Laura Anglade has the profile of a confident French singer, in North America to make her mark. This destiny of a career at least Canadian was traced, it must be said. Born in Brousse-le-Château, in the south of France, Laura grew up in Connecticut with her family who emigrated from Europe. She crossed the northern border of the United States a while ago.
An old soul in her mid-twenties, this seasoned performer and improviser has a strong preference for the modern jazz of generations before her own. She would be inspired by Carmen McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Nancy Wilson, Etta Jones, Anita O’Day, Chet Baker, Blossom Dearie.
The biographical profile of this quality artist is full of indirect and direct comparisons…” For fans of: Laufey, Stacey Kent, Veronica Swift, Carla Bruni, Françoise Hardy…While Laura’s style is evocative of Julie London, Helen Merrill and Cyrille Aimée – her voice is uniquely her own.”
She certainly draws from the repertoire of classic French chanson, a distinct color to her jazz classicism when it comes to (mostly) expressing herself in English.All indications are that she could provoke things, at least in the Canadian market she’s investing in – especially since she’s living in Toronto after residing in Montreal for a few years.
z gypsy music of her parents. There, she has collaborated with established artists such as David Lahm, Ranee Lee, Andre White, Jean-Michel Pilc and Alec Walkington.
Released in 2019, the album I’ve Just Got About Everything on Justin Time has put many chips in my ears,
And why not continue the discovery of Laura Anglade by addressing it directly?
No sooner said than done. Here is the interview with PAN M 360.
PAN M 360: Do you agree with the many comparisons or evocations in your biographical profiles?
Laura Anglade: Yes and no, I think each of these musicians is unique. I am very flattered!
PAN M 360: Are we to understand that you are somewhere between “classic” jazz singing and quality songs, French or English speaking?
Laura Anglade: Yes. I didn’t want to “jazzify” all these songs on the new album, for example those of Barbara or Piaf, my goal was to underline the lyrics, to create an arrangement around the lyrics. It’s not necessary to always fit into the framework of “jazz”, as long as the lyrics tell a sincere story and are very close to my heart.
PAN M 360: What do you want to jazzify in the French repertoire?
Laura Anglade: I think there are plenty of songs that can be interpreted in different ways. For example, “Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir”, the original version by Charles Trenet is beautiful, but quite slow. You get the impression that the person is sad, full of regrets. However, if you make it more “swing”, the lyrics immediately change the tone. The message becomes a little more ironic, almost mocking. You can play with the arrangement of a song quite a bit.
PAN M 360: “French classics made famous by Maurice Chevalier, Boris Vian, Edith Piaf, and Jacques Brel to name a few.”
These French (or Belgian in the case of Brel) artists are from your grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generation! Of course, many of their songs have been “jazzified” over the decades as we know.
So what do you think?
Do you see this choice of artists as a starting point for your exploration of the francophone repertoire? Or does this classicism satisfy you and is your search elsewhere?
Laura Anglade: I wanted to do an album in French to represent my dual Franco-American identity, as if they were meeting. I was born in France but grew up in the United States. I’ve always felt in between. I also wanted to show that, as in my own life, the two worlds, the world of the Great American Songbook and the world of French song, have always been intertwined. In particular, there are many songs, including “La valse des lilas”, “La chanson de Maxence” or “Que reste-il de nos amours”, which have been adapted and translated into English and which are part of the Great American Songbook repertoire. In fact, I first learned the English adaptation of La Chanson de Maxence, “You Must Believe In Spring”. I later found out that the original version came from a Michel Legrand musical. It was important for me to give this gift to my family as well, especially my French grandparents, to bring back memories, so that they could recognize themselves through the lyrics. They liked the first album, but they didn’t understand the lyrics and these songs weren’t from their culture, which created a wall.
PAN M 360: At first sight, your style is part of the female vocal jazz of the 40s, 50s, early 60s. How do you explain this passion for this period of modern jazz history?
Laura Anglade: For me, this period is timeless. I see the music of that era as life lessons. It’s often said that older people are wiser, it’s the same with music. Whether you’ve lived through these stories or not, you still learn and can relate to them, no matter how old you are. I choose songs to sing that are similar to me or that make me feel good, that remind me of a memory or someone close to me. I am a very nostalgic person.
PAN M 360: Do you consider yourself a “classic” jazz singer?
Laura Anglade: I think so, yes. It’s by singing this repertoire that I feel the most myself, that I find myself the most.
PAN M 360: What are you trying to achieve as a performer and improviser?
Laura Anglade: I try to bring back emotions, memories. I’m looking to tell stories that we can all relate to, from generation to generation. I’d like to revive some of the lesser-known songs as well, personalize them, bring them back to the surface, the songs that got lost between “La bohême” and “La vie en rose”. It’s interesting by the way. What makes some songs become the nuggets and others not? There are so many songs that are just as beautiful, that have just as important stories and deserve to be told. In my everyday life, I try to live more in the moment and interpret it my way, which is the very definition of improvisation.
PAN M 360: What are the challenges for the development of vocal jazz in 2021?
Laura Anglade: In this day and age, it’s fantastic to be able to reach audiences all over the world, just with a shared video. I’m grateful for that because I’ve been able to interact with a lot of people that I would never have met otherwise. I recognize that we’re moving into a virtual world, and I’m adapting to that. But I also find that there can be a loss of authenticity, in the sense that we are so preoccupied with our online visibility that we forget the essential: the sharing of what we like, simply, too tied to the number of “likes” and “views”. You have to learn to step back because I’ve fallen into this trap several times. I sing because it is part of me, I have things to express and give through music.
PAN M 360: We owe you the quintet album “I’ve Got Just About Everything”. Another one is planned for 2022.
Laura Anglade: At the moment, we’ve just finished the second album, “Venez donc chez moi”, which will be released in May 2022.
PAN M 360: Could you explain your aesthetic progression through these projects, as well as your choice of collaborators?
Laura Anglade: Sam (Kirmayer) and I have been working together for several years now. We’ve gotten to know each other through music. Sometimes we even improvise in unison on stage. We recorded this album in the middle of a pandemic, stuck at home, without being able to rehearse together. There has always been a beautiful musical complicity between us, and this quasi absence of rehearsal makes the album even more spontaneous and natural, and emphasizes our mutual trust.
PAN M 360: Why are you now living in Toronto? How long did you live in Montreal?
Laura Anglade: I wanted to discover a different side of Canada and a new jazz scene, and I’ve always loved this city. I left the US when I was 18 to study translation in Montreal, and I stayed for two years after graduation. So I spent a total of six years in Montreal. I have never actually lived in France, except for vacation periods in a small village in the south of France, where my family is.
PAN M 360: Who will accompany you to the Salle Bourgie ? What are you planning to present there, roughly speaking?
Laura Anglade: Sam Kirmayer will accompany me for this concert. We will be performing music from our new album. I’m really looking forward to finally being able to share this project, especially in this beautiful venue!
With two albums, 1979’s Y and 1980’s For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder, The Pop Group unknowingly laid the foundations of post-punk. Influenced by the anarchic and aggressive aspects of punk, but with their ears tuned much more towards funk, reggae and dub, the Bristol-based band influenced an impressive number of musicians in its short career, from The Birthday Party to Sonic Youth to Bauhaus, St. Vincent and of course the entire trip-hop cohort of the British port city.
Just after Y’s 40th anniversary, The Pop Group, which reformed in 2010, called on visionary producer Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell to resume his role at the helm and rebuild the dub version of the album he recorded with the band on a farm in the English countryside in 1979. Y in Dub is a collection of nine heavyweight dub versions reflecting the prodigious intensity of the source material, and the enterprising originality of the dub and reggae music that inspired The Pop Group.
With Y In Dub, The Pop Group and Bovell explore Y, amplifying the shadows and echoes, intensely accentuating the resonance of each element. The original material is submerged and sometimes extended, broken, shattered and sculpted into turbulent, contrasting forms that deviate from the original tracks in unpredictable ways. On this new oddity, Bovell, known for his numerous albums, the Babylon soundtrack and his work with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Fela Kuti, Madness, The Slits and many others, adds another inventive step to his illustrious career.
To tell us about this restless and confusing experimentation, we caught up with the band’s singer and lyricist Mark Stewart. A first-rate iconoclast, a gentle nutcase who’s very likeable but not always easy to follow, the man has an impressive track record, whether it’s with his band Mark Stewart & The Maffia or with the New Age Steppers, Tackhead and Adrian Sherwood’s On U Sound System crew.
PAN M 360: Why did you choose to do a dub version of Y and not For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder, for exemple?
Mark Stewart: I’ve always been very interested in dub techniques, you know, I kind of dub up my life. Dub for me, it’s the music of chance—you don’t know, when you suddenly turn off everything that’s underneath, what the bass drum is suddenly going to do on its own. It’s just such that it’s just such an interesting experiment, and time and time again. When I’m sitting with Adrian or sitting with Dennis Bovell, I just say, cut everything, and you’re on this cliff’s edge, then suddenly a violin floats in which you didn’t even realize was there. It’s really cathartic. And it’s unplanned. And it’s kind of like, there’s this thing in England called psychogeography, where you walk around the city, but you deliberately go left instead of right. And that whole procedure for me is kind of cleansing, time and time again. Because what happened was that suddenly we got the master tapes back and me and Gareth, we’re in our office, right, with this box and we open this box, and we’ve sold these tapes with our handwriting on it. We haven’t seen the tapes since 1978. Right? And I said to Gareth, I said we should dub it. Because we were using dub experiments and we were influenced by concrete music when we were making Y itself. But we said, get Dennis to dub it, but just use exactly what’s on the master tapes. Nothing fresh, no news or plugins or effects, as King Tubby or Dennis would have done it back in the day. Right? Obviously, it’s not a retro thing. For me, it was quite a heretical thing because that has become a… I don’t know, it’s become a sort of totem. And I thought it’s quite good to flip it.
PAN M 360: Tell me a bit about about Dennis Bovell. Why did you choose to work with with him in the first place for the original Y?
