicians who make promises for free services that don’t come true. Also it is a message of hope – despite those false promises, we keep on going.

Uproot Andy: One of the things about amapiano is that it’s a style made for the club. The songs are very long and it takes time getting to it. So it also fits at home, it felt really right during the last year because it’s a patient style. Maybe that explains why it has become so popular during the pandemic. So you can stay home and get into those songs, and go a little deeper into yourself. Also this South African music has become very popular in Congo and also in Nigeria. As it spreads, it folds to the local music styles.

PAN M 360: Do you have other collaborative projects for the near future? 

Pierre  Kwenders: The future is full of surprises! Many things are coming and that’s all we can say. First, we will be performing the songs and a couple more together at Mural festival on the 22nd. Myself and Andy will introduce this EP to the people. We will be outdoors and it starts at 6 PM. Don’t be late!

Qama’si means “stand up” in Mi’gmaq. And this is precisely the message that Quentin Condo, a rapper from Quebec’s 52nd Indigenous community, Gesgapegiag, wants to send. On stage, he goes by the alias of Q-052 and works to communicate Indigenous issues and problems.

And when he’s not on stage? Nothing changes! Not only is he still active in the political life of his community, but he also makes sure to teach his children the ancestral knowledge of his people. And unlike many others, Q052 was quite comfortable with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to working on future projects, he took advantage of this precious time to remind his offspring of the importance of nature and the need to take care of it. 

A good listener, Q052 doesn’t go easy on his interlocutor. He doesn’t hesitate to talk about the colonialist and racist tendencies of governments, to recall the murders and disappearances of Indigenous girls and women… He doesn’t talk about a single problem, but rather about finely interwoven and, of course, complex issues.

His tone is sharp, dry, unequivocal. Refusing to put on the white gloves, he reminds us of what is sometimes so easy to forget: Canada is guilty of an ongoing genocide.  

Q052 has only two albums to his credit (2019’s Qama’si and 2018’s Rez Life, the latter of which was nominated for an Indigenious Music Award in the Best New Artist category) as well as a few singles. Drawing from the codes of old-school rap, his music is reminiscent of the rap-rock ardour of Rage Against the Machine, or the nuanced boom-bap of A Tribe Called Quest. 

Fans will have to be patient – although a new project is waiting for release, Q052 will not make it available until 2022. In the meantime, PAN M 360 met with him to talk about his art, his ambitions, and especially about the performance he will be giving at Montreal’s International First Peoples Festival. 

PAN M 360: Can you talk a little to us about your community? What do you like most about it? 

Q052: I’m from the Mi’kmaq community of Gesgapegiag, one of the three Mi’kmaq communities in Gaspesie. I grew up a little bit in and out of the reservation, because my mom is Irish-American, from the Boston area. I have mostly good memories from my childhood, with my cousins, my aunts and my uncles, doing a lot of fishing, a lot of hunting… A lot of arts and crafts… You name it, you know? That’s the way it is in indigenous communities, since we have very large families. 

PAN M 360: Your father is a member of the Mi’kmaq community and, like you already said, your mother is Irish-American. What’s your relationship with English, since most of your songs are written in that language? Is creating an album in your native language a future project of yours? 

Q052: Yeah! So, for the language aspect, in our community, Mi’kmaq is still spoken very much. My father was fluent in that language, but still learned English and French. My mom was speaking English too, obviously, but my dad never spoke to us in Mi’kmaq, just for the fact that he is a residential school survivor. So, he believed – well, was forced to believe – that speaking his own language was bad. And he wanted me to be able to master English and French, so that I’d be able to fight the government and to express the needs of Indigenous people in their language. The Mi’kmaq that I learned was with my friends and with other members of my family. But my dad always said to me, “you can learn Mi’kmaq any time you want, but you need to learn the white man’s language. Just because it’s a white man’s world and you need to survive in it.” So, I don’t speak fluently the way I would love to, but I do get by pretty good. And the song I will be performing on Friday night with Samian will be in Mi’kmaq. 

PAN M 360:  How has been the pandemic for you, creatively? Did you use it to make new music? 

Q052: For me, the pandemic was a blessing! And I don’t know if you remember, but right before the pandemic, we were blocking the railroads, because we were saying that we need to stop the way that we’re moving forward right now, and we must change the way we do things! We must be more aware and respectful of Mother Nature. And the government said “No, that’s impossible, economically.” Then, Covid came along and said “hold my beer.” So yeah, to me, it wasn’t a problem at all, I was ready for the reset. I even took the time to take my kids back to Gaspesie. We went to the woods and did a lot of traditional activities. 

PAN M 360: What kind of ‘’activism education’’ will your children get from you, of course, but also from your own father, who I believe is an important leader of your community? What do you want to teach them?  

Q052: Obviously, the environment is a priority to me, just because if we keep destroying it, we’ll soon be dead, right? We need to address the killing of Indigenous women, the mass incarceration of Indigenous people, the list goes on and on… But I try to touch base of every single one of them.

PAN M 360: I heard you were a politician before, why did you stop and chose music instead?  

Q052: Hip-hop has always been in my blood, right? And it’s all because the hip-hop culture is very similar to Indigenous culture. The MCs are very similar to our chanters, the breakdancers are very similar to our dancers, and the graffiti writers are very similar to our art and crafts… And on top of that, my father was – and still is – very into political changes, so he wanted me to follow that, right? So, I grew up surrounded by the desire for social change, I did two terms of political work, then I decided to step away ‘cause I felt like… I could do more through music than politics. You have a lot of restraint in politics, you can’t always say what you want. In hip-hop, you can talk about things the way they really are. 

PAN M 360: Are you currently working on a new project? 

Q052: I’ve been steadily working through the pandemic, doing collaborations with other artists, I’ve got a track that will be coming out with Violent Ground, I’ve got a track with Samian, one with Melodie McArthur. I also have a whole album recorded and ready to go but I’m only putting it out in 2022. So, I’ve been very active writing, recording, just having a great time doing those things. There’s powerful stuff coming. 

PAN M 360: When people listen to your music, what emotion, what response do you want to get from them?

Q052: What I wanna do is to hit you in the conscience. I want people to be aware, to be conscious of what’s happening. And I think the way that I deliver it is in your face, it’s direct and I think people need to hear it that way, rather than the political way. I don’t want to be nice about it, you know? We need to hear it, even if we don’t like it. 

PAN M 360: Can we hear a certain evolution, a growth when we listen to your music. Did your vision or attitude change along the way? 

Q052: Yeah, if you heard the first album I put out, I’m more in the angry, direct approach. My second one is more R&B, more of an educational approach… The next album is going to be a mix of educational and anger, but a lot of rock! I recorded it with my full band. 

PAN M 360: It seems like Samian and yourself are working on a set for the festival next Friday, can you talk a little bit about it? 

Q052: Actually, I’m working on two collaborations! So, Wednesday night, I’ll be performing with NEM, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and Forestare, alongside Laura Niquay and Anachnid, two wonderful Indigenous artists. We’ll perform a song with a whole orchestra and that’s going to be a 20-minute song. And then on Friday night, it’s Samian’s record launch! We collaborated for a track in his new album, and we’ll do it at the show! We’re very excited about that!

In the context of Montreal’s International First Peoples’ Festival, Andrew Paul MacDonald has been recruited by Normand Forget, artistic director of the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, to create an orchestral link between the NEM, the guitar ensemble Forestare and three figures illustrating the cultural energy of the First Nations – Anachnid, Laura Niquay and Q-052 will be the soloists of a new concert, given on Wednesday August 4, 8pm, at Montrteal’s Place des Festivals.

Originally from Guelph, the Sherbrooke resident is a trained composer and performer. He studied music theory and piano with Rosemarie Hamilton and guitar with Alexandre Lagoya, Michael Lorimer, Ray Sealey and Manuel Lopez-Ramos. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, where he was a student of Arsenio Girón and Alan Heard. 

He pursued graduate studies in composition at the University of Michigan, where he earned a Master of Music (1982) and a Doctor of Musical Arts (1985). At UM, he was a student of William Albright, William Bolcom, Leslie Bassett and George Balch Wilson. Returning to Canada in 1985, his teaching career took him to Manitoba and Quebec. In 1987, he became a tenured professor at Bishop’s University, where he continues to teach composition and electronic music. Among his projects as a musician is the Ensemble Musica Nova, of which he is the artistic director.  In addition to teaching and composing, he works as a classical and/or electric guitarist and also as a conductor.