Mark Stewart: Right. So we were still in school and we were just playing these clubs. And then suddenly, these music editors of Melody Maker and NME started taking about us really seriously and doing these interviews with us. And I was, you know, I was out there anyway, I would have been out there even if I wasn’t in the band. I was reading Apollinaire and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I thought I was some kind of intellectual. But suddenly, they start saying, ‘oh, this is so weird, it sounds like Captain Beefheart’. I didn’t really know who Captain Beefheart was. And reading all their theories… The Pop Group is a perfect thing for journalists to reuse their college essay as a review. So I was going to a lot of soundsystems and the late-night clubs in Bristol, which are basically reggae clubs or soundsystems or dub clubs, and I just loved scooped-out versions of the classic reggae and deejay [or toaster, not to be confused with DJ] tracks that were happening at the time: U Roy, I Roy, Aggrovators. I was immersed in reggae. Where my mom grew up is where all the Jamaicans came to live, you know, when they came on the Windrush. But in Bristol, we don’t really see colour. we’re just Bristolians, right? Anyway, so the label, we had a really cool guy, Andrew Lauder, who ran UA, who signed us up, right? And he was really open-minded. He was going, ‘well, who do you want to work with?’ And we said, we don’t really want to work with anybody. And he was going, ‘well, you know, people use producers’. And so we all said John Cale straightaway because of his work with Nico, and we loved Marble Index. And he’s worked with the Stooges. And it’s quite free jazzy, the arrangements of the sax and stuff… And so they flew John over and we had a meeting with him in our school during lunch break, and John kept on falling asleep. Perhaps he was jet-lagged or so, but we couldn’t understand what was going on. But then, because we were so much into rhythms and reggae and funk and the rhythm sections, we kept on saying we wanted to work with King Tubby, but then we found out King Tubby had been shot. And all the way from the age of 13 onwards, I was knocking off school a lot and I’d hang out, when it was raining, in this record shop called Revolver. Every Friday, when what we called “the van from Zion” arrived with that week’s prereleases from Jamaica, the little seven-inches, I’d just be in the other room saying, ‘play the version, play the version!’ Bought them all with my dinner money. I didn’t eat. And it turned out Adrian Sherwood was a delivery man driving the van down from London. But anyway, so there was one record that I was really into, like, just before we were having these meetings, and it was called “Feel Like Making Love”, by Elizabeth Archer and The Equators, but there was a version called “Feel Like Making Dub”, and it was slowed down and there were lightning crashes. It was full-on. You know, the dub I like is messianic. It’s just full-on and it sends a shiver. It’s like lightning! What do they say? The bassline is in your spine, or something? Anyway, that’s what gets me going, the full-on Biblical dub. And they said Dennis Bovell, and I knew Dennis was in Matumbi, because they were sort of playing around England at the time. And so I just said, see if this guy can do it. And we reached out to him and we had a meeting with him. And as soon as we met him, he’s just like, a big furry bear like somebody from Sesame Street. You know, I got this saying, don’t grow up–it’s a trap. I’m still in my kung-fu pajamas I’ve been wearing since I was 12, you know? And Dennis was just so playful and naive and excitable. So he gave us the excuse to be idiots. I’m not gonna call it art, but it’s all about play. When you play, you juxtapose, then stuff happens. He just encouraged us. And he was very playful. And suddenly we have like, 50 takes of this track called “Blood Money”. And there’s a track called “:338”, which was just like “Beyond Good and Evil” backwards, which has turned out really good on this dub album. It sounds like a sort of mad Neu track or something. Again, it’s just suddenly something which started off as a sort of one-two-three-four punk song or whatever, when we were kids doing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” or something, and it suddenly becomes something else. You know, there wasn’t a lot of thought into it. If you flip something or turn it backwards or open it up, suddenly, you’re in another universe.
PAN M 360: Did you want to steer away from the original album or stay close to it ?
Mark Stewart: I don’t go into these things with preconceptions. We believed some of the politics of punk were non-hierarchical. We don’t tell somebody what to do, we just harness whatever anybody’s doing and flip it again and try and crash that energy with some other energy. I don’t know how to explain it. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And that’s what I like, you go in somewhere, you come out the next day at 7 o’clock in the morning, and something else has happened. You’ve got to keep your third eye open, you know, throughout life.
PAN M 360: And during these dub sessions, was it only Dennis working on it, or were you also with the band?
Mark Stewart: Basically, Gareth was there a lot. I was involved kind of remotely and throwing curveballs on the phone into it and just making stupid jokes, you know? And we were going backwards and forwards, and strip it down and turn it off and summit whatever, and I got overruled, because I weighed upon loads of farmyard noises and stuff like all those Joe Gibbs ones when there’s like cockerels. I would have started toasting “Old MacDonald Had A Farm”!
What’s really interesting to me is turning stuff off and opening it up, especially being the lyricist. I was interested in cut-ups. going back to Brion Gysin. And my stuff is just like collections of bits I sort of crash together just because I’m excited about these lines or whatever. Some of the stuff I wrote when I was 13-14. I call it psychic archaeology, it’s about going back into those tapes. Philosophically, my younger self helped me last year and the year before with these kind of messages. These lines came through to me, which helped some quite heavy situations I was in or trying to deal with in my mind at the time, it’s quite weird.
PAN M 360: Did this dub exercise help you rediscover the album?
MarkStewart: I rediscovered the energy, it was like a seance. I hate to word use the word ritual, but we sort of conjured something up, we kind of bottled an energy, we managed to get this energy onto ferric oxide, And Dennis with his way in dub was like rubbing Sinbad’s lamp, and the thing jumped out again, but it’s a different sort of golem. They asked me what his name is but I can’t even pronounce it. It’s really long. I think it’s friendly. What do you reckon?
PAN M 360: Do you think that the dub version sheds a new light on the album?
Mark Stewart: Yes. Well, for me, the genie that we bottled and the ideas that I had for it were frozen in the vault of the label. They shed a new light on the situation I was in last year. So the light beams from the past into the future. You know, my grandmother was a clairvoyant and my father was obsessed with the power of paranormal things. But I think that maybe these messages are coming from the future. Why are they constantly thinking it’s coming from the past, or dead people? Who knows where these things are coming from?
PAN M 360: Do you remember how Y was originally conceived? And recorded?
Mark Stewart: Totally, totally because we went to this really weird farm called Rich Farm. We worked in a barn for a month with Dennis. And it was a crazy, it was one of the first time I’d really kind of been away from home, apart from when I was in the Boy Scouts, for such a long period of time, and we just had such a laugh. Staying up all night, coming across in the snow in our pajamas, you know, we were out of anybody’s control. Feral, absolutely feral. I mean, The Slits went there about two years later because we started helping The Slits, and we were touring and working with them, really, and they got Dennis to produce them as well later on. They did Cut there and you can see the effect it had on them on the cover of the Slits album, it got them naked, covered in what looks like manure.
PAN M 360: I read that you were influenced by much more than music at the start of the band.
Mark Stewart: Totally. The funny thing is movies were very influential on us. And then Patti Smith took us on tour with her when we were making this record, the original Y. And her piano player was called Richard “Death in Venice” Sohl. People don’t realize films were as influential as music, you know? And the thing is, when punk rock was kicking off, you could only wear mad clothes to these kind of art-centre bars. There were two art centres, a place called Dr. Finney and another one called the Actual Art Center. And it was the only place that people didn’t want to pick a fight with you. You know, you could go and wear your rubber fireman’s trousers you bought in the army surplus shop. Clothes are the most important, obviously, speaking to a unified gentleman of leisure like yourself.
PAN M 360: Ha ha! I used to be into that stuff. And at one point I said to myself, what’s this uniform I’m wearing?
Mark Stewart: Well, that was the point of the Pop Group. Because our best friends were in a local punk band called The Cortinas, and we were going up to this punk club where everybody played called The Roxy, up in London. And we just said to each other, let’s form a band. But punk was already not punk. We thought punk was about experimenting and challenging things, but it became… It was weird. It was kind of like pub rock. I mean, there was attitude, but it became traditional very, very quick.
PAN M 360: It somehow morphed into the no wave thing. And that was more interesting and more, I don’t know… adventurous?
Mark Stewart: My timeline is not the same. I was always listening to funk, originally, and then reggae, going out clubbing and stuff in Bristol, right. I never said we were a genre or anything, but we went straight from school to New York. You know, when we were playing Y, and we were there, us and the Gang of Four. We were the flavour of New York. And I was in New York weeks and weeks on end. And I was in these clubs next to Keith Haring, you know, it’s just mad. And the way that no wave kicked off in New York, we weren’t aware, really. I mean, we knew about Patti Smith, but to suddenly find out about James Chance and stuff like that was weird. We were playing these clubs, you know, we were so young. Seventeen, man.
PAN M 360: It’s crazy how influential the band became. I delved into Y, an album that I haven’t listened in a while, and I was struck by how much The Birthday Party was influenced by the band.
Mark Stewart: Yeah, Nick [Cave] says that. I don’t like talking about that, you know… It’s a circle… who was influencing your influence? We were totally influenced by like Ornette Coleman, and seeing free jazz guys like Derek Bailey and stuff. For us, it’s anybody that goes into the wilderness or makes an outsider decision to try and take a risk and challenge themselves first. We had this whole thing about deconditioning ourselves and questioning what we were doing, and the process of making Y with Dennis and Rich Farm Studios, of which Y in Dub is the process continuing. For me, it’s very difficult to sum stuff up and I don’t understand why one record means something and another record means something else. You know, another record I made, As The Veneer of Democracy Starts To Fade, may have kickstarted industrial music, I don’t know. Who knows? I get ideas from like mad R&B, the experiments they’re doing with tuning down kick drums and stuff, or like crunk, all that chop-and-screw stuff, you know?
PAN M 360: The band regrouped in 2010. You did two new albums, Citizen Zombie in 2015 and Honeymoon On Mars the year after. Is there any new stuff coming up?
Mark Stewart: Yeah, we’re still going. And we’ve just done Y In Dub live. Terry Hall from the Specials asked us to do something. He was in charge of Coventry City of Culture. Really, really interesting experiment. Because in the rehearsals, we were cutting the track, we were playing every third beat. It was really, really weird. It was like going through some sort of Marines training or something, stopping yourself from playing bits of your own soul. It was quite a heavy thing. You know, like when drummers tie one arm on to their leg to try become more ambidextrous. Can you imagine the songs you’ve played often and that you know intrinsically, and you have to just go ching instead of ching, ching, ching. It was really interesting. So Dennis had space to dub live.
PAN M 360: So are you thinking of doing that again?
Mark Stewart: Yeah! It was a very, very interesting experiment for us. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Again, it’s a it’s a kind of deconditioning you know, it’s a cleansing thing. I found it very, very interesting. I can’t compare it to anything. But it was it was really, really quite weird.
PAN M 360: Are the songs “It’s Beyond Good and Evil” and “:338” recorded live on the Y in Dub album?
Mark Stewart: Basically, what happened was, when we got the master tapes, we were trying to do some things. We had this idea of this Y salon with performance art and poet mates and whatever, and just doing these weird old pop-up things in these record shops, no sort of a big deal, just to launch Y. And I said, we’ve got the master tapes, why don’t we get our engineer to bring them and get Dennis to dub them on a mixing desk live from the tapes? So Dennis did that. And I was standing next to him and I was shouting at him and nagging him on. I was really dancing next to the bass bins in the Rough Trade shop with all these heavyweight fans, you know they’re virtually mates now, and it came out really, really good and it was a brilliant experience, it was like hearing my shit on a really good sound system, it was like a dream come true.
PAN M 360: Do you have the intention of making a dub version of the second album?
Mark Stewart: Now that you say it! I’m thinking about doing a Christmas single. Me and Gareth have been working on “Silent Night”, which goes really well with the lockdowns and the curfew over here. I was working with Lee Perry on some of my solo stuff just before he died. And I did a radio show with him and the guy from Wire and Cosey Fanni Tutti. I asked Cosey but I haven’t heard back from her yet, but I’ve just reached out to David Thomas from Pere Ubu. I like these versus things, like The Pop Group versus Pere Ubu’s Christmas song or something. We’re constantly doing stuff. I’m in a room surrounded by stacks of stuff. I’m working with all sorts of people on all sorts of different projects.
PAN M 360: What’s your definition of dub?
Mark Stewart: (long silence) I try and dub up my life. Dub is the music of chance, and to dub something is to flip it. Postmodernists call it deconstruction or something, but again it’s wide open. So dub is like being on the shores of endless worlds. It’s an index of possibilities, like a Rubik’s Cube, you know? And I love it. I was just listening to some Don Carlos stuff earlier on. My problem is when I go to soundsystems, I hear a tune out but I can never find the bloody tune because I don’t know all the names of everything, right? I used to chat to the old reggae singers, they used to just queue up and five different people would sing five different songs on the same rhythm section in the same day.
PAN M 360: And if push comes to shove, what’s your favourite dub album, then?
Mark Stewart: It’s not really albums, it’s tracks. There’s a track called “Stone” by Prince Alla, with all these lightning crashes and stuff, (singing) “I man saw a stone just come to mash down Rome”, or the dub version of “Jahovia” by the Twinkle Brothers… it’s endless, I could be talking about it for hours and hours! And every time I go on YouTube, people are posting these crazy dubbed versions of tunes I heard. There’s this classic club in Bristol called the Bamboo Club where I saw I Roy, The Revolutionaries, Style Scott… You know, it’s the love of my life. My friend from Primal Scream says wives come and go but your football team stays forever. It’s the same with dub. I think I’m still going to be playing dub tunes when I’m in a bloody old-punks retirement home.
(photo : Chiara Meattelli)
In the last few years, the Arabic electronic/hip-hop band 47Soul, led by Tareq Abu Kwaik, have performed a few times in Montreal. Without a doubt, some of the best Arabic grooves in the world today! Based in London, this explosive Palestinian unit express their people’s deep considerations and concerns, needless to say. To achieve this musically, 47Soul fuses chaabi, hip-hop, electronic dub and dubstep, a very personal style the band calls Shamstep.
For the Festival du monde arabe de Montréal, Tareq Abu Kwaik arrives as El Far3i and unleashes his solo project, a superb avant-folk mix of Middle Eastern music, hip-hop and electro. We’re talking about a considerable workload during the last decade, with six albums already out—Sout Min Khashab (2012), Far3 El Madakhel (2012), Kaman Dafsheh (2014), El Rajol El Khashabi (2017), and Lazim Tisa (2021).
A week before his concert at the FMA, PAN M 360 had the opportunity to talk to Tareq Abu Kwaik aka El Far3i. Here are our questions, here are his answers.
PAN M 360: Can you identify the main formal differences between your solo project, and 47Soul and El Morabba3 before that?
Tareq Abu Kwaik: My solo project El Far3i is very focused on the freedom to express using different types of production as mediums for musical ideas, words and thoughts. For that reason, it focuses on the idea of a rapper that plays guitar and a singer that sings their hook on their own rap verse. Just like El Far3i allows freedom to do organic acoustic music and rap, songs over beats, collaborations with producers and forming musical groups is also a part of the meaning of El Far3i. The branch cannot grow if it hooks off from the tree… to say that your growth as an individual is not separated from the growth and wellbeing of the group. I co-founded El Morabba3 in 2009 as an Arabic independent band with some rock influences, and later co-founded my current band 47Soul as an electronic and shaabi (Shamstep ) group… In the end I am trying to say that each one of us fits or belongs even in several spaces and groups, but that should not stop the freedom to grow the self… there should not be compromises. We are both social brings and individual souls.
PAN M 360: As an artist who is fond of discoveries and sound exploration, you fuse Arab folk music and hip-hop. Since the ’80s we have observed many bands from South Asia and the U.K. who fuse hip-hop, electro and their own culture—Asian Dub Foundation, Monsoon, Talvin Singh, much more… From Arabic and North African culture, we had Hamid Baroudi, Transglobal Underground, Natacha Atlas, Zebda, Acid Arab, Gnawa Diffusion, Emel Mathlouthi, Khaled, Rachid Taha, and so many others. All those experiences happened mainly through immigration to the U.K. and France. So… what about the Middle East and North Africa? What happened? Who were your models when you grew up? How did you imagine your own sound? Tareq Abu Kwaik: First, I must say after this great list of artists you’ve put down, that it was an honour for 47Soul to collaborate with Asian Dub Foundation on the track “Human 47” from their latest Access Denied (Deluxe). We’ve always looked up to them as legends! As far as the influence in our region, you can say in a way with exceptions my generation was the one that started fusing stuff more, but we are certainly influenced by Khaled, Rachid Taha, Mohammad Munir, Mohammad Muneeb, Ziad Rahbani, George Wassof and all the Shaabi sounds, Dabkat, Mijwez, Choubie… then everyone adds whatever they like from outside the region. For me it was Anthrax, Deftones, Cypress Hill, Lupe Fiasco, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson. And as far as my generation, regional and local inspirations from DAM, Ramallah Underground, Autostrad, Abyusif, etc.
PAN M 360: Your Bandcamp page says that you are from Amman, Jordan. Do you go back to Palestine on a regular basis? Do you spend a lot of time in Europe and North America? Where are you based now? Tareq Abu Kwaik: I lived in the USA for five years in the early 2000s, and I have been based in London for the past six years. I am the product of my city, Amman, where I spent most of my life and the almost yearly visits to Jenin, Palestine. I am a Palestinian Jordanian with a Yellow Card… it’s not the worst… but let’s not get into the Palestinian identification and travel document colours and types, as that would be very long.
PAN M 360: Is there a Palestinian musical specificity in your craft? Traditional melodies? Traditional instruments? Some forms of shaabi? Tareq Abu Kwaik: In my group 47Soul, there certainly is. In my solo act, you’ll find that in some beat samples, or in the vocal style over the guitar sound.
PAN M 360: What were your inspiring sounds in the beatmaking? Hip hop? Trap? Drill? Electronic groove in general? Tareq Abu Kwaik: While I do produce some beats under Arab Drumz [“a music production and artist development company with focus on Arab experiences throughout the world”], it’s not my main work, I usually collaborate with producers for my rap tracks and many times we co-produce. Generally, I love it all. I like experimenting with the Shamstep vibe, similar to production work I do in 47Soul but with some trap and drill influence… speaking of which, while the instruments are a bit different, what we call Shamstep is not very different from a typical drill beat.
PAN M360: Lyrically, what are the main topics of your solo songs? Sorry for my ignorance of the Arabic language. Tareq Abu Kwaik: From love to individual and group search for control over one’s own destiny, to Arab hopes and Palestinian struggle, to politics and religion… Arab problems, mental health, struggles for enlightenment, world unity, the power of love and the spirit of unity…
PAN M 360 How do you see the tension between poetry and sociopolitical engagement in your writing approach?
Tareq Abu Kwaik: I’ll leave that to the listener to answer…
PAN M 360: What is your solo concert setup? Alone? With a band? What’s you gear? Tareq Abu Kwaik: It’s a singer/songwriter with a guitar that transforms into a hip-hop show with an MC and loud beats… Then goes back to do a guitar outro …
PAN M 360: What are your next projects in the near future? Your next dreams? Tareq Abu Kwaik: I am close to releasing my third acoustic album, which concludes a trilogy and finishes a story related to the meaning of El Far3i. Then, continuing to release music that combines my hip-hop with my songwriting, maybe in a form closer to pop. Something I started calling El Far3i Flux. I am also celebrating the tenth anniversary of my first two acoustic and rap albums, Soat Min Khashab and Far3 El Madakhil, in February 2022…
PAN M 360: Many thanks for your answers and welcome back to MTL!
Tareq Abu Kwaik: Thank you. Last time I was in Montreal with 47Soul, it was a great vibe! I am now truly looking forward to this full rap-and-guitar El Far3i solo show.
To use (and recycle) a cliché, Ahmed Moneka had to reinvent himself long before the pandemic. A well-known Iraqi actor and broadcaster, he had to migrate to Canada in 2015 to ensure his safety after receiving serious threats from intolerant militias for being involved in a Iraqi film about homosexuality in the Arabic world. In Toronto, he became a singer and de facto witness of an Afro-Raqi culture that is little known in the West. Nearly two million Iraqi citizens have African roots, the descendants of a trans-Saharan slave trade that took place in the ninth century, and whose bloody revolt left hundreds of thousands dead in those distant days. A millennium later, this African culture still exists in Iraq, and Moneka is a proud representative of it. Moreover, this Iraqi artist turned Canadian (and citizen of the world) is willing to merge his culture with those of his colleagues of Moneka Arabic Jazz, performing this Saturday, November 6 at the Festival du monde arabe. Hence this interview with PAN M 360.
PAN M 360: “A show devised as a self-portrait, like a mirror on his own life, is the artistic path that Ahmed Moneka decided to take with Moneka Arabic Jazz.” This is how your concert is described by the FMA. Can you comment on this self-portrait?
Ahmed Moneka: It’s the soundtrack of my life, the Iraqi maqam I grew up with in Baghdad and the warmth of the quartertones is in my veins, and also the African groove in my soul that came from my ancestors, the Moneka family, and the freedom of expression of jazz. That inspired me in my city, Toronto, the meeting place.
PAN M 360 : Under what circumstances did you leave Irak? What do you think about the situation in Irak today for artists? Where did you live after your departure? When did you settle in Canada?
Ahmed Moneka: I came here to Canada, on September 10, 2015. I left Iraq for 10 days. I was invited to the Toronto International Film Festival to screen the movie that I co-wrote and that I starred in. The movie was about homosexual rights in Iraq, and there was a wave of events regarding the issue in 2011 in Baghdad. So when we screened the movie in 2015, I got threats from the militia there. I was forced to stay here in order to save my life. And you know, now, I’m happy. I think I am. The change was for the better. Baghdad is still beautiful. It’s an amazing city and there are lots of great artists creating and a really rich art scene there today, in a lot of different sectors like in TV, music, theatre, films and also visual artists. There is a crazy revolution happening there and it’s all about love, about having a good time. So, you know, where there is love there is happiness. There are people really working hard to fill the community with joy and to keep the city beautiful.
PAN M 360: What was your voice, music and artistic training in Iraq?
Ahmed Moneka: The first interaction with music for me was with my family. Singing and playing drums. I was five years old. When I was introduced to Afro-Sufi ceremonies in my family house. Also, I learned maqam music at school in the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. And that was also part of my training as an actor.
PAN M 360: The instruments are diverse and not all Arabic. Can you describe it?
Ahmed Moneka: We have oud, which is Arabic, but also the guitar, the keyboard, the saxophone, kora, bass guitar, drums and violin are not. And so yeah, we are a very diverse group.
PAN M 360: Your music videos are groove-based, sort of a funk-jazz-reggae approach within which you inject Arabic melodies—can you explain more about it?