Needless to say, this cross-cultural mission represents a more than interesting challenge for Andrew Paul MacDonald.

PAN M 360: How did you approach this project?

ANDREW PAUL MACDONALD: This is something very new for me. I have been composing for a long time, symphonies, string quartets, you name it, and I have done a lot different kinds of projects, like this piece for the Evergreen Club in Toronto, a concerto for harp and gamelan… and many  other projects from traditional to very different things, but I’ve never come across something like this. What I think would be best is that I talk about it. Normand Forget approached me and I had very little time to do it. Thankfully, I was free at the time – pandemic – and I was ready for a new project. In another time it would have been impossible because my agenda would have been too busy. So Normand asked me to write a piece for these First Nation singers, Anachnid, Laura Niquay, and Q-052 (Quentin Quando) and combine this piece with NEM and Forestare. Originally, the aim was to have a very  portable piece that could pop up on a stage in any city or event. So he gave me the instrumentation, time limitations, and he had some songs from those First Nations to reimagine inside my own work. Very similar to the way the late Hans Zender reimagined Schubert’s Winterreise. 

PAN M 360: How is it constructed?

Andrew Paul MacDonald: Is it an arrangement? No it’s not. It’s a reimagining, it’s composing, deconstructing, reassembling and coming out with something new. We also must talk about the title that I have, the lyrics  and the music itself. The original title was Transmission Connection, the name of the NEM project, to bring NEM, Forestare, First Nation artists and a Canadian anglophone composer who lives in Quebec, so we involved different cultures in Québec, and different types of music – First Nations rap, pop electronic, and folk-rock, combined with new contemporary music. Very challenging!

PAN M 360: So, three songs are the basic materials of the composed reimagining. Can you explain what you did with those songs?

Andrew Paul MacDonald: My piece Frames of Reference is a part of this bringing together  in Transmission Connection but also Frames of Reference is a particular set of ideas or beliefs on what you base your judgement of things. Considering the artists I was working with, I felt that we must better understand what the First Nations people have experienced – residential schools, genocide crisis, etc. – and what they’re currently going through, and very importantly, to stand up and speak out about injustice. So there is a kind of a political bent in this piece. We can’t avoid it. One of the lines in the earlier refrain in the piece is this: “Silence is violence in your ear, change up your frame of reference, don’t let these terrible crimes be overlooked, stand up and speak out now.” I think that is a pretty powerful refrain, imperative. 

PAN M 360: Let’s be more specific with each song.

Andrew Paul MacDonald: Right. 

The original lyrics are done by Quentin Condo in his rap section, called “Q-052’s Rap Movement”, an edgy rap about residential school, genocide, and more generally, problematic government relations with the First Nations. It’s rapped in English and Micmac, there is a certain part of improvisation in this composition, leaving it up to the artists a little bit. In this first rap that Quentin does, we work things out properly between music and lyrics. I love his freestyle rapping section at the end of the piece, which combined with a singer’s improvisation. I will be unique each time they will be performing that piece. 

There is also this song by the Oji-Cree singer, songwriter and producer Anachnid – her full name is Anna-Khesic Kway Harper. Her song is a pop song but… on the surface, it’s a love relationship breakup, and on another level, it is an analogy of the First Nations relationship with the rest of Canada. “You got the best of me / Trapped in your lies and your disgards / Stop it, don’t waste my time / Set me free, release me / Stop playing games with me…” So you’ve got to read it in both ways, and that fits very very well in the aesthetic of this whole work. 

And then there is Laura Niquay’s song called “Moteskano”, which means “the past of our ancestors”, this a rock song about the First Nations pride and who they are. The lyrics are sung in Atikamekw, here is one quote translated: “I understood that she (my mother) was an inspiration in my life, my guide in life, it is a transmission, a way of life for future generations, let’s walk the path of our ancestors.” 

PAN M 360: So how are all those elements superimposed in the final piece?

Andrew Paul MacDonald: I designed the piece for about 20 minutes, the piece is done in seven sections. The first one is a prelude, aggressive and imperative, with vocal interruptions. The second is Q-052’s rap, so I studied rap litterature very carefully, Run the Jewels, Snoop Dog, Eminem, etc. Quentin wrote the lyrics and I include a refrain. The third movement is called “Interlude One”, a big contrast to previous movements, slow, trippy… The fourth movement is Anachnid’s “La Lune”, a gentle love song with a double meaning that we discussed, and it has a static quality. The fifth movement is “Interlude 2”, an aggressive variation of the first interlude. The sixth movement is Laura Niquay’s “Moteskano”, an energetic reimagining of her rock song with a ground bass pattern. It continues with the last movement “Rave Up”, including improvisation, freestyle rap. A huge, energetic conclusion.  And I must say that I am really honoured to have those three artists’ songs in my composed reimagining.

PAN M 360: So including those differents style in a cohesive piece was a challenge. 

Andrew Paul MacDonald: Totally! Frame of Reference is a composed reimagining. I took those original songs apart, and I reassembled them, stretching, compressing, interrupting from different angles, turning them upside down, and all done with respect to the original forms and sentiments. I want the artists to sing what they are accustomed to. I didn’t want to mess around their pitch and their rhythm and then destroy the original aesthetic. 

I also extracted motives from musical ideas in their song, in order to generate the rest of the musical material of the composition, including some instrumental parts in the piece. I find some key motivic ideas in each song, or even the rap. I also took from their traditional work certain rhythm patterns, certain melodic patterns, essentially pentatonic. I wanted to play with those elements tied into the history. So the instrumental section of the piece becomes a huge commentary on the songs themselves, to make the whole composition have a greater meaning. 

PAN M 360: Happy with this very special experience?

Andrew Paul MacDonald: Very very eye-opening. I learned a lot about First Nations culture, conditions, concerns, and I hope that more people will learn about it as well.

Having released her second album Waska Matisiwin last spring, an album that literally took her beyond the network of the Atikamekw community from which she originates, Laura Niquay makes music and songs to reach out to different First Nations communities, but also to those who are not part of them. The sweetness of her sandy voice and her unique style bordering on indie-folk transport us through her songs into the stories of her past and some of the realities that the Indigenous communities live. PAN M 360 spoke with Niquay for more insights.

PAN M 360: First of all, what inspires you to write?

Laura Niquay: Most of the time, I have to be in nature or in my community of Wemotaci to be productive. Even when I’m there, sometimes I can compose in five minutes, but other times it can take me much longer. It really depends on how I feel.

PAN M 360: Does coming from a musical family imply a certain pressure to continue in this way, or did it come naturally?

Laura Niquay: It really came naturally over time. My father bought me my first guitar when I was 10 years old and I started playing when I was 11. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I started singing and writing.

PAN M 360: It’s only recently that we’ve seen a greater openness to First Nations music. Were you afraid of not reaching such a large audience by singing in Atikamekw?

Laura Niquay: No, it’s a language like any other language in the world. It is the music of the world. It’s easier for me, especially at the beginning, to sing in my mother tongue. Moreover, I have always sung my own compositions, I do not sing the songs of other artists. I will never be an interpreter, I will never be able to. It stresses me out too much. So I prefer to sing my own compositions and to do a summary in French of each of them in the shows. I will always explain the theme of the song before I sing it.

PAN M 360: Your most recent album Waska Matisiwin was on the long list for the 2021 Polaris Music Prize. What was your reaction?

Laura Niquay: At first, I had no idea what the Polaris Prize was. However, when I met Louis-Jean Cormier, he explained everything to me and I finally understood that it was prestigious. Louis-Jean had already won this award in 2010. I had a chance to win, but unfortunately my album was not selected among the 10 best albums, the short list. At least, I was in the best albums in Canada. That’s great for me because I consider it my first real accomplished and professional album. Waratanak was more independent and it was mostly about learning how to produce music. Waska Matisiwin is really my biggest accomplishment and I am very proud of this album.

PAN M 360: Darker themes such as suicide and addiction are present on your album. Have you had any comments about these?