Ahmed Moneka: I live in Toronto, I’m Iraqi, Arabic. I am inspired by world music, especially here in Toronto, I got inspired by a lot of different backgrounds—Cuban, jazz, Balkan, African, Asian music, and I also like Canadian music. I thought I had something to share. To add to the dish. And it was my Iraqi-African heritage, and that is embodied in Moneka Arabic Jazz.
PAN M 360: From Baghdad to Toronto, your craft has probably changed even if you retain the roots of your Iraqi background. In what way has it changed since you came to Canada?
Ahmed Moneka: People know me in Baghdad as an actor who was trained in theatre school. I worked in theatre and in films, TV series, and I also hosted a TV show. But I never played in a band in Baghdad, nor in Iraq. I started playing here in Canada. Why? Because when I arrived here, I didn’t know how to speak English at that time, so music and singing in Arabic was something that made me feel like myself, and sharing my culture and my heritage also, starting with Mosquito Bar, the first band I played with in my life, as well as in Canada. And after that, I created Moneka Arabic Jazz, to represent me even more.
PAN M 360: In what way your North American musicians have been influenced by you and Iraqi culture in general? How did it change their playing and also improvisation?
Ahmed Moneka: The musicians I’m playing with are very professional, and I chose them because of that. There’s Demetri Petsalakis from Greece. We share maqam, and also the style of music that is alive in Greece. Demetri is the music director of Kuné – Canada’s Global Orchestra. He plays oud and is familiar with maqam and also plays guitar and is familiar with rock, jazz and different genres—he plays the keyboards as well. Same with Waleed, he’s originally from Sudan and he knows maqam but also, he teaches African music and samba at Humber College. As a bass player, he is also familiar with Western music. There is Fathi Najem, who is Algerian—he’s familiar with both Western and Eastern music and has an African side with Algerian Amazigh. Walid also has the African touch as well as experience in Eastern and Western music. Ernie Tollar plays the sax and the Ney—he’s extraordinary. He trained in India and played a lot of Arabic music because his wife is Egyptian, so he’s familiar with the Eastern world, and he’s an incredible jazz saxophone player. Last but not least, there is Max Sennitt, who played with a lot of different groups of people and has a lot of knowledge in world music. Through hard work, he learned a lot about Iraqi rhythm. All of them learned about particularities in Iraqi music. They are all amazing, we can say they are angels.
PAN M 360: You have been involved in other fields of Western music—Canadian Opera Company, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and the Royal Conservatory of Music. So you also have a conversation with classical music from West, don’t you?
Ahmed Moneka: I did work with all of these amazing people and institutions and organizations. And in all the places that I work, I worked my way, with my Arabic Iraqi way of being. For example, with the Canadian Opera Company, I worked with Wajdi Mouawad on the show, and I taught Arabic maqam like the call to prayer—I was staging, acting, and helping with the integration of the specific Arabic culture movement. I did poetry and a song with the Royal Conservatory, because I’m part of Kuné – Canada’s Global Orchestra, which presented a show at the Conservatory. So yes, I did collaborate with a lot of different projects and events with these institutions, and each time it was such a unique experience and an opportunity to share my Arabic heritage in all these places.
So yes, I did work in theater a lot. And yes, I am a musician. Sometimes I do collaborations with other artists, but as for Moneka Arabic Jazz: Waleed Abdulhamid plays bass, Demetri Petsalakis guitar and oud, Ernie Tollar plays Ney and saxophone, Fathi Najem the violin, Max Sennitt the drums. All the musicians are from Toronto. We met here in Canada and have been playing together since. And they are the core of this band.
PAN M 360: What can we expect in Montréal ?
Ahmed Moneka: Fun, energy, love and ecstasy to the fullest. Thanks so much to the Festival du Monde Arabe de Montréal for having us. And thank you again for this interview.
With Sympathy For Life, Parquet Courts continue the groovy turn they started on their previous album Wide Awake! without straying too far from their punk and garage-rock roots. For this eighth album, the Brooklyn-based band drew inspiration from club music, house and funk, with bands like the Talking Heads and Primal Scream in mind. Conceived just before the pandemic, when parties were still allowed and widely attended, Sympathy For Life is composed of songs largely born of long jams and improvisations, with the four members of Parquet Courts wanting to create a record that embodies the experience of live music, as in a club or at a DJ party. Paradoxically, the first three singles and videos already released are probably the most punk tracks on the album…
From his home in Washington, D.C., drummer Max Savage talks about the genesis of the album, the recording process with producers Rodaidh McDonald and John Parish, their different influences and their desire to constantly evolve without disappointing diehard fans.
PAN M 360: Sympathy For Life is your eighth album. In these pandemic times, this title may have a greater meaning than it lets on.
Max Savage: You’re right. We started recording this album before the pandemic, but we recorded many of the lyrics during the lockdown, right in the middle of the pandemic, and I think we were already nostalgic for that not-so-distant time when we could play shows, tour and live our lives as musicians. The title Sympathy For Life refers to this pre-pandemic period.
PAN M 360: The record was largely conceived in the fall of 2019. Why did you wait so long to release it when that’s all you basically had to do?
Max Savage: Actually, some of us wanted to get the record out quite a bit sooner. The label was more insistent that we release it later, when we would be able to promote the album on tour. So since we couldn’t do too many shows everywhere before the current period, we waited for the right time. These are purely commercial reasons.
PAN M 360: In the press release for the album, it says that Sympathy For Life is a groove record rather than a rhythm record, a party-inspired record rather than a party record, although many of the 11 tracks on the album could easily fit a dancefloor. On one hand, Austin Brown [guitar/vocals] says the album is inspired by club music, house music and Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, while on the other your brother Andrew [guitar/vocals] mentions Can, Canned Heat, This Heat and… acid. What do you think about that?
Max Savage: They are two different people with different influences… But I would add that all four of us had different influences for this record. It’s mostly what the four of us brought to the table that makes this record so special. Yes, there were differences, but I think all those influences put together were ultimately a good thing, I think it makes the record stand out more, it gives it that very eclectic sound overall.
PAN M 360: It seems that within the band there are two streams of thought: Austin’s more funky and groovy tastes on one side, and Andrew’s more rocky ones on the other. Would you say that this kind of duality is a creative force or a source of tension?
Max Savage: For this record, I would say that these differences in taste were not a source of tension. Those two types of influences could easily coexist on this record. But it’s only natural that four different people are going to have different ideas sometimes. We don’t all listen to the same music and we don’t all have the same references, but that mix of dance and punk, I think that’s what highlights the sound of this record and what Parquet Courts is like today.
PAN M 360: Will the band in the future tend more toward a more groove-oriented sound? I read that you wanted to move away from the “Parquet Courts” sound because you felt that too many bands sounded like you.
Max Savage: The idea is to progress, not to stand still. If we were to make the same record over and over again, the critics would criticize us and if we stray too far from our basic sound, we risk losing people who have been following us since the beginning. But as musicians, it’s important for us to progress, to try something else. So yes, I think we’re going to continue in this funkier vein because we had a lot of fun making this record. We’re definitely going to keep changing from one record to the next because that’s how we evolve and progress as musicians.
PAN M 360: Would you say that the previous Wide Awake!, with some more groovy and funky tracks, paved the way for Sympathy For Life?
Max Savage: Yes, absolutely. We took what worked well on Wide Awake! and ran with it. I like to think that Sympathy For Life is a logical progression from what we accomplished on Wide Awake! and that we’ve taken things a little further with our new album.
PAN M 360: I heard that Sympathy For Life is the result of long jams that you recorded and then deconstructed.
Max Savage: Absolutely! We spent a lot of time in the studio in the same room just jamming, and we were really encouraged by [producer] Rodaidh McDonald to get our ideas out and run with it for 30-45 minutes. Then we’d go back to the control room and listen to what we had just played and take note of the moments that worked best and that we liked the most, and then try to structure a song around that. So yeah, it was a pretty different creative process this time around. In fact, it kind of brought us back to the way we did it in the beginning. We could go around a riff or a melody for a long time to find the right continuation. We used to do that at gigs too. That’s how a lot of our early songs came about.
PAN M 360: Why did you choose to work this time with Rodaidh McDonald and, for some tracks, John Parish?
Max Savage: It’s always interesting to have more than one producer on board. We felt that some of the songs, the more danceable ones, would benefit from being directed by someone like Rodaidh McDonald, that’s more his specialty. Rodaidh is also a DJ, he has worked with artists who are more in the electronic sphere such as xx for example, or Hot Chip. Rodaidh was also quite enthusiastic about the more groovy or dance-y songs we sent him. We sent him a lot of demos. Whereas for John Parish, it seemed logical to send him the rockier songs because that’s really more his thing. He’s worked with PJ Harvey, Eels and so many others for a long time. So yeah, it was really interesting to work with these two directors and find the elements that would make it all fit together.
PAN M 360: You recorded several songs with John Parish but only two of them ended up on the album. What will happen to the others?
Max Savage: I would say we recorded about ten of them. We spent a week in the studio with him in Bath [Real World Studios]. That’s really the hardest part about making an album, choosing the songs you’re going to put on it. There are also several songs that we recorded with Rodaidh that we didn’t use. But in the end, since we had spent almost seven weeks with him and only one with John, it seemed fairer to incorporate more of the songs we did with Rodaidh. So it’s quite possible that some of the songs that didn’t make it onto this record will make it onto an eventual EP. I hope so because there’s some really good stuff on there.
PAN M 360: How do you plan to transpose this new album to the stage? Will it be more funky or more rock?
Max Savage: Definitely more funky. We’re going to incorporate more electronic elements on stage, especially the drums. It’s not just going to be a traditional drum kit, but I’m also going to have a pad, the Roland SPD for those in the know. So yes, we will definitely be incorporating more electronic sounds into our live shows. We tried it recently at our launch show in Brooklyn. We hadn’t played in front of an audience in a long time and most of the songs were the first time we played them live. So we’re going to get it right as we go along, and the whole thing will get better and better as the shows go on. We have a big North American tour starting soon; I realized during lockdown not to take any of our shows for granted. For me, it’s like a dream to finally be able to play on stage again.
Photo: Ebru Yildiz
Soprano Lubana Al-Quntar is one of the leading lights of Arabic singing, and Montreal music lovers will have the chance to discover her art rooted in the great refinement of the Middle East. Offering such an indoor experience is one of the great specialties of the Montreal Arab World Festival, which starts this Friday, October 29.
For the artisans and users of PAN M 360, this is an opportunity to make us more aware of the traditional and classical music of the Arab world and, needless to say, to talk about the challenges of female singing with Lubana Al-Quntar, who was kind enough to answer our questions.
PAN M 360: You were born in Damascus, Syria to a family of traditional singers. A descendant of famous Syrian singer, Amal Al Atrash (Asmahan), and renowned composer and singer of the previous century. Can we know more precisely the lineage between you and Asmahan and her brother the great composer Farid El Atrash? How those legends of modern arabic culture had an impact on your development and career?
Lubana Al-Quntar : Asmahan’s father is the cousin of my grandfather (from my mother’s side). Since my childhood, I grew up with the stories of these legends, and the challenges they faced to perpetuate their art and music. I feel I have a big responsibility in extending the legacy of the family with the musical path that I am pursuing. The challenges that I face in my artistic career alike my predecessors, push me further to follow the same path. Some aspects of Asmahan’s voice resembles mine, especially in its depth and tessiture, which challenges me even more to pursue the legacy.
PAN M 360: You trained in classical international conservatories under the supervision of renowned singers such as Galina Khaldieva, Kenneth Woollam, and Maestra Mya Besselink. You also have worked with great conductors – Daniel Barenboim, Ricardo Mutti, Sara Beaker, etc. So you had both classical training as a soprano singer : arabic and occidental. What are the main differences in voice training? Do you draw from both cultures in your own voice identity?
Lubana Al-Quntar : There is a fundamental difference between the two types of Arabic singing and classical opera. Whereas, for operatic singing, the production of the sound and its center is through the head voice. As for Arabic singing, it is from the throat. One of the important recommendations that my teachers told me about is that I should give up Arabic singing (the throat), especially in the early stages of study, because placing the vocal cords within two different singing styles and techniques will negatively affect the voice and prevent its perfect and proper development. I followed this advice for many years until I mastered the techniques of operatic voice and reached the level of professionalism. After the stability of the voice and its maturity, I began to benefit from everything I had learned in operatic singing and employed it to serve Arab singing… in terms of breathing and correct resonance.. and the extension of lyrical sentences.
PAN M 360: As a coloratura soprano, you explore the wide repertoire she sings in folk, traditional Syriac and Aramaic languages, pop, and classical opera. Can you add something to that description? What makes you special among the Arabic community of classical & traditional singers?
Lubana Al-Quntar : When I started my career in Syria, I was the first opera singer as there was no opera training yet. I was the first student of the department. I then travelled to pursue my studies in London and Germany and have become the first Syrian Opera singer with a great mastery of opera’s techniques. On the other hand, I have also mastered traditional and folk Arabic songs. In other words, I have a great mastery of both repertoires that require a completely different way of singing and voice positioning. It is very rare to find an Arab singer that can do both professionally.
PAN M 360: You won the prestigious title of the First Arab Opera Singer from Syria. In 1996, you won the first audience prize and fourth overall prize in a Belgrade International Singing Competition. In 2000, you were awarded fifth prive at the The Queen Elizabeth Singing Competition, Brussels, Belgium. What are for you the most precious of those prices?
Lubana Al-Quntar : These prices are very special for me since it was the first time for a Syrian to attend these international music competitions:
* The Belgrade International singing competition: I was still a student and this prestigious competition gave me a very high affirmation of my talent and a great motivation to continue on my path.
* The Queen Elizabeth singing competition was the key moment that propelled my career out of the Arab world and resulted in many European tours in the world of opera.
PAN M 360: Between 2006 and 2012, you served at the Syrian National Conservatory as the Voice Chair for the Department of Opera Singing. You also founded and launched the Department of Classical Arabic Singing allowing students to study both Western and Arabic forms together for the very first time. So the teaching aspect of your career seems to be very important. What does it bring to you?
Lubana Al-Quntar : I started teaching opera singing at an early stage in my career, as I wanted to transfer my experience that I had obtained through my studies with great masters in Europe and the important experience in the competitions that I participated in. I wanted new students who are excited about professional opera singing to be familiar with all these singing techniques.
Opera singing was not at the heart of our culture in Syria… and success in it required extra effort and perseverance. And when the new students saw that the one teaching them is from their culture, and that success is possible and not impossible, my presence as a Professor in the singing department was special on a personal and practical level.
I am proud that I founded the Arabic Singing Department at the Higher Institute of Music in Syria and developed a special technique to develop the voice, benefiting from my experience in operatic singing.This achievement is an important leap in my teaching career
PAN M 360 Can you talk a bit about the musicians that will play for you in Montreal?
Lubana Al-Quntar : I will meet the musicians for the first time! So far, working with them (virtually) has been great! Then I will sing Asmahan, Oum Kalthoum, Qudud halabiya, and traditional songs from Damascus as well as Persian, Kurdish, Armenian and Syriac / Aramaic chants.
PAN M 360: Have you sung in Canada before? If yes in what cities? About United States?
Lubana Al-Quntar : Yes at the Aga Khan foundation in Toronto. I have performed in many cities in the USA: New York, DC, Los Angeles, Michigan, etc.
PAN M 360: As a Syrian citizen you must have suffered in the last years. What are your thoughts about the situation? Where are you based now?
Lubana Al-Quntar : I have been in the USA since the tragic events in Syria (2012). It is very hard for me since all my family is still in Syria or in other places in the world.
“Transparent Water”, Seckou Keita and Omar Sosa’s debut album, was released in 2017. Four years later, here is “Suba”, released on October 22 by Bendigedig, the second chapter of this collaboration between a Senegalese griot and a Lucumi artist, an Afro-descendant of Yoruba culture, a culture from present-day Nigeria forcibly transplanted to Cuba by conquering slavers from Spain.
Written and recorded in 2020 during the planetary confinement, the opus Suba wants to be a placid work, first and foremost. A work dedicated to hope, to compassion for others, to benevolence, to peace in this world that sorely needs it. Omar Sosa and Seckou Keita form a trio with Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles, a trio that is joined by Brazilian cellist and arranger Jaques Morelenbaum, Burkinabe flutist Dramane Dembélé, and English percussionist and director Steve Argüelles.
Among the best Cuban pianists of this era, Omar Sosa has remained an off-the-beaten-path artist since the beginning of his long musical migration, well, if we stick to the stereotype of the Latino speedy gunner one might expect. Omar Sosa’s cross-cultural crossovers span some 30 albums and even more world tours.
Before that happens again, here is a second studio collaboration with Senegalese singer and kora virtuoso Seckou Keita.
More precisely, the latter is from Casamance. On his father’s side, he is from the royal line of Keita. On his mother’s side, the Cissokho family, he comes from the hereditary caste of griots – musicians, singers, storytellers and messengers of West African traditions. Seckou Keita is both the guardian of the great Mandingo musical traditions and very open to the rest of the musical world today, as evidenced by his harmonic proposals that clearly go beyond the West African heritage.
His qualities as a musician have notably earned him an invitation to the School of Oriental and African Studies in England, where he has lived since 1998. He has given several studio performances, the best known of which in the West is the album Clychau Dibon, performed in concert with Welsh harpist Catrin Finch.
So? Let’s reach Omar Sosa in Barcelona, where he lives for 2 decades… but also spend plenty of time in California and again in Cuba – whose economic precariousness he laments.
PAN M 360: How did you meet Seckou Keita?
Omar Sosa: In 2012, I released the album “ Eggun: The AfriLectric Experience”. My drummer at the time, Marque Gilmore, had invited me to play with his band in London. I joined that band at the last minute and tried to see who I could click with. I always do this when I come into a new context, it’s always helpful and productive to have a musician that you spontaneously connect with and who can also support you during the performance if need be. When Seckou started playing, it was clear to me. I told him, hey I feel like we are playing together as if we have known each other for a long time! I then asked him if he was open to a possible collaboration. Let’s do a project together! I found a studio and invited him to create new music.
PAN M 360: Where are the values of newness and freshness in this music that unites you?
Omar Sosa: I don’t think anything is really new in music in general. What is new is the way to mix the spices of the dish! This time, the mix would be with a griot from Senegal, a lucumí musician from Cuba, a percussionist from Venezuela. Before the pandemic, we were able to tour and when the lockdown was imposed, I called Seckou back and suggested that he lead a second project, this time more orchestrated. The idea was also to add other colors, not only African and West Indian but also Asian and Western. So we spent 10 days in the studio in Mallorca, then I continued to develop the concept elsewhere with other collaborations. So this is the idea of this trio, but this time with more arrangements. This trio was already working very well; we are on the same wavelength, there is no conflict between us because we seek to create singing and peaceful pieces, rooted in our respective traditions.
PAN M 360: Afro-Cuban / Mandingo, traditional Afro / contemporary jazz, acoustic / electronic…Cross-references are a specialty of yours! What are they this time?
Omar Sosa : It’s Africa for us, our distinct traditions, presented with respect for each other. None of us are trying to impose ourselves, none of us want to fight to show who is the best, who is the leader… who puts the biggest dick on the table. We’re not looking to make testosterone music, we’ve all done that before and it’s not what we’re looking for anymore. We all understand that the music is the boss, that we have to serve the music. We are antennas and I work with musicians who see themselves as antennas. The best way to play the best music and record the best works is also to share, to pool our respective knowledge. This is how we find the balance between the cultures involved in such a project. We are the servants of music.
PAN M 360: This album is certainly more arranged, but remains calm and minimalist. Was that the idea?
Omar Sosa: Yes, this music is contemplative and inspires peace. The more you listen to it, the more you discover the minute details. To play this music, we had to put our egos aside and be relaxed. And you know what? It is very difficult to make contemplative music, it requires more attention, more care, a concern for silence. You have to get rid of the pollution of the mind, that’s why I like pacifying music, it allows the listener to listen carefully, to digest what he hears.
PAN M 360: Suba also defends values that are greater than the work itself. What are these values?
Omar Sosa: To inspire peace, love and hope. In the Mandingo language, Suba means dawn, sunrise. The idea of a sunrise came up and since Suba also resembles Cuba… So Suba is the moment to reprogram oneself before facing life again. Our songs are about friendship, spirituality, migration, the ocean, anxiety, drama, hope in spite of everything. There is too much aggression in our lives in this human jungle, the present time is worrying, that’s why we have to activate the connections with our inner self, our spirit, our luminous ancestors, our own spirituality. Music can help to do this. This is why we prefer more contemplative music: more than ever, the world needs peace and contemplation.
PAN M 360: You shot all the recording sessions. Why did you do that?
Omar Sosa : Nowadays, music is not enough (laughs)… So we made an audiovisual document with the process of recording, it became a must. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I still wanted to see the musicians really play, I didn’t want them to be extras in the service of the image. So we hired a videographer who was with us from the beginning to the end of the sessions, with several cameras in the studio. We had no choice: we had to succeed in the group shots so that the video would be conclusive. This implies defects in the execution? In my opinion, there are no faults in art… it’s all a matter of perception.
Jean-Guihen Queyras is the first name that comes to mind when one speaks of top cellists in France. Born in Quebec, he has been based in France for most of his life, but has always had a special bond with Quebec’s classical music community, as evidenced by his frequent visits and affinities with several local artists, beginning with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and his colleague Stéphane Tétreault, with whom he shares this program at Salle Bourgie two nights in a row this week.
Best known for his role as a soloist with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Queyras was influenced by the approach of the late Pierre Boulez, one of the leading figures of contemporary music in the previous century. Queyras is not a hardcore contemporary musician, however. This eclectic virtuoso likes to explore the entire repertoire written for his instrument, from the Baroque era to the present day. He has made some 40 recordings since 1994, which shows the scope of his career.