Laura Niquay: Yes, really! At the Festival en chanson de Petite-Vallée, many people came to see me after the show and were very moved by my songs. They understood perfectly what I went through, because I tell a lot of my life story through my songs. People were so touched that they told me that I was their favourite of the festival. I can understand because I deal with more specific and difficult subjects. I tell the themes of my songs in a very intimate way. The subject of children who have children in our communities, who don’t have time to live their adolescence, is one that touches me a lot. I still see young girls who get pregnant, or young boys who become fathers, who don’t have time to live this period that is adolescence. I am doing a lot of awareness-raising on this subject right now. It’s really important to raise awareness among young people as well.

PAN M 360: What are the reasons for the three years it took to finalize this second album?

Laura Niquay: It would have taken two years, but with the pandemic, it delayed us and it was like that for everyone. In fact, I liked it. It allowed me to take a step back in my life and get better at therapy. I’ve been to five therapies in my life. I really needed to get the balance I needed in my job and in my personal relationships too. I was able to really work on elements that I didn’t like as much and produce an album that I liked 100%.

PAN M 360: Waska Matisiwin is very eclectic. Each of the songs is unique. Did you want a guideline for the whole album, or rather to give importance to each song?

Laura Niquay: There is no guideline. I asked, for each of the songs, people around me what they liked to hear, so, like “Nicim” with the singer Shauit, it’s about my brother who went through a depressive and suicidal period. It’s not necessarily a sad song, but rather a song of encouragement to not give up. I asked him what kind of music he likes to listen to and his answer was hip-hop, reggae, and he likes the sound of electric guitars in the background. It’s really important to listen to the people around you and know what they like to listen to. I made sure to make songs to please my audience. That’s very important to me.

PAN M 360: So it is really your entourage that oriented your album?

Laura Niquay: Yes, there is also everything that I’ve heard since I was very little. My album is the result of all this mixture.

PAN M 360: What can we expect from your concert at the First Peoples Festival?

Laura Niquay: There will be nothing extravagant. There will be 12 classical guitar players. It’s going to be a little different from what I usually do, but since I grew up with the sound of classical guitar, I immediately wanted to get involved in this project. It’s going to be very special.

PAN M 360: Which song do you prefer to sing, and why?

Laura Niquay: The second song for sure! It’s called “Moteskano”, which means “The paths of our ancestors”. It’s a song about passing on our culture, and that it should never stop. I had to walk a long way to get to where I am today. Otherwise, I also like the twelfth, which is very national. It’s really important to support the elders too, to respect them. It’s about us, the First Nations, but also the non-Indigenous people, who are a nation too. We are all human.

PAN M 360: What are your next projects?

Laura Niquay: In a year and a half, I should produce another album, but it will probably have a blues background because I would like to explore this style more deeply. The First Nations have done well in this style, so I want to bring out a kind of Indigenous blues. In the meantime, it will be full of concerts in the next few months. I’m going to take advantage of it to do my first tour and I’m looking forward to it. I wish myself good health and a long life.

Fans of nu jazz with a punk attitude, supremely bittersweet, know this excellent Australian quartet. The release of the albums Tawk Tomahawk (2012) and Choose Your Weapon (2015) by Hiatus Kayote were occasions for joy, and then nothing more until the summer of 2021.  Serious health issues experienced by frontwoman and multi-instrumentalist Nai Palm led to this… hiatus.

Fortunately, the Melbourne quartet found Nai Palm healed and in full possession of her means. On this wave of redemption, Hiatus Kayote created the album Mood Valiant, released at the end of June. PAN M 360 reached bassist Paul Bender, who gave us an interview and summed up this long awaited return. 

PAN M 360: It’s been a hard ride for Nai Palm after she knew she had breast cancer and finally recovered after a tough fight. It obviously had a direct impact on the band’s progression and also on the inspiration for the new album.

Paul Bender: Of course, it did slow things down, but Nai Palm is very resilient. She had to deal with her health and recovered. She is really a champion with that sort of stuff, she used it as an inspiration and new energy, instead of giving up. She is very strong in a crisis situation. She was very inspiring to see, with that challenge.

PAN M 360: The tension between jazz groove and punk attitude is less prominent on Mood Valiant. 

Paul Bender: It is more an emotional record than the previous ones. There is a lot of new music on Mood Valiant. We definitely covered different areas, some are fairly pyrotechnic in their approach and I guess this collection of songs reflect something else, those emotional states we went through. On our previous recordings, we had done those crazy, flashy things, over the top, we proved ourselves in that way. And life is different now, things happened to everybody in the band, so we express something different at this point. Not to say we lost interest in the previous things, but the new songs fit in a different body of work, a particular set of feelings and ideas, it is a sort of cohesive emotional statement, little more focused on this state than a wow factor of explosion, I guess. It is nice to be united around certain things. That being said, there is plenty more ridiculous nonsense, crazy-bullshit stuff to come, whatever Hiatus Kayote do next, we have no doubt. And do not worry, we won’t do boring sad shit (laughs), abrasive, technical  stuff will be back again. Choose Your Weapon was including everything we could do at that time, Mood Valiant is different and built without expressing everything. It’s more like a story and needed to be less hyperactive, aggressive or whatever.

PAN M 360: The orchestration is also different, with reeds, brasses, strings, new electronic sounds. Can you describe the process of arrangements? 

Paul Bender: I guess we are always searching for new sounds. You know, the sonic aspect inspires us to drive something. You’ve got a song, it’s got some melody, chords, the way it sounds is very important, so we always try to find different ways to capture it, to colour it and to express what the song is about. It’s always a quest. So this album is more tonally and harmonically sophisticated, but at the same time there is something more live-energy and human-feeling, and some sense of rawness and looseness that conveys certain things and triggers your imagination.

PAN M 360:  Have you played with orchestral sections?

Paul Bender: We haven’t done it yet but it would certainly be fun to extend our line-up for special concerts. We are open to this idea, there will be a time and a place for such an event. Now, we are about to give concerts in Australia and later this year in New Zealand, we can’t think about international touring until the conditions allow us to travel out of the area. Also, we included many elements of what has been recorded with arrangements of Artur Verocai in Rio de Janeiro (“Get Sun” and “Stone or Lavender”)

PAN M 360: In Australia, are there other bands more or less in the same musical niche as yours?

Paul Bender: There are a lot of crazy bands but we don’t take inspiration from any scene. We don’t claim to have invented our style, it’s all stolen in some way. The best you can do to be original is to combine pre-existing things with creativity. Truly original music can also be unbearable and unlistenable. 

PAN M 360: Certainly the combination of forms has produced something different in Hiatus Kayote. 

Paul Bender: Everyone recombines elements of music that already exist. I guess we combine enough disparate elements of music to be original. But you know, anyone who says they’re really original is a fucking liar. Yeah, a lot of the stuff in our music is pretty distinct, but at the end of the day, 90% of what you do is normal. It’s like cooking, the ingredient you don’t expect is added to a normal meal, it makes it interesting. When I went to study in a jazz school, what did I do? I found something I really liked and I reproduced it! That something then becomes part of you and takes on a different form while you’re playing. 

PAN M 360: There is also this mixture of intuition and musicianship, which is very important in Hiatus Kayote. Is that a strength, in your opinion? 

Paul Bender: Yes, we’re all students of music forever, we accumulate knowledge and try to emulate aspects of it as it comes into our tool bag, and we work with our musician friends.  We are a mix of educated – me and Simon – and self-taught, Nai and Perrin, musicians, it’s a good combination of theoretical understanding and intuitive understanding. We help each other in both directions, it’s good to keep the focus on both. 

PAN M 360: You still have fun together, that’s more than obvious. A stable and happy family?Paul Bender: The family is stable, yes, we are happy with this record, very happy to have gone through this rollercoaster. It’s not easy to reach high standards and the truth is in the expression through a long process of filtration. To get all the members to the same place, there are always battles, but each of us was super patient. At the end of the day, we were all happy to work together.

Anika made a name for herself in 2010 with a self-titled debut album with Geoff Barrows (Portishead) and the other members of Beak, while living in Bristol. With her Nico looks, cool beauty, German accent and mechanical art-pop songs, Annika Henderson had no trouble winning over an audience with more avant-garde tastes. In 2013, after the Anika EP, the German-British singer became more discreet, collaborating here and there with various artists such as Tricky, T.Raumschmiere, Dave Clarke and Shackleton. In 2016, she joined the Mexican band Exploded View, with whom she recorded two albums and an EP. Aside from the single “No More Parties in the Attic”, also released in 2016, Anika hasn’t released anything under her own name, until the very recent Change, endorsed by the renowned Sacred Bones label and co-produced by her and Martin Thulin of Exploded View. 

Joined at her home in the Berlin countryside, the former political journalist revealed the background of the creation of this second album, the reasons for her semi-silence, the changes in her life and her music, while confessing in passing her great respect for Nico.

PAN M 360: Change is the title of your new album. It’s a very significant word – what does it mean to you?

Anika: This title means so much, but so many different things. It means on the one hand that there are so many changes in the world right now. I don’t know where to start because there have been so many changes in the last year – the coronavirus, the rise of the extreme right, the different social upheavals… But this title also implies personal changes, because a lot of things have happened in the last ten years. So yes, there has been a lot of change and that is indeed the main theme of my album. 

PAN M 360: There are also some changes in the music. What’s changed compared to your last album?

Anika: The first album was made with Beak, quite simply, without any specific goal, we didn’t even think about making an album with these songs. We were only venting about stuff. For the second album, they weren’t even there. My plan was to go back to Bristol and record there, but with the pandemic that just wasn’t possible. So I had to do things differently. I recorded by myself in Berlin and fortunately one of the members of Exploded View came to join me. So yes, it’s different; I didn’t want to pretend I was in a studio in Bristol while I was stranded in a studio in Berlin, I didn’t want to pretend the last ten years hadn’t happened, you know? That would be kind of sad. 

PAN M 360: So what would you say is different? Is it less dubby? 

Anika: Well, it’s different because Beak aren’t playing the music! The whole thing changes. I’m playing most of the instruments while the live drums are done by Martin Thulen from Exploded View, and he has wide, eclectic tastes, but the reason I really wanted to work with him is because of his understanding of post-rock stuff. I kind of wanted it to be a bit different, it was a conscious decision. I didn’t want to force this dubiness. I love dub, but at the same time I’m not gonna make a dub record… I mean, I don’t want to force it if I’m working with people who are not into that music as much as I am. That’s one thing I really noticed about living in Germany, it has a very different relation with music, especially with dub. In England it’s much easier to come across people who have a lot of different understandings of different types of music, whereas here it’s just not there. Here, it’s rock and that’s it. Of course, Berlin is obviously pretty diverse, but a thing like dub is not much there. 

PAN M 360 : Would it be safe to say that there are maybe more elements of krautrock in this new album?

Anika: Hmm… maybe. Like I said, I didn’t sit down and said to myself, “I’m now going to make a krautrock album or a dub album”, it just became what it was. And it obviously has some slight elements of dub in there. A lot of it I recorded in my studio on my own. The thing that was lost, I think, was the drums, because I programmed the drums on an electronic drum machine and then when Martin came, he adapted it for live so the sound of the drums became its own thing. There were not dubby drums like, say, when I was working with Geoff, this was a very different thing. So yes, there was a lot more kraut. The way I write is like a journey. Some of the songs are more structured, more like pop songs, but most of the time the way I write is like a weird journey from the beginning to the end. “Freedom” and “Finger Pies”… these songs were just me jamming alone in my studio one night with some weird synths. If anything, we had to tame these ideas to put it on the record. So yeah, it definitely has a kraut thing but that was just from life you know, it’s the way it was, the way it was written. And to be honest, that’s what lockdown felt like, this ongoing endless sausage, when is this gonna end (laughs). Just imagine a kraut band surfing along it. You have to play a little bit longer, a little bit longer, and then you just keep playing as lockdown extends.

PAN M 360: Tell me about the album’s closing song “Wait For Something”, which is a bit different from what you have done before.

Anika: Yes, definitely! Before the lockdown, I wrote a load of demos, and a lot of them were on the guitar because that’s how I often start, with just the guitar. And also because I had nothing else than this classic guitar. So “Wait For Something” is the only song that made it from the old batch of songs that I wrote before. I felt that it had somewhere to go, but I only had a beginning, so when I played it to Martin and we were trying to work it out, we extended it and it became so cheesy, and then Martin added strings on it. It’s one of the tracks where I just let him go wild, so it became a bit cheesy but I think it’s good to have a mix of stuff, it goes to a lot of different places and I think it’s honest in that way. 

PAN M 360: Since you worked with Martin, do you think that there are some similarities with Exploded View?

Anika: Yes, in some ways. That’s why I wanted to work with him, because we’ve known each other for such a long time and we worked so closely together on various albums. We’ve been through so many tours where everything went wrong, we had face to face confrontations and he’s the sort of person that now is ideal to work with because neither of us is scared of saying no, or “that doesn’t sound very good”, and we’re not gonna take it personally. I know also that Martin hasn’t got anything to prove, he was there to help me out. Very often when you collaborate with someone more in the production role, they kind of start molding it into what they think it should be, and I did not want that to happen! But Geoff is not like that, he’s pretty laid back. But a lot of people would think, “oh, it can become post-punk” or something else, and they start changing things. I just wanted this album to be weird and I don’t have any ideas what it is. I mean, there are a lot of different genres, but I didn’t want it to be… ordered. So that was nice about working with Martin. Plus he can teach me a lot because I really wanted to co-produce it, I knew what I wanted to do with it.

It was a really focused task, from the depth of my soul. There was no energy left for anything else after that.

PAN M 360 : Your first album came out in 2010 and then you did an EP in 2013. Aside from your work with Exploded View and a few collaborations, how come it took so long for you to put out another album under your name? 

Anika: It never seemed right. There were a lot of demos made in that time though, but it  just felt too forced and I didn’t have the tools that I needed in order to put across what I wanted. And Geoff kept saying to me, “we’ll help you do the next album, just go ahead and write it and bring it to us”, but I didn’t know how to write an album! So I went into that long investigation of trying to learn how to write an album because I’ve never been to music school or anything. I did a lot of collaborations where I could learn something. And then I started Exploded View. We thought of naming the project Anika but then it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like it gave the musicians credit, and it was also a new project. I think it would have really killed it if we came out with something that sounded the same as my first album. 

PAN M 360: You used to be a political journalist for a little while. Does politics affect your music? 

Anika: Yes, definitely. The world is political, everything is political. Everything we do is based on politics. All this stuff I’ve written, it’s about life, it’s about experiences, so it’s definitely political.

PAN M 360: There are three videos from the new album that were released, “Rights”, “Change”, and “Finger Pies”. You can see the same kind of aesthetic from one video to the other and also a certain emphasis on the clothes, all very chic and original. 

Anika: It’s weird because there were very different people involved. I choose to work with very specific people for very specific reasons. We filmed those clips in Berlin which is a place where I lived for 10 years, I just recently moved out. So the videos are quite Berlin in a way, but it’s not because they’re trying to be Berlin, it’s just that this place has been my life for years. I think it’s nice to put it across in a video and just work with people that I care about, they’ve been part of my life for the last 10 years and they were all saying, “Yes! You’re finally releasing something!” So I had to make them part of it as well. The styling was done by a friend of mine, except for the “Change” video. She’s been a good friend for years and I used to live in the back of her clothing store at one point, surrounded by mannequins and these crazy, inventive clothes that she used to make, so it all symbolizes this whole journey, or part of it. So yes, she makes nice clothes. That’s the fun of it all, you know? You test your own boundaries or limits, especially with “Finger Pie”… people are often trying to tell you who you are, what to do, or how you should dress… That’s why I’m constantly changing skin, you see? I don’t want to be put in one corner, it’s suffocating. I think it’s natural for artists to change in that way. Again, that’s one of the reasons the album is called Change. Some artists stay the same, but if you look at the ones that really sustained through the years, they were okay to keep changing, they changed with the times. Imagine if the Beatles wore their suits the whole time! They’d be stuck there with their same stupid little haircuts for years, and try to squeeze into these tight little suits. 

PAN M 360: Well, the Ramones did exactly that…

Anika: (laughs) True, but I guess it’s because they were messed up since the beginning, you know. For them, it was more a question of attitude. For them, it’s a lifelong sentence (laughs). It’s like Lydia Lunch… I love Lydia Lunch. Well, she got a lot of criticism, last year I think, because she became a yoga teacher… “How can Lydia Lunch become a yoga teacher?” So what? I didn’t have any problem with that, she can do what she wants! 

PAN M 360: You often have been compared to Nico. Everytime we read something about you, there is a Nico comparison, even in the press release I was sent. Aren’t you tired of that?