His biographical profile indicates that he has premiered works by Ivan Fedele, Gilbert Amy and Tristan Murail, and that he recorded Peter Eötvös’ Cello Concerto for the composer’s 70th birthday. That he plays numerous works for chamber music. That he formed an outstanding trio with the violinist Isabelle Faust and the pianist Alexander Melnikov. That he founded the Arcanto string quartet with Tabea Zimmermann, Antje Weithaas and Daniel Sepec. That he’s regularly accompanied in recital by the pianist Alexandre Tharaud.
Never to mention his numerous invitations from symphony orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and conductors as prominent as Iván Fischer, Philippe Herreweghe and, of course, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Queyras teaches at the Hochschüle für Musik in Freiburg and is the musical director of the Rencontres musicales de Haute-Provence in Folcalquier. Since 2005, he has been playing on a cello made in 1696 by Gioff redo Cappa, kindly made available to him by the Mécénat musical de la Société Générale.
Just as kindly, Jean-Guihen Queyras answered PAN M 360’s questions in advance of his performance in Montreal.
PAN M 360: Let’s first talk about the works you will be performing as a soloist at Salle Bourgie: Ahmet Adnan Saygun’s Partita for Solo Cello, Op. 31, Britten’s Suite No. 1 in G Major for Cello, Op. 72, and Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G Major for Solo Cello, BWV 1007. A highly varied program! Could you comment on these choices and your approach to them? How are these works related?
Jean-Guihen Queyras: The Saygun Partita is a splendid work that deserves to be known worldwide! It alone is worth the trip! It combines, with ardour and depth, Turkish folklore and French colours, which testify to Saygun’s studies in Paris. Britten’s First Suite is a masterpiece written for Rostropovich, directly inspired by Bach’s First Suite, which I will play later.
PAN M 360: At this stage of your brilliant career, what are the main issues in your playing? Today, what do you seek to develop as an instrumentalist, artist, soloist? Other marked interests?
Jean-Guihen Queyras: I continue to let artistic encounters guide me, and it is more and more exciting! Working intensely with A.T. de Keersmaeker was so inspiring! And then I like to cherish and develop collaborations with great artists, lifelong friends, Isabelle Faust, Tabea Zimmermann, Raphaël Imbert—with whom we have a jazz recording project in the pipeline—Sokratis Sinopoulos and the Chemirani brothers (new episode, “Beyond Thrace”).
PAN M 360: What have been the greatest artistic challenges of the pandemic period, and what comes next? Meetings? Recordings? By the way, I’m writing these questions while listening to Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote. Till Eulenspiegel by Richard Strauss. Great.
Jean-Guihen Queyras: I’m glad you like Don Quixote! What a chance to record this masterpiece with my dear Tabea Zimmermann and the extraordinary François-Xavier Roth! I took advantage of the pandemic to create a series of online workshops around the Bach Suites. I plan to continue it in the coming months, as I am more and more passionate about transmission.
PAN M 360: Your connection with Montreal continues to grow! What can you say about your musical and professional relationship with your Quebec colleague Stéphane Tétreault? What are the circumstances that led to this collaboration?
Jean-Guihen Queyras: I have admired Stéphane’s artistic career for many years now. In proposing that he join me, I wanted to add an additional intergenerational link on the one hand, and an emotional and quasi-familial one as well, given the emotional importance that my Quebec roots have for me.
PAN M 360: While we’re on the subject, what are your comments on the choice of the two works in which you will both be involved, as well as the desired approach in this context? Barriere’s Sonata for Two Cellos in G Major, Op. 4 No. 4, and Offenbach’s Duo for Two Cellos in B Flat Major, Op. 53 No. 1.
Jean-Guihen Queyras: Two works full of freshness and joy that the cellists have to play together, sharing being the very purpose of music!
PAN M 360: What does the experience of an additional performance of the same program represent? An opportunity for renewal? A different reading? Better understanding of the work?
Jean-Guihen Queyras: Each additional concert allows us to deepen the link with a work, let us benefit from it!
PAN M 360: After the Montreal stopover, what are your next projects?
Jean-Guihen Queyras: The Hague Residentie Orchestra (Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations), then Dutilleux’s concerto Tout un Monde Lointain… with the Orchestre de Paris and their wonderful young conductor Klaus Maekele… I’ll stop here, but the coming months will be intense and exciting!
An architect of Detroit techno since the 1980s, Jeff Mills has been at the forefront of electronic music for over 30 years. During his prolific career, the “Wizard” has collaborated with symphony orchestras and explored futuristic jazz, with his band Spiral Deluxe, and electronic jazz, with the late Tony Allen and France’s Jean-Phi Dary. Today, Jeff Mills joins forces with Detroit multi-instrumentalist Rafael Leafar. With The Override Switch, Mills and Leafar offer a musical conversation in which horns and machines answer each other, taking the listener into a musical future that goes beyond the usual stylistic boundaries. A journey that Jeff Mills opens up about in this interview.
PAN M 360: After reading about Rafael Leafar and you, listening to the album, I have the impression that you share a common vision of music. On Rafael Leafar’s website, music is described as a vehicle, and the creation process is seen as a journey, which seems to resonate with your approach of music. Furthermore, the title of Axis’ webzine, The Escaped Velocity, induces, too, the idea of movement in space, in time. It makes me wonder, what place does this concept of movement hold in your personal creative process? And how is it expressed through The Override Switch?
Jeff Mills: I recognize music as a vessel and a carrier of not just information in the sounds we receive, but also, the soul and spirit. I think it’s a general understanding that would not be difficult to find in Detroit among musicians, as many of us were taught to respect what you feel, not just what you learn. Most modern and popular forms of music derive from blues, so the idea of using music to take someone somewhere or to use music as the excuse to reach a higher level of consciousness comes from channeling thoughts about what sets us free. To re-connect to where we’re originally from—the stars. To be able to communicate through ways that had been taken away and suppressed—harmonics. And, to have a sense of more purpose in the time and space we’ve been given. We both understand this.
PAN M 360: I understand The Override Switch is about experimentation. To what extent is it an improvisational album? Was it a lot of trial and error? Was the mix of your creative thoughts organic?
Jeff Mills: Actually, it is more about the intricacies of communicating than trying to find new ways to translate. I think we knew what the objective was and how to get there. I think experimenting is a consideration when there is no apparent goal. We reacted accordingly and in a natural way, in a musical conversation about what it might take to overcome obstacles in life. We improvised the same way you would with a stranger about weather. Creating the mixes were the third and final step in that conversation. They were only designed to emphasize points of the discussion.
PAN M 360: If I am correct, the album was recorded in studio, but due to the pandemic, you weren’t together. How do you manage to create an undisturbed environment while being apart from each other? How would you describe the interaction you had with your own instruments or machines while working with what the other produced?
Jeff Mills: We both have private studios, the right gear and method that enabled us to record individually. So, we were free to apply whatever we felt made the compositions address the subjects. There wasn’t much verbal or written discussion. All compositions were created in three steps. One, I created the foundation of the track. Two, Rafael recorded all horn parts, and three, I mixed all the tracks down to master version.
PAN M 360: I read that you were introduced to each other by Mike Banks. Can you tell me more about a musician or players in the field who act or have acted as a bridge between different musical spheres and opened new horizons in music?
Jeff Mills: Yes, it was through Mike Banks that Rafael and I met. It was just by chance and good timing. Rafael was staying Mike’s place for a short time and I was regularly talking to Mike about finding musicians to work with. Detroit has a rather tight-knit community of musicians, that also includes DJs and many people that are connected to music. If we’ve never met, we’re about only one person away from knowing them, so it’s easy to connect.
We’ve always and often shared information and ideas about Music. I think this directly comes from the legacy of Berry Gordy’s Motown. Like Nashville, Chicago and New Orleans, Detroit is one of those special cities in America where you can find generations of people that are well connected to the industry of music – that understand it in deeper sense. Not just in the frame of a popular commodity. So, there are many bridges.
PAN M 360: The relationship, the bond you each have with the city, and of course to Detroit in particular, seems very important. Can you think about a place in Detroit that has been structuring in your work or has the potential to be structuring (or inspiring) for the next generation of Detroit musicians?
Jeff Mills: Well, not exactly. There is no specific place. It would be more of a mindset. And just about anyone can possess it because it’s always been accessible. Meaning that, any and everything that has ever been released under the category of Detroit techno is probably available to find. In hindsight and looking back, I think one of the most important qualities of Detroit techno was that all those independent labels weren’t signed up, compiled and shelved by larger media companies. We still remain loose and flexible to chart our own courses. So, future artists can come at any time, from anywhere for any reason.
PAN M 360: Will you be presenting this album live? In what kind of physical spaces do you think The Override Switch would fit the best?
Jeff Mills: We would like to present the album in a live performance. Rafael is such an incredible musical force, that I think if you ever have the opportunity to see him play, you should not hesitate. I can’t really suggest a specific type of setting because how would we really know, but like the album, I think the subject connects to any and everyone.
As the pandemic destroyed many planned objectives of bands across the world, the two masterminds behind Calgary’s indie post-punks Sunglaciers, Evan Resnik and Mathieu Blanchard, found themselves in a strange but happy dream—having access to a bunch of amazing gear (used by huge names in the music world like Elton John) and able to write music every day.
During the heart of Canada’s lockdown, in a commercial voiceover studio, Evan and Mathieu wrote and recorded a bunch of songs that would make up their upcoming sophomore album, Subterranea, co-produced by their hometown hero Chad VanGaalen and mixed by acclaimed engineer Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Yves Jarvis, The Unicorns).
Subterrenea is due sometime in 2022 out via Mothland, but the single “Draw Me In,” a psychedelic downer dance beat in the same vein as MGMT, dropped a week ago, paired with a trippy visualizer created by Anthony Lucero, using machine learning techniques.
Sunglaciers have been going nowhere but up since forming in 2017, steadily growing in popularity and sharing stages with acts such as Omni, Preoccupations, and Daniel Romano, while topping the charts of campus radio stations in Western Canada. Sunglaciers are playing a show with Motorists and Split Layer on Oct. 22 at l’Hemisphere Gauche and have another appearance during Mothland’s showcase during M For Montreal in November.
PAN M 360 had time to chat with Evan and Mathie, as they basked in picturesque Toronto sunrays (fitting for a band called Sunglaciers), right after they got back from their tour in the United Kingdom.
PAN M 360: You just got back into Canada today right? How was the tour?
Evan Resnik: We flew into Toronto yesterday around 4-ish and got to where we’re staying at like six or seven, and kind of crashed early. Today we’re enjoying a little chill day. The tour was amazing. It was really, really, fun. The promoters were all really great, crowds excellent and so enthusiastic and really supportive and pretty much every show just got better and better. It kind of came and went in a flash and I’m feeling really good about it.
PAN M 360: But it was originally planned for Europe as well, right?
Mathieu Blanchard: Yeah, we had a two-week EU component as well back at the start of 2020. But obviously with all the all the COVID recoveries being different in every country, we we just decided to keep it to the UK this time.
PAN M 360: I hear they treat you really well when you tour in the U.K.