Anika: It was fair enough in the beginning because people are trying to place you somewhere but by now… I don’t know… I mean, I like Nico, I have a lot of respect for her, she is a very dark character. But last year, I put that whole comparison to rest, at least for myself, because I accepted this project with a string orchestra in Berlin, the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop. They’re kind of the rebels of the string scene, and we played Nico’s Desertshore album. We did it only twice because of the lockdown, and we worked so long on it. We were working through the internet, then we had masked rehearsals… But it was such an interesting project. Before that, I avoided Nico because of this comparison, somehow. But that’s the way it is. She still got there first!

Last June, Anoush Moazzeni gave an inspiring concert of contemporary and female musical creativity from Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, the United States and Canada at the Suoni per il popolo Festival in Montreal. We took the opportunity to talk to her and discover her world. At the time of our video conference, she had been in Iran for almost a year and a half, due to the pandemic.

Pan M 360: Hello Anoush. You have been in Iran for more than a year now while your home is in Montreal. Why are you there?

Anoush Moazzeni: I had come to Iran for workshops and also to see family, but the pandemic took the turn that we know and given the cancellations, postponements and other delays for the return, I finally decided to let the storm pass. I’m lucky because I live in a nice flat owned by my parents, I have a piano and I was able to work remotely (I’m an Assistant Professor, Research Assistant et Ph.D candidate at Concordia University in Montreal) and even do some music commissions. I’ve managed!

Pan M 360: Looking at your web page, we can see that you do a lot of things. In a few words, how would you describe yourself?

Anoush Moazzeni: I identify myself as a concert pianist, interdisciplinary artist, researcher, creator, educator. It’s quite varied indeed!

Pan M 360: What are the roots of this interest in the avant-garde and contemporary creation? Are they rooted in family?

Anoush Moazzeni: Music ran in my family, that’s true. My mother is a singer and has always had a love for Persian literature and music. I learned to play the piano at the age of five and my parents always encouraged my choices. At the age of 18 I started my studies at Tehran University and 3 years later I went to Lyon (France) to continue my piano studies. In parallel, I developed a love for computers, philosophy and digital arts. I completed a master’s degree in piano in Montreal, and it was there that I developed my identity as a multidisciplinary artist. I discovered a cultural crossroads that allowed me to reveal my own essence at the intersection of several artistic disciplines.

Riseopera.ca

Pan M 360: Where else did you get your attraction to the avant-garde?

Anoush Moazzeni: I travelled a lot! I went to Köln and to IRCAM (Institute for Research and Coordination of Acoustics and Music) in Paris. Once here in Canada, I was given the chance to participate in festivals where I could try things out. I appreciate this great freedom and the opportunity to delve into unconventional territories that allow me to explore all the avant-garde possibilities and also those of a constructive dialogue between Western and Persian traditions.

Pan M 360: As a woman of Iranian origin, do you believe you are a model, an inspiration for other women in this part of the world?

Anoush Moazzeni: I don’t see myself as a role model, but I can assume that I can be an inspiration for those who suffer from the usual limitations in this region. Yes, it’s very good if my example can help to break the barrier of ‘I can’t do that’. I see that it is still a bit taboo to be a woman and to be independent. People sometimes say to me, “Did you really do that all by yourself? Wasn’t it your boyfriend?” Even here in Canada! So I can understand the difficulties of many women in the world. That’s why I give help and advice to women composers as I did with my project Deterritorializing the realm of new music.

I have also been researching the place of women in avant-garde creation, particularly women from minorities and those from the LGBTQ+ community. If my background can serve as an inspiration, so much the better. But it would be pretentious to define myself as a role model!

Anoush Moazzeni

Pan M 360: Let’s talk about Deterritorializing the realm of new music. What was it about?

Anoush Moazzeni: I commissioned works from West Asian composers (Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel) who live and create either there or in the West. The pieces were to be written for piano (I am the performer) accompanied by either voice, tape, audiovisual installation or electronic recordings.

Pan M 360: What is your assessment?

Anoush Moazzeni: I didn’t have any particular expectations, but I am happy to have participated in my own way in this vast project, which is to stimulate avant-garde creation in regions outside the West. I hope that in the long run, radical scholarly creativity will emerge from the almost exclusively Western territories. Hence the title of the project!

Pan M 360: In addition to being a performer, what roles do you play in the production of this kind of project?

Anoush Moazzeni: All of them! I book the musicians, plan the rehearsals, do the promotion, contact the festivals, manage the recording and video broadcasting, etc.

VISIT THE SUONI PER IL POPOLO WEBSITE TO WATCH THE VIDEO OF PART OF ANOUSH MOAZZENI’S CONCERT ON JUNE 15, 2021 (you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page to access the video)

Pan M 360: You are definitely even more ‘multidisciplinary’ than the usual artistic label suggests! Are there any other projects of yours that we can see and hear?

Anoush Moazzeni: If people ever get to Toronto (once the border restrictions are lifted), they can visit the Aga Khan Museum, which has a beautiful exhibition by Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed, Dissolving Order. His work is inspired by the ancient art of carpets, a thousand-year-old tradition throughout the Near East region. He uses new technologies to reappropriate the artistic expression linked to this tradition. My contribution was a musical piece that included audio-visual materials. I used piano, digital and invented sounds, concrete sounds, such as those of a machine used to make carpets, etc., and I mixed everything together. The graphic notation was inspired by the carpet patterns of the region. I also asked an artist to weave these notations into a traditional style fabric.

Pan M 360: I also understand that you have a new project underway in Quebec City?

Anoush Moazzeni: Yes, it’s a production residency at the Chambre blanche in Quebec City, from August 3 to September 18. It’s called

Autopoiesis in the Making and it’s about creating original digital instruments. It will take advantage of my interest in interdisciplinarity because I will include artificial intelligence.

The beauty of this is that the result of my research there will be integrated into another project under construction, that of an opera at Concordia University. It will be very experimental, very far from the traditional form. In addition to investing artificial intelligence, I want to integrate virtual reality. The singer will have to move and interpret the score in a totally new context.

Pan M 360: Do you still give traditional classical piano concerts?

Anoush Moazzeni: No, not at the moment. I am very busy with my career in the avant-garde. But I still practice every day.

Pan M 360: Which classical composers do you like?

Anoush Moazzeni: Bach, Scriabin, moderns like Webern. I also like Brahms, Chopin, Saint-Saëns.

Pan M 360: Who inspires you in contemporary art?

Anoush Moazzeni: Artists in akousmatics, electroacoustics, and also female artists and many from first nations.

Pan M 360: Thank you

Pan M 360 : Hello Jean-Félix! How did you come up with the idea of a musical show based on the figure of Leonardo da Vinci?

Jean-Félix Mailloux : In truth, it was a commission from Wonny Song, artistic director of the Orford Arts Centre. We spoke at the Opus Prize ceremony in 2018. I offered to go and play our Debussy album, but he thought it didn’t fit in with the theme of the 2019 festival, which was to be centred around Italy. He then asked me if I would be willing to build a show inspired by Leonardo da Vinci and the music of the Italian Renaissance. I thought about it, and finally said yes! We premiered the show in July 2019.

Pan M 360 : Were you familiar with this musical universe at the time?

Jean-Félix Mailloux : Very little! I had never had the opportunity to play it. That said, it’s music and a period that I’ve loved for a long time, thanks to albums by Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras. I’ve also listened to a lot of Gesualdo, as well as modern musicians influenced by this period: Pärt and Stravinsky (his three madrigals on Gesualdo, his Pulcinella inspired by Pergolesi, among others, and even his Persephone, rather atonal, but still linked to this period, etc.), and several others.

Pan M 360 : The addition of a voice (Coral Egan’s, magnificent!) in such an extensive way is new for a Cordâme album. Why, and how did you come to choose Coral?

Jean-Félix Mailloux : Coral had already worked with me on pieces for Solawa (another ensemble founded and directed by Jean-Félix, editor’s note), and we really enjoyed our collaboration. I had been looking for a long time to integrate her into a Cordâme project. So when the idea of the Da Vinci show started to take shape, I thought of her. I don’t really like operatic voices with a large vibrato. I wanted a voice that was better suited to the early music repertoire, a pure voice with little or no vibrato. Coral has the perfect instrument for that! An exceptional talent with an infallible technique, a fluid plasticity thanks to her work in jazz, an impeccable accuracy of classical baroque level. It’s exactly what I needed!