Mathieu Blanchard: I just made a post this morning about how well the promoters treated us, like literally two hours ago (laughs). Yeah, every promoter was honestly, like Evan just said, I think better than the last, or they were just all …
Evan Resnik: They just really prioritized our comfortability, so it was a great experience.
PAN M 360: And you probably only got like trickles of it, but I what’s the U.K. scene like? Canada is so small in comparison.
Mathieu Blanchard: What was crazy was neither the promoters nor the bands really knew other bands at their same level in other cities that were just like an hour or two away. The crew we hung out with that were great and the bands were so good. There was this one band, Rongorongo, that was so sick, and they didn’t know any bands from like Newcastle, where we were just the day before, which is just like two, three hours away. Like Manchester and Liverpool were half an hour away and nobody knew of anyone. And we thought that was weird because of what you just said in Canada. After you’ve been playing for five, six years or whatever, you kind of know people from all across the country, right?
Evan Resnik: Yeah, I think it’s because a three-hour drive is considered so ridiculously long and unacceptable (laughs). A lot of the bands hadn’t toured much outside of their immediate proximity.
PAN M 360: That makes sense. So our readers don’t really know your origin story so how did you guys form?
Mathieu Blanchard: So Chris Dadge [musician from Calgary in a number of projects] is the one who kind of linked us up in 2017. I was playing with a couple of bands, Catholic Girls and Crystal Eyes, and then I stopped playing with those bands, and Evan was looking for a drummer. He was getting Dadge to drum on the EP and I was looking for a drummer for the band, and so I joined up and then we started writing songs for the next couple of EPs. After that we started writing the songs for the full-length Foreign Bodies that we put out a couple years ago. Then we got Kyle from DRI HIEV on bass and Nyssa who is from Hag Face and a bunch of other cool projects, and yeah, we just got to write a shit-ton during COVID for the follow-up LP coming out.
PAN M 360: And most bands and artists didn’t really get that opportunity to jam during the lockdowns.
Mathieu Blanchard: Well, it was just Evan and I in the same cohort. We had just gotten the studio maybe like a month before COVID and we were supposed to get another jam room and people literally got kicked out the day we were moving in. They got evicted, the band Napalmpom. The room had been there for like 15 years. I moved to Calgary in 2012 and always wanted a room there forever and finally, the day were supposed to start jamming for the first time, the restaurant upstairs got it cancelled cause of COVID.
Evan Resnik: From there, one of our friends is a part-owner of a commercial voiceover studio and we had always thought about doing like no-trace jamming there, and the studio was into it for a bit of extra cash.
Mathieu Blanchard: We got like two or three jams in with Nyssa and then COVID happened.
Evan Resnik: So all of a sudden we had access to all of their gear and nobody from the studio was coming into work during that first lockdown, which was really intense.
Mathieu Blanchard: So Evan and I were just always hanging out and constantly writing songs and jamming non-stop. When we would go outside it was so fucking quiet and just bizarre. That studio was so sick. It does like WestJet on-hold calls…
Evan Resnik: Or like auto parts call directories for air filters, and it’s all on tape still.
PAN M 360: That’s crazy that they’re still using tape.
Mathieu Blanchard: (laughs) It is! It’s like the hospitals still using pagers. So the other co-owner is just this old guy who has been in studios for years and he’s rented gear to like Elton John, and the mics for the first Chili Peppers record are all his. So this guy has a ton of gear and once he got more comfortable with us, we had access to all of it, so we just started recording everything.
PAN M 360: And some of those recordings became songs on your upcoming LP Subterranea?
Mathieu Blanchard: Yeah, exactly.
PAN M 360: And after a first listen, it kind of seems like you guys leaned more into the synths on this one more than on Foreign Bodies?
Evan Resnik: I think we both have loved synths for a long time and just wanted to kind of get out of our comfort zones a bit, from a writing perspective. So we just did a lot of jamming on synths and drum machines and stuff, seeing which ways our brains would take us if we didn’t have guitars and drum sticks in hand.
Mathieu Blanchard: We had talked about what we wanted to do after we wrote the first record and we decided we wanted to try and write songs differently. Instead of Evan on the guitar and me being on drums, we would not use either of those instruments to write songs and would just pick up whatever. So we kind of made it a mission to not write songs with the guitar. And there’s still songs that were written on guitar or transposed from synth to guitar, but it was to just to get a different vibe. Portishead had done that for Third and I’m sure tons of bands have done that for more inspiration and creativity.
Evan Resnik: And then for the next record we got Chad VanGaalen to add a bunch of other cool shit on top of what we had already done.
PAN M 360: Like for the latest single, “Draw Me In”? It’s more indie pop, but lyrically bleak as hell.
Evan Resnik: (laughs) That’s the semi-charmed life approach to songwriting.
Mathieu Blanchard: (laughs) It’s the line we want to be towing for sure. But the indie pop vibe was all Chad, who added that very cool synth with some extra drums. And he really made it just better.
Evan Resnik: And quickly too, as if it was so easy.
Mathieu Blanchard: Yeah. It was humbling working with people who were kind of at a much different level than us.
PAN M 360: And do you guys write lyrics together?
Evan Resnik: So I sing the vocals but I will often come to Matt with a bunch of ideas and a bunch of raw stuff and we’ll flesh it out together. I think as time goes on we’re becoming more and more just like equal parts and just kind of kind of both approaching it together.
PAN M 360: And I kind of get the sense that some of the lyrics are really stream of consciousness?
Evan Resnik: Yeah, it can be kind of like stream-of-consciousness rambling, like from me or we really simplify it, just focus on a few words that have maybe either vague or kind of universal meaning and are accessible from different points. Personally, I love interpreting songs. I love the fact that the way I interpret a song is almost certainly different from the intention of the songwriter.
Mathieu Blanchard: Evan’s thing is that he has a million ideas, you can probably see that from Foreign Bodies. And the lyrics initially are the same so it’s really just pairing it down a finding a specific theme.
PAN M 360: And so how do these songs translate live? It sounds like there’s lots of room to experiment?
Mathieu Blanchard: It’s been really fun. We just expanded the setup and got a drum machine, essentially a sampling pad that is up front that sometimes I use, sometimes Evan uses, sometimes Nyssa uses, and we added a synth as well. And Evan and Nyssa kind of nice rotate between those two.
PAN M 360: And so all of you guys are just switching instruments?
Evan Resnik: Yeah, even Kyle plays synth, so we’re all kind of flip-flopping, kind of like Sloan used to do. Like when I saw them in the late ’90s, they would just throw their guitars at each other. Maybe we’ll get there.
Traversing most of Latin America in their resources, Chicago’s Dos Santos have cultivated a mature and considered strain of alternative rock, one that’s resonantly reflective of the borders they have crossed—and returned to. The contents of City of Mirrors, their new album on the hot Chicago label International Anthem, are to an extent a variant of Americana with the whitewash stripped away, revealing fragments and echoes of much vaster map of the misnomered “new world”. The sounds are richly textured, at times a dreamlike haze, at others with a gritty sharp focus. It’s also music that is deeply literary and learned, to be expected given that bandleader, singer, and lyricist Alex Chavez is also an author, and an associate professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. PAN M 360 corresponded with Chavez, to gain more insights into substance and subtleties of City of Mirrors.
PAN M 360: Borders are imaginary lines across the continuity of Earth’s surface that can nonetheless be very real as they entrap and entangle, wound and deny. In many cases, they are the invisible lines that separate the privileged from those who struggle. City of Mirrors returns to borders often, as things to be explored, challenged and transcended. Do you feel that’s an accurate assessment?
Alex Chavez: We have always explored the issue of borders and their crossings through our music, both in terms of subject matter—lyrically/creatively—and musical composition, as we have always sought to incorporate our various transhemispheric influences. This is at once—always—cultural, political, and social. It is what we know and who we are.
PAN M 360: Borders define space, but time can also have figurative borders. I hear this in City of Mirrors, and not just in the different musical eras it touches on, and they are many. It’s in the themes too. Some songs, like “Crown Me”, are pressingly current. Others are timeless, or rooted in memory—“that was then, this is now” is probably one of the clearest temporal borders. Any thoughts on that?
Alex Chavez: Temporality is always a key in dimension of any border crossing, for the self is both emplaced and embodied, and the two are bound through what French philosopher and public intellectual Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to as reversibility. In other words, the body not only reaches places but also bears the traces of the places it has known—these residues are laid down within the body, and this incorporation ultimately shapes both body and place, for places are themselves altered by our having been in them. At last, these embodied memories of place ring out, especially during performative moments that occur across time.
PAN M 360: The title track is a love letter to Puerto Rico, but it’s inspired by the great Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, who certainly knew how to blur those borders in time I mentioned. Do you think the idea of magical realism, of which he is among the greatest practitioners, has had an influence on the music you make with Dos Santos?
Alex Chavez: Perhaps not always, but certainly on this record. Yes, indeed, “City of Mirrors” is a love song to Puerto Rico amid the aftershocks of disasters past and present, historical and ongoing. Inspired by Gabriel García Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, we imagined Puerto Rico in the image of Macondo—the city of mirrors—a place of beauty and trauma, of struggle and triumph. We feel the Caribbean embodies the extremes of such dichotomies borne of the violent legacies of colonialism and an invented “new world,” while remaining a cherished place of beauty, refusal, and freedom dreams to remember. And so, we asked, what luminous echoes between love and solitude, hope and absurdity, euphoria and mourning are necessary in holding onto the places you cherish, those you call home in the face of oblivion, always. Perhaps, an oblivion in the form of the noisy city in the depths of José Arcadio Buendía’s slumber? And when he asked what city it was, “they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo”— the city of mirrors. A place of beauty and dread, “secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love.”
PAN M 360: The brief track “Jaguar de Rosas” welcomes the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral, who reads a fragment of her poem “Recado a Lolita Arriaga, en México”. It would be rewarding to know a bit more about her.
Alex Chavez: This is a historical recording written and performed by Gabriela Mistral, the audio courtesy of the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape, Library of Congress (1950). We are fans of her work. She was South America’s first ever Nobel Laureate in Literature.
PAN M 360: On City of Mirrors, you’ve enlisted the help of two of the architects of the American Afrobeat revival, Elliot Bergman of NOMO and Martín Perna of Antibalas. Both of whom have a history of dipping into experimental sounds, I’ll add. What prompted you to invite their participation?
Alex Chavez: Elliot Bergman is a friend of the band and based in Chicago. When we made the decision to work with a producer on this record, he was at the top of our list. We subsequently reached out to him, and he accepted—and then we embarked on the journey of making this album, most of which was recorded out in Los Angeles, California. During one of those sessions, Martín Perna of Antibalas—who collaborated on the previous Dos Santos record, Logos—reached out to Alex Chavez to catch up, they have known one another for years. Perna mentioned he was also in Los Angeles, and thus in this quite serendipitous way he ended up coming by the studio and playing on the album. It was a wonderful coincidence.