Pan M 360 : What are the main elements that make it possible for you to create music that is both new (because all the compositions are yours!) and so evocative of the Renaissance, all without being a pastiche?

Jean-Félix Mailloux : The rhythms are very important. They make me think of folklore, because it’s music that was part of the daily life of the people at the time. I listened a lot to Jordi Savall, and the use of percussion instruments like tambourines is very present. There are also the simple, insistent motifs and the use of old harmonic modes, such as the melodic minor. I also used a lot of parallel fourths and fifths, techniques that sound “old”. It’s very technical and musicological, but the result is satisfying, both new and traditional, at least I think so.

Pan M 360 : Compared to your previous albums linked to the world of classical music (Debussy, Satie), how does Da Vinci compare in terms of difficulties and challenges?

Jean-Félix Mailloux : It’s a different job. For Satie, the connection was quite natural, because his music is quite similar to what we were doing at that time. Debussy was more difficult, because his music is perfect in itself, very directed in the writing. Debussy knew what he wanted. It was more difficult to ‘get out’ of the imposed framework. With Da Vinci and the Renaissance, it was actually easier. Once I had assimilated the basic concepts (which I mentioned earlier), I had a lot of freedom. Da Vinci composed music, as we know, but no documents have come down to us. I was therefore able to invent as I pleased sound worlds that he “could have” conceived himself! This is the central idea of the show and the album. I’m happy with the result, and I think I’m going to love these pieces for a long time.

Pan M 360: Would you have considered tackling this musical universe on your own if Wonny (Song) hadn’t challenged you to do it?

Jean-Félix Mailloux: I’m not sure, no. But in retrospect, I’m very happy! I have the impression that doors are opening for Cordâme thanks to this concept. Doors that I was knocking on without any answer. There aren’t many shows like this on the stage at the moment. I feel that we can use it to showcase our originality and play on stages or at festivals that we have never visited before. I am very happy, and I thank Wonny for that!

Pan M 360: I would like you to tell me about the lyrics that Coral sings. Who are they from and how did you find them?

Jean-Félix Mailloux: For the project, I did some research to find texts that could have been read and appreciated by Leonardo da Vinci. At first I thought of Petrarch, but I fell in love with a certain Gaspara Stampa, who lived about the same time as Leonardo. I was won over by her very strong and poetic texts, full of pearls and little wonders. She is an unknown poet outside Italy, but her work resonates with passion and is tinged with a rock’n’roll life full of emotions. She was married to a man who was away at war for a long time, so the themes of absence, of waiting, of love imagined rather than experienced, permeate her work almost everywhere.

Pan M 360: A great discovery, then?

Jean-Félix Mailloux: Yes, so much so that I’m currently working on an upcoming show centred around women authors from different eras, which I will set to music specifically for Coral Egan. In addition to Gaspara Stampa, there will be Louise Labbé, Catherine Pozzi, Louis de Vilmorin, Emily Dickinson, and others.

Cordâme ensemble- left to right : Sheila Hannigan, Coral Egan, Éveline Grégoire-Rousseau, Marie Neige Lavigne, Jean-Félix Mailloux

Pan M 360: Another project related to classical music?

Jean-Félix Mailloux: Yes. The next one will be devoted to Ravel. The work on this one is very advanced and will complete the French trilogy (with Satie and Debussy), but then (I’m already thinking about it!), I intend to tackle Stravinsky!

Pan M 360: But before all that, you’ll be performing (in front of an audience!!) in several places in Quebec, right?

Jean-Félix Mailloux: Absolutely. We’re really looking forward to seeing real humans in front of us! We’ll be in Saint-Prime on July 3rd, in Sorel-Tracy on August 8th, in Trois-Rivières on August 22nd. Other dates and locations may be added soon, thanks to the relaxing of sanitary measures. The public can visit our Facebook page to stay informed.

Pan M 360: Thank you!


Formed in Perth, Australia in 1978, the Scientists first established themselves as a punk band with pop tendencies before a personnel reshuffle (the first of many) in the early ’80s, which saw the band dive into disturbing swamp rock, tinged with Beefhearty crazy blues, Cramps-like dissonant ’60s fuzz-rock, Suicidal hysteria, Stoogian proto-punk, and apocalyptic Birthday Party-style post-punk. Raw, lo-fi sound, primal and hypnotic rhythms, dangerously simple riffs, it’s particularly this second incarnation of the Scientists that has left its mark and influenced numerous bands including the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Mudhoney. The incendiary “We Had Love”, recently heard by many in the movie Rock n Rolla, could be considered a classic of the  Scientists sound.

They’ve been crowned the godfathers of grunge, but the Scientists were far more twisted, unhealthy and sinister than anything that came out of Seattle or Sub Pop. After relocating to Sydney, then London, and six landmark albums between 1982 and 87, the Scientists faded away… only to return with the same spirit. First sporadically, then much more seriously since the beginning of the 2000s.

The current formation, still centered around the singer and guitarist Kim Salmon, gathers all the musicians of the second incarnation: guitarist Tony Thewlis, bassist Boris Sujdovic and drummer Leanne Cowie, who joined the band in December 1985. If the Scientists have toured a lot since this reformation, they have on the other hand released very little new material, Salmon preferring to focus on concerts. After a single released in 2017, then another for the Los Angeles label In The Red the following year and an EP for the same label in 2019, the band was convinced to make a new album. Negativity, released on June 11, brings the Australian band back to almost where they left off in 1987. They haven’t mellowed out a bit, always seemingly fueled by bad acid and cheap beer, and they’re still in the same bad mood that suits them so well. To emphasize the point, PAN M 360 reached Salmon at his home in Melbourne, where it’s almost winter. The very friendly leader of the band gave us a long interview, in which he talks about the Scientists reformation, the creation of Negativity, and his passion for drawing and painting.  

PAN M 360: When the Scientists called it quits in 1987, did you leave on a bad note? How did you get back together?

Kim Salmon: It was sort of a natural process when we ended the Scientists in ’86, there wasn’t any point in pursuing it, it seemed okay to do it, we couldn’t see any reasons not to…

PAN M 360: Had you thought about coming back together for a while before making it real?

Kim Salmon: Not really. It was one of those understood kind of things. Tony was a bit reluctant about it because of certain things that did occur in the past. He was a bit embittered about some things that had nothing to do with the band, but more about the band not being as successful as he had hoped. We were kind of on the verge of breaking into the mainstream in the ’80s but it just never quite happened for various reasons, and he was maybe more disappointed than us about that. Anyway, we succeeded in persuading him to restart the band. 

PAN M 360: Were you adamant about having the old line-up back together?

Kim Salmon: The band had a few line-ups. We reunited one of the earlier line-up with James Baker, Ian Sharples and Ben Juniper to perform a show on some rooftop somewhere in Perth for quite a bit of money in 1995, but that was just a one-off thing. And there was the line-up we had for Human Jukebox in 1987 with myself, Tony and a guy named Nick Combe, so that was another line-up as well. I like it but I don’t think it was the Scientists line-up. It’s just that people were more interested in this actual line-up, which is the one we had in the early to mid-’80s. Leanne joined in late ’85. She was the one who fit best with this line-up after Brett Rixon left in ’85. People think we got back together in 2006 but it was actually in 2002, when we were offered to tour Australia. At this point, we had tried two different drummers. One night, we played a show in Sydney and we asked Leanne if she would like to join us on stage for a song. That was a pivotal moment because that’s where we realized that we really needed her in the band, it just wasn’t the same without Leanne on drums. 

PAN M 360: How did this new album came together?

Kim Salmon: In 2017, we had the opportunity to do some touring in Australia and we had at that point reissued all our catalogue on a label called Numero. We had many, many reissues over the years, but Numero was really the most successful, and really brought the band back to life, so we went on that tour. In those days, Tony got me involved in some recording he was doing for someone’s birthday and he wanted me to sing on it. He actually did a pretty good job with my vocals and we thought that maybe we should do some more tracks with the rest of the band, so we did this single, which was a cover of Jacques Dutronc’s “Mini Mini Mini” and “Perpetual Motion”, an obscure Scientists song from the ’80s that we never officially recorded. We were’nt too much into recording new stuff like old bands do because its always fraught with disaster. So for us a single was alright. But then we found ourselves touring Europe a year after, and then the USA, so we did another single, with In The Red this time, and then In The Red persuaded us to do an EP and another tour of the U.S.

After that, we were offered a third tour of the USA but the label needed more new recordings so we finally agreed to do another album… that’s how Negativity came about! So we put the album out, but we were never able to tour… We still have an open visa until June 2022, so we’ll see how things go. Negativity was basically done through the Internet. I would come up with a rhythm on the drums, send it to Tony in London who would come up with a riff and send it to me. If I liked the riff, I would come up with something to sing on it. Then we would add the bass and send it to Leanne to add the drums. But since I had already found a beat, it was not easy for her to play over it. So we basically recorded it at Sumo Studio in Perth. We added some stuff here and there, violin, trombone, my daughter sang a bit and played some piano…

PAN M 360: Would you say that Negativity is the logical follow-up to Human Jukebox, that last album you guys recorded together in 1987?

Kim Salmon: In some ways. I think it’s more polished than Human Jukebox which is much more rough and ready. This new record sounds like it’s more produced to my ears. And there aren’t a lot of Scientists records that sound well produced, aside from Weird Love (1986) and maybe You Get What You Deserve (1985); generally, we had pretty garage-y records. We usually recorded on a low budget. I think our recording history is bizarre because our first album is very different, with a pop-punky kind of sound; Blood Red River is quite an extreme sounding record and You Get What Deserve is also different… I can hear a sort of aesthetic somehow, I think that they share some things. We’re still pursuing that minimalist sort of structure in our songs, that’s what we’ve always done. The structures are very simple in terms of notes and keys and melodies. That said, the artist is the last person to be talking about his work. But If I can draw a parallel between those two albums, it’s mostly about Tony’s involvment. Usually, I was writing most of the songs, but on Human Jukebox, Tony contributed to a lot of the music, as well as on Negativity. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXHR69POI2E

PAN M 360: Why did you choose the title Negativity?

Kim Salmon: We’ve always been a band with a dark side, we’ve never done anything very positive and upbeat – without being goth, that I want to say (laughs). So this word came to me in one of the songs of the album, on “Dissonance” I think, and I thought it would make a good title. I did something positive with Negativity (laughs)

PAN M 360: Aside from the band, you teach music and you also paint and draw. 

Kim Salmon: When I was 19, I studied fine arts for a year, painting was my primary interest. Then I took what they call a gap year… and that gap year lasted until now (laughs). But all along, I kept being interested in drawing and art, but aside from a few drawings and cartoons here and there, and a few record covers I illustrated, I never really focused on this. It’s after my last solo album in 2015 that I got more into it. In order to do the album, I had a Gofundme, but instead of doing a private show or something like that for the people who helped me, I decided to send them a card with some drawings I made. Then someone approached me about doing an exhibition of my work. So I did my first exhibit in 2018 which included a little bit of everything I’ve done since I was 16. I sold quite a few works and the following year I did another one, mostly drawings and watercolours. Again, I sold a lot of them. Then I exhibited at Mick Harvey and his wife’s gallery. Again, a big success as I sold 14 of my works. At the opening, I sold five works that I had done in a week while I was in quarantine in Perth! Since the confinement, I really immersed myself in painting and drawing. I have been quite productive and have made a lot of progress. I really love painting and drawing, I’m really excited about it and will definitely do more of it. 

(photo credit: Andrew Watson)

I’ve met with Ben Reimer, drummer and initiator of this new festival. 

https://youtu.be/2-GKgdeLpcA
Video interviews with many artists participating in the Undrum fest 2021

Pan M 360 : Hello Ben! How did you come up with this great idea for a concert series?

Ben Reimer : well, it was years in the making, at least in my mind! Since I am a drummer and also a member of Architek percussion group, I am well aware of the possibilities of drums in avant-garde and contemporary music, added to those in jazz, improv, metal, pop, rock and so on. I am a fan of all kinds of music, big range. So I wanted to bring together all those great people, musicians and thinkers of new music, that use the drum kit in innovative ways and contribute to ‘’undo’’ the usual ways of playing the instrument and shake the public’s conventional idea of music making with drums.

So with the help of my friends at Architek and also Peter (Burton) from Suoni per il popolo, everything was put in place this year to inaugurate this series within the festival and we called it Undrum, for obvious reasons! I am aware there are a lot of drum fests already out there (right here in Montreal, there is a very good one!), and they’re great, but I wanted to showcase styles and musical ideas that are less well represented in these gatherings, individual voices that express themselves in unconventional ways through drum kit playing. That’s the goal. 

Pan M 360 : May we call you the Tim Brady of drums?

Ben Reimer : LOL! Well, I haven’t done a piece for 100 drums yet, so, I don’t know… But hey, just for the principle of it, that would be an honor! And that wouldn’t be so far from the truth. I have my (drumming) hands in art and vernacular music-making, be it metal and rock, and also contemporary opera and drum kit concertos, which I have done! The difference is that I do not compose. I play others’ music, and I like it that way. I love the relationship I develop with composers (like Nicole Lizée for example). That’s my thing.

Pan M 360 : Can you drive us through some of the shows coming next in the series?

Ben Reimer : Sure! This Sunday is Part 2, and it starts with Greg Harrison from Toronto. Great artist, also associated with Jeremy Dutcher. He plays these wonderful grooves where he doubles as a synth player while drumming! Some very ambient, accessible atmospheres mixing delicate drum kit with entrancing bass lines. That’s something to look for.

Then there’s Montreal’s Mili Hong who is well versed in beautiful straight ahead jazz, but here will dazzle with incredible free improv, with purely acoustic drum kit. She knows how to invent great textures with her instrument.

Ian Chang from Sun Lux will also be there. He is like a one man DJ-orchestra! Drumming and also triggering all kinds of sound effects with simultaneous electronics. It’s shocking to hear what can come from a single person on a stage!

Jason Tait will entertain a second set. He comes from The Weakerthans, from Winnipeg. 

Pan M 360 : And later on in the month, legendary names will be in town : Susie Ibarra, from Tzadik/John Zorn fame and also Glenn Kotche from Wilco! Was it difficult to bring them along ?

Ben Reimer : No, not at all! I was introduced to Glenn via David Cossin from Bang on a Can in New York, with whom I collaborated on some work by Lukas Ligeti (drummer and son of the famous composer Györgi Ligeti!). Glenn did some lectures for my students at McGill. Like me, he is part of the ‘’popular’’ and ‘’classical’’ worlds. I never met Susie, but I know about her work, of course, and she has an idea of my own, so there is a lot of respect. She also is a wonderful lecturer, researcher and scholar of her instrument. I can’t wait to hear them and see the public’s reaction to their incredible playing.

They are wonderful and very generous individuals. So, no, it wasn’t difficult at all to bring them to the roster.

Pan M 360 : What’s the state of the drum kit as a popular instrument, considering that nowadays, popular and far reaching radio, tv and digital waves have been taken over by rap and hip hop, where the drums aren’t a usual feature?

Ben Reimer : Oh, that is a massive question! It depends if you’re a scholar, a teacher or a player. But I’d say that for sure it’s a different landscape out there from 20 or 50 years ago. I meet some students that have a surprising lack of knowledge of the historical figures of the instrument, and rock music! That being said, they are curious, and once there in the game, they come up with questions about Keith Moon and so on, so then we talk and discuss and they drink it, you know. And, as much as the internet can be a pain, it can also be a way for them to listen and discover lots and lots of things that we didn’t have access to decades ago. So, we have to tamper a bit the idea of lack of knowledge.

That being said, there is a new brand of young drummers arriving with academic and literate credentials. They come from university programs, like McGill in jazz, and they are very well trained and hungry for originality. I’d love to see more classical programs also giving space to the knowledge of drums, and the possibilities of this instrument in a more avant-garde context. But things are evolving. I gave lectures on drum history to classical percussion students. So things are changing.

Pan M 360 : Would you say that walls between ‘’pop’’ and ‘’classical’’ music-making are going down?

Ben Reimer : I think we’re getting there! You know, with pioneering work and advocacy done in the last 25 years or so by ensembles like Bang on a Can, Alarm Will Sound, or right here by Architek, mentalities are going in the right direction, I’d say. But there is still some separation. 

Pan M 360 : What artists are blowing up your mind these days?

Ben Reimer : Oh, many, many! All those at Undrum, of course, but also some recent metal drumming. There are incredible drummers out there. So I get inspiration from them, I practice and I even get some new music based on that from Nicole Lizée! 