PAN M 360: “Palo Santo” is a political song, but its title refers to the “holy wood”, bursera graveolens, burned for purifying purposes since Incan times. The word palo can also mean, in Spain, a robbery or a flamenco dance. In Peru, it can mean a lie, in Puerto Rico, an alcoholic drink, an advantage, or a success of some sort. In Argentina, a million pesos, or an erection. Any of these can be anointed with holiness by adding “santo”, and become, at the very least, the start of a very good story. Do you think any of these variations of palo santo apply elsewhere on City of Mirrors? “White. Lies”, perhaps?
Alex Chavez: That song, yes, is a commentary on the contemporary lived politics of race in the United States, and movements for social justice in response. We imagine these movements as part of a larger struggle to change and transform, to usher in a new day in this country. The title “Palo Santo” is invoked with reference to its ethnobotanical use in Mexico and other parts of Latin America as central to ritual purification, much as these movements are also spaces of sacred congregation to purify and change the world.
Photo: Victor Duarte
Released digitally a few weeks ago, We Are The Times, the eighth album from Buffalo Daughter, has just landed in vinyl and CD versions in the record shops. It must be said that the Japanese trio took its time with We Are The Times. Since the release of Konjac-tion in 2014, Buffalo Daughter have been rather discreet, prioritizing concerts and tours over studio sessions.
We Are The Times brings back the Tokyo band as we’ve always known them since Captain Vapour Athletes, their first full-length album on the now-defunct Beastie Boys label Grand Royal in 1996: eclectic, adventurous, flirting with electronica, new wave, avant-garde pop, leftfield hip-hop and post-rock with a strong experimental bent. Still composed of suGar Yoshinaga on guitar, Yumiko Ohno on bass and MoOoG Yamamoto on machines and turntables, Buffalo Daughter draws up, over nine tracks, a dark assessment of the world and humanity on We Are The Times.
Born from an improvisation session with Masaya Nakahara, as part of a tribute to Takahiro Muramatsu (Smurf Otokogumi), the album was conceived over several years, evolving and changing with the moods of the band members. Although We Are The Times was created during a tumultuous time, when the trio found themselves, like everyone else, facing the Covid-19 pandemic, it suggests that there is still hope, that music does indeed soften the blow. With this new effort, Buffalo Daughter sought to create an energetic, upbeat and anxiety-inducing project to combat the turmoil.
Reached at her home in Tokyo, suGar Yoshinaga spoke to us in broken English about the genesis of this long-form album, about Kid Koala, featured on one of the album’s tracks, about the Shibuya-kei movement and the power of music, among other things; an interview punctuated by the singing and calls to play of her parrot Popcorn.
PAN M 360: We Are The Times is the title of your new album. What’s its meaning?
suGar Yoshinaga: We sing it in the song “Times”, the second track on the album. The song is about the current world we live in. There are so many different opinions battling each other. There is red and blue. Blue people have their opinions and red people have a different one. These opinions are completely different and quite often, these people are debating. There are some conflicts happening all over the world. Right wing versus left wing… they are debating but there is no common ground. This polarization became worse, or more obvious, during the pandemic and maybe even the Trump years.
PAN M 360: Is it a Covid album? Was it influenced and created during the pandemic?
suGar Yoshinaga: We started to work on the album in 2017. We made most of the album before the pandemic. But we gathered all the pieces during Covid. So obviously, we were greatly influenced by Covid, but most of the tracks were made before. So it is a mix of before and during the pandemic.
PAN M 360: The lyrics were written before as well?
suGar Yoshinaga: Two songs were written during the pandemic, “Music” and “Times”. The first two songs on the album.
PAN M 360: The song “Music”startswith the words “music is the vitamin”. Did music save you or keep you sane during these hard times ?
suGar Yoshinaga: Oh yes, definitely! During Covid, we had to stay home forever, we couldn’t do shows and tour anymore. Everything changed in one day. Like everybody else, we are worried by the future and what is happening right now. It is the last song we wrote for this album. There are so many things we are worried about, like global warming and all that stuff. Looking at the whole album after it was done, we thought it was very dark, like there is no way out. Then we said to ourselves, will it be a good album with so many dark songs?. Then we wrote the last song, “Music”. Looking back at our lifestyle—the Buffalo Daughter lifestyle, I mean—music is our way to communicate to the world and between each other in the band. Music is our biggest relief and biggest passion. So that’s why we say that music is the vitamin. It saved me during the pandemic.
PAN M 360: You mentioned global warming earlier. You have a song on the album, “Global Warming Kills Us All”, that you wrote four years ago during an extremely warm summer. Kid Koala is featured on that song. How did you hook up with him ?
suGar Yoshinaga: We’ve known Kid Koala since the late ’90s when we toured together with the Money Mark band through Europe and the USA. I think we went to Montreal too. By the way, I really love Montreal, it’s one of my favourite cities in the world… So Kid Koala came to Japan just before the pandemic for his Nufonia Must Fall show. We went to see it and we were so moved and impressed by what he has done with his music and characters, this muppet show live with the music… So when we started thinking about a video for “Global Warming Kills Us All”, we instantly thought of him. Because global warming is killing us all. That’s a strong statement and it’s a very, very serious issue. But we didn’t want the video to be dark and depressing because we don’t want to give up our hope. We wanted to express the feeling that we are really in danger, everybody on Earth, humans and animals, this global warming might kill us all in the near future. So we thought that his personality, just like his characters that he draws or his muppets that are so cute, might make people take it more seriously, that they would react more to seeing these innocent and cute little characters than to seeing sinister images.
PAN M 360: What was his contribution to the song?
suGar Yoshinaga: We tried to show how critical the situation is and that we need to do something, even if it’s small things like avoiding plastic and stuff like that. So we chose to sing using a vocoder, to give us a kind of a robot voice. Because it gives an impression that we are more in [imitates a robot voice] danger—and even that the robots are in danger!
PAN M 360: The title “Don’t Punk Out” is intriguing. Can you tell us more about it?
suGar Yoshinaga: It’s a song about a person like me, or the other band members, struggling in this world, in these times. We are all getting older. When we started the band, we were so young, but after 25 years, we are not so young anymore! In fact, we are going to become old and bitter! (laughs) So the feeling we have now is totally different from when we were in our early twenties. We had our worries, our struggles when we were 20, 40 and now. Life can seem long, but it can also seem very short. But despite the passage of time, we will always have battles to fight. We still have to get through it all. So don’t punk out! Do what you have to or what you want to. That’s kind of what we’re trying to say in this song.
PAN M 360: What other subjects do you touch on in the album?
suGar Yoshinaga: I think the whole album is about struggling. Struggling in life, with global warming and all the stuff we are facing. We all have personal struggles too. And especially during this pandemic period. We wanted to express those struggles and what we can do about it or to get through it. And for us, the best way to get through it is through music. Music is our vitamin, we take it every day, it excites us and makes us feel good.
PAN M 360: Besides Kid Koala, there are also other guests on the album…
suGar Yoshinaga: Yes, there are a few, including Atsushi Matsushita, the drummer who plays on “Don’t Punk Out”. He played with John Zorn and many others, he is probably the best session drummer in Japan. There is also Ricardo Dias Gomes, who sings and speaks on the song “Jazz”, he is Brazilian and lives in Portugal. He came to Tokyo two years ago for sessions with a famous American singer whose name I forget. He played at the Blue Note jazz club in Tokyo and Yumiko knew the drummer of this American singer’s band, so we went there. Ricardo was the bass player that night. Since we liked Ricardo Gomes’ albums a lot, we asked him if he wanted to sing on one of our songs. He happened to like what we did with Takako Minekawa [the Roomic Cube album] in the ’90s.
PAN M 360: Your previous album was released in 2014, what has happened in the last seven years?
suGar Yoshinaga: (laughs) Yeah, seven years seem like a long time… We didn’t really idle, we did a lot of touring throughout Europe and the US for three years and then, in 2017, we thought it might be time to make a new album, so we started working on it. But we also had other things to do, for example Yumiko was touring with Cornelius, so it was not easy to be in the studio together. So we agreed to meet at least once a month all together in the studio, it was a promise we made. We did sessions with different musicians like Masaya Nakahara, who plays modular synth, he is credited on the album too. Anyway, it was a very long process; one day a month is not much. That said, we always did as much as we could during these sessions. We documented these early sessions with a few videos on Youtube and a few songs on Soundcloud.
PAN M 360: So after a long silence of seven years, you resurfaced in 2021 with two releases, the digital EP Continuous Stories of Miss Cro-magnon (20 Years Later), available on Bandcamp, and this new album! Were you running after lost time?
suGar Yoshinaga: (laughs) You could say that. Regarding the EP on Bandcamp, we had a concert last July in Tokyo and we wanted to mark the event with something special. We hadn’t played for a long time and we could only do one show. We thought that a t-shirt would be ordinary, so we thought of an EP with three songs. We released it on July 8. I don’t know if you know this, but July 7 is the Festival of Stars in Japan, the Tanabata. So on this date, the seventh day of the seventh month, the myth says that a man and a goddess meet on the Milky Way. It’s very romantic and we think about the stars, the space and the universe during this day. So we wanted to make an EP that would touch this theme. We did the three songs and mixed the album in two weeks.
PAN M 360: One of the songs, “Son of Altair”, was already released before, right?
suGar Yoshinaga: Yes, we re-recorded it. The others (“Cosmic Dance”, “Interstellar Journey”) are new compositions though. Actually, the third song of the EP, “Interstellar Journey”, shares the same source as “Serendipity (Tsubu)” on our new album. “Serendipity” is an alternative version, let’s say.
PAN M 360: Buffalo Daughter has often been associated with the Shibuya-kei movement, but I have read here and there that you don’t feel so close to the other artists in this movement.
suGar Yoshinaga: We think that musically, we are quite different from other artists in this movement such as Pizzicato 5, Cornelius, Flipper’s Guitar and all the others. Our music doesn’t sound like theirs, but they are all very good friends! There’s something trendy about this movement, something a little bit stylish, while we’re more of this indie band that tours in a van, you see? We feel different. And that stuff is a little bit out of fashion, it was popular years ago. But there are quite a few bands that are inspired by the Shibuya-kei sound and are starting to be known in Japan.
PAN M 360: You also play with another band, Metalchicks. Can you tell us a little bit about this project?
suGar Yoshinaga: Metalchicks is me on guitar or bass and Yuka (Yoshimura) on drums. The idea was to make something really hard, like metal. That’s something I can’t do with Buffalo Daughter, and that’s why I started this band.
PAN M 360: Is this your answer to Babymetal?
suGar Yoshinaga: (laughs) Actually, they came long after Metalchicks! But I like Babymetal, I think they are quite original.
PAN M 360: I’ve been hearing a bird chirping since the beginning of the interview. Do you have a parrot at home?
suGar Yoshinaga: Yes, she calls me to go and play with her. Her name is Popcorn, do you want to see her?
PAN M 360: Uh… yeah, why not, I’ve had several birds previously…
What follows is a lively discussion about parrots and other small, talking, winged creatures. But as PAN M 360 is not an ornithological site, we’ll stop here…
Photo credit: Enno Kapitz, digitally modified by Kosuke Kawamura
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