Pan M 360 : What does the drum kit brings to music-making that other percussion instruments don’t?

Ben Reimer : Technically, you have the option of having four things happening at the same time, so it creates a multi-limbed independance which is at the core of what makes a drum kit performance. And also, what I love about it, is the fact that you have all those great individuals, creating their own personal sound world but all tied in with the 100 year-history and knowledge of this instrument. It’s all tied-in with the politics and social fabric of the last 100 years! Yeah. And, best thing, in my mind : you can create such great grooves with it! That’s the beauty of the drum kit : playing it makes people wanna get up and dance!

Pan M 360 : Thanks Ben, and all the best with the series!

Ben Reimer : Thanks to you!

Cavalcade, the highly anticipated, newly released second album from  black midi, takes the now British trio back to the paths of unbridled progressive alt-rock music. Like the previous Schlagenheim of 2019, which revealed to the world a group of young virtuoso musicians, capable of incredible technical prowess, digging without restraint into punk, jazz, experimental music and progressive rock like children with a box of candy, Cavalcade, aptly titled, is a surprising, ambitious at times, difficult record, on which all kinds of influences and ambiances jostle together. The delirious first single “John L”, released last March, and the equally crazy video that accompanied it, furiously set the tone for what was to come: Cavalcade is an unbridled ride from which one does not emerge unscathed. 

It’s at 2 p.m. that we had an appointment with Geordie Greep at his place in London. Comfortably seated in an armchair in the basement of his house, wearing a shirt, tie and a baggy jacket (a bit like the photo in this article), the guitarist and lead singer of black midi looks like he’s about to be interviewed for a job selling used cars. Unpredictable and sometimes irascible, the talented musician is in a pretty good mood. Without going into too many details and anecdotes, he talked to PAN M 360 about Cavalcade, the new opus of the London combo featuring bassist Cameron Picton and the prodigious drummer-percussionist Morgan Simpson, completed by saxophonist Kaidi Akinnibi and keyboardist Seth Evans. 

PAN M 360: How would you describe Calvacade in your own words?

Geordie Greep: Non-stop thrills, adventure, action, drama, comeday, romance… it’s got it all! The highest highs and the lowest lows.

PAN M 360: The word “drama” pops up often in your interviews and even your press releases…

Geordie Greep: It’s a less limiting term than say… noise-rock or R&B or something like that. When you have a more vague and emotional term like “drama”, it doesn’t mean you have to do a specific type of music, it just means that you can use it as a guide to make music that has a form of trajectory or tension to it. And I think drama is a good thing to keep in my mind because you always want the music to be exciting, to have the serene or melodic moments still have that threat there, the tension, the drama, and to still be able to go back to a quiet moment…

PAN M 360: The cover seems to represent quite well the contents of the record, it’s a dense and intense cover but with a lot of blue, blue being a more meditative colour, not too aggressive. You chose to work again with David Rudnick, who did the cover art of your first album. Would he be your main artist for the covers, someone who creates a style that will fit the band like Vaughan Oliver did with 4AD, Peter Saville with Factory, or Malcolm Garrett with the Buzzcocks?

Geordie Greep: Well, we like what he did on the first album, even though he had a very limited amount of time to finish that cover, he did it in about a week. So now we had more time and we thought that if he could do what he did in a week for the first album, let’s see what he can do for this one in a couple of months!  He has a similar approach to his art to the one we have for our music. You get someone that you like and get him to do something that he really believes in, and not try to water him down but instead let him follow what he thinks is the right thing to do.

PAN M 360: How do you build the songs? Is it lyrics first, or do you work on the music before you add the vocals?

Geordie Greep: It’s two separate things for us. We work on the songs together or someone does that alone at home and brings it in, and then we decide who’s gonna do vocals. And whoever is going to do vocals looks for every word they can think of that fits best to the song.  So it may not be the best method because there isn’t necessarly an intelligent design in how the lyrics and the song fit together a lot of the time, it’s more like a coincidence, like what words fits more with the song rather than constructing each side by side. But there are a couple of songs on this album where the words and the music were kind of done at the same time, built around each other, but most of the time they’re done completely separately and just put together afterwards. 

PAN M 360: It seems the music stems less from jams than the previous album.

Geordie Greep: On the first album the way we would actually make the songs in the first place was to just jam out untile we had a verse or until we had a kind of chorus. On this new album, it’s more one guy sitting down and thinking, “okay, let’s make a verse and make the verse fit with the chorus,” that kind of thing…

PAN M 360: What are the main differences between Shlagenheim and Calvacade?

Geordie Greep: I hope that the main difference is, there ius much more nuance to it and more dynamics, I hope there are more colours involved. It’s just a more interesting album, I think. The songs are more melodic and have more longevity, meaning that you can listen to them longer without getting bored. 

PAN M 360: What did you try on this album that you haven’t tried before?

Geordie Greep: I don’t know… It was a fairly similar method of recording and everything. Aside from the songs written completely differently, we used a click track on a couple of songs, which is something the we never did because there were bits in those songs that had to be recorded separately, and there were also songs that didn’t rely so much on the push-and-pull tempo, like a lot of our other songs. 

PAN M 360: You used different instruments too, for the new album, no?

Geordie Greep: Yeah, we used different instruments. It was the same as the first album though, we took advantage of what was in the studio. You know, if there is an instrument laying around, it’s best to use it whenever possible, it’s good to make the most of the place you’re in. But I think a lot of those overdubs and strange instruments are much more apparent on this album because on the first album, a lot of the time all these different instruments we used were buried in the mix, or sounded more like something else. It was less obvious that there was a wide range of instruments on the first album. 

PAN M 360: So what about that wok, how and on what song was it used?

Geordie Greep: Oh, yeah (laughs). I think it’s on “Diamond Stuff”, and I think what Morgan (Simpson) was doing there was just using a bow on the side of this bowl or frying pan to make a kind of a ghostly sound like you do with the cymbals, so it’s more that kind of thing than hiting on the thing.

PAN M 360: Tell us a bit about the recording. I understand you guys went to a studio in Ireland just to record a kind of a demo, but ended recording most of the album there.

Geordie Greep: We went there to record a few tracks, just to see how it is to work with John Murphy, the producer of the album. But the atmosphere was really good and the songs sounded really good too, so we ended up recording all the tracks on the album to a kind of half-finished degree. We did it all in between lockdowns. You know, we had this free time so it would have been a tragedy to not take advantage of it. If we would have stayed home and did nothing, that would have been such a waste of time. 

PAN M 360: Did Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin help on the album before he took a break from the band?

Geordie Greep: (hesitant)… It kind of happened before we recorded it and even writing the tunes. He did work on two songs that we wrote a few years ago and put on the album, but for the rest he did not take part in any of it. 

PAN M 360: How did you cope or adjust to his departure?

Geordie Greep: The whole situation with Matt has been developing for a long time, so there wasn’t really a sudden change. But it was quite cool on some of the tracks to lean into kind of the trio aspect, a kind of a more spacious element, on tracks like “Dethroned”, it’s like kind of a power-trio sort of thing, like Jimi Hendrix’s Experience or The Police, it’s great to have fun with that sort of space sometimes. It probably did change the writing process as well, because there is one less cook in the kitchen, you know? 

PAN M 360: Your label has this Golden Ticket contest, where a ticket will be inserted into a Cavalcade album in the U.S. and another one in the U.K., and will give the winners the chance to either have black midi as a band for an event of their choice, or a day in the studio with the band for a creative collaboration, or tickets for two to all future black midi worldwide shows for 10 years, but there is also a pretty special flexi-disc that comes with some of your albums – what is it about exactly?

Geordie Greep: We did a poll asking different independent record shops from around the world to do a list of ten songs that they like, and get their customers to vote for the one they prefer so we could cover it. Then that song will be on a flexi-disc that will come with our album, but only available at the store that voted for the song we covered. So there are as many songs as there are different record shops, meaning it’s not going to be the same songs on every flexi, depending of the store where you buy the record. It was really fun doing it because there was quite a range of songs. We did songs like “Nothing Compares 2 U” from Prince, “21st Century Schizoid Man” from King Crimson, “Psycho Killer” from Talking Heads, “Love Story” from Taylor Swift, a Captain Beefheart song… quite a funny mix.

Crédit illustrations: Anthrox Studios

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