Interviews – Page 77

Photo: VonPleid

PAN M 360: How and why did this idea for such an ambitious project come about?

Navet Confit: It’s a project I had in mind for a long time. It obviously takes a lot of time to go through 20 years of recordings of all kinds. I used to do bits and pieces here and there when I had the time in the last few years, when I used to go through an old hard drive to find a lost file from a session, but I’d never delved into it as deeply as I did during the quarantine. The studio where I usually work closed for two months; I moved home with a few instruments to create, but the morale was not there. Suddenly having that much time in front of me gave me a complete overview of my archives, and it made it easier to finish the review and compilation work. Since 2000, I’ve recorded a lot, an awful lot! I don’t write the music down, my way of remembering what I create is to make a demo of it. There have been times when I’ve been able to write two or three songs a day and still have a full-time job! Even during that period, which goes back 15 years, I’d start a recording with the idea that one day a new song might come out in that form, because you never know where the recordings are going to end up. I’ve always taken care to record in a “semi-broadcast” quality (according to my standards as a sound engineer and mixer at the time, of course), so I think this project has been around since I’ve been making music. And the 20-year-old Navet is very happy that it’s finally coming out.

PAN M 360: How many songs are we talking about, altogether? When was the oldest one from? And the most recent?

NC: I think it’s 103 songs in all. I could have forced myself to make a round number. I’m sorry! The oldest tracks are from 2000, when I did a kind of eponymous demo for my friends at Christmas, homemade. The pieces “Moi aussi”, “Cancel = Skip” et “Sans titre encore” are from it and are all on volumes 1 and 2 of the Nostalgie Incubateur series. The piece “Moi aussi” is the first track by Navet Confit with lyrics (it was already very minimal). The most recent material can be found on volume 3 of the same series: these are b-sides and mock-ups of my last “real” album to date, Engagement, lutte, clan et respect (2019). Several songs were still incomplete, so among other things I added vocals on “Morts pendant le confinement”. I did the same with the Elton John cover, “Daniel” (on Covers de rêves), for which I finished the translation and recorded the vocals (with Émilie Proulx, remotely) during quarantine. The instrumental version of the song had been around for a few years, recorded for a theatre show, but never used.

PAN M 360: Was there anything you hadn’t listened to for a long time? Did you rediscover things you had underestimated in the past, where you thought, but why didn’t I play this or that? How did it feel to go back to those songs or music you had left behind?

NC: It’s crazy because music is a real machine for travelling through time and space. I found stuff I didn’t even remember having recorded. I’ve also been able to observe my reflexes as a composer, chord forms, types of melodies that come back over the years. But above all, it put me back in the state I was in when I recorded those pieces, in which apartment, in which studio… The compilations of theatre music also put me back in the context of the productions they were made for, made me think about the people I worked with, the directors who guided me and so on. I’ve also rediscovered more youthful things that I’m going to keep to myself; and through it all, funny and heartbreaking memories. But my choices have always been clear for my albums, so there’s no “I should have”.

PAN M 360: Why did all these songs never end up on disc, or any other medium?

NC: I tend to take responsibility for my choices and let go quite easily. I release a lot of albums and EPs. I have a lot of freedom in my sound and in my releases, among others thanks to my label Lazy at Work (Galaxie, Fuudge, Zouz). If this material hadn’t been released before, it was for a good reason and there was no existential crisis related to these decisions (laughs)! It’s not an easy repertoire that is found on these 10 albums. It’s really very eclectic and it can be very demanding to listen to. That’s why I suggest moderation… These are complementary universes which, a bit like my many EPs, throw a different light on the official albums. You shouldn’t press play expecting to be knocked over. But I think they go well together, these tracks, and I’m happy to release them all at the same time rather than separately on official albums. In the case of the theater-music compilations, the answer is more obvious: these pieces were not intended to be on albums in the first place. Releasing them in this way gives a glimpse (or a listen) of my “ambient” side that isn’t very present in my other productions. It’s a style of music that I like very much, and that lends itself well to the stage, its very minimal side blending perfectly with a supporting role, behind the script and the acting.

PAN M 360: How long did it take you to listen to it all again, make choices, and put it all together? Were the choices difficult? Did you have any help?

NC: As in many of my projects, I didn’t calculate my time, but I could just say – a lot. It’s a job I did quite alone, but over the years, I had often made compilations on records I burned for my friends; it had already oriented me towards what was best. The hardest thing was to compile the songs together, to make pacings that stood together. In terms of choices, it was pretty simple: what irritated me at the time (musically, in the voice or in the mix) still irritates me today. As soon as I wasn’t proud of something, as soon as something got stuck and it didn’t serve the overall understanding of the exercise, it was rejected. We change a lot over the years and the world changes too. I’ve rejected a lot of things, like lyrics that haven’t aged well or songs where I hadn’t yet found my voice or my way of singing in French.

PAN M 360: Have you reworked, remixed, or remastered some tracks?

NC: As I said before, I sometimes finished recording some pieces during the quarantine. I didn’t have access to all the multitrack sessions (I used to record with an old beige PC and pirated programs), so in some cases I couldn’t remix. In other cases, I added a bass here, recorded a voice there, and so on.

For the theater compilations, I had to remix quite a lot, the relationship to the sound in the theater being very different from the one on the album (“Nyotaimori”, for example, was originally quadraphonic when it was presented at CTD’A). Jean-Philippe Villemure did a colossal job of mastering the whole thing! He won’t say it to me, but I think I drove him a bit crazy.

PAN M 360: Are there any others left? Could you have made more than 10 albums if you had wanted to?

NC: I think I could have made at least five more albums with what I have left! You have to know when to stop in life, don’t you? On the other hand, I plan to continue the Monsieur Confit au théâtre series (I do two or three theatre productions a year, that’s a lot of recorded music) and Nostalgie Incubateur.

PAN M 360: Tell us about this virtual show you’re presenting on July 13.

NC: It’s a fake Facebook live show of about 25 minutes with my beloved Von Pleid (camera, motion design and editing) and my great friend Martin Lachapelle (motion design and editing). I was inspired by what I saw on the Internet at the beginning of the pandemic, the live shows, the famous Zoom aperitifs, which lasted a maximum of two weeks… Like theatre people, I believe that “going digital” or “reinventing oneself” doesn’t mean putting a fixed camera in the room and playing. That’s not how I see the adaptation of the performing arts to the digital format. If our content is artistic, then I think at the same time the container has to be artistic as well. So I resisted doing live shows from my living room with my acoustic guitar – frankly, I wasn’t tempted to do that at all – and instead, I thought about how to make the show without an audience more stimulating. I don’t denigrate the artists who lent themselves to the Facebook live game, on the contrary. I find them very brave to have presented themselves like that, without artifice and in rudimentary conditions. But I believe that it was a temporary solution in response to an emergency, and not a new path to take in the long term. So this show is very weird, very “treated” visually and audibly, and I put a good dose of my dubious humour in it. I’m fortunate to have collaborators who understand (and add to) this humour – Von Pleid did the cover art for Justin Trudeau Kinda Party, among others, and Martin did my live video projections. I perform seven or eight songs. There are some more literary, narrative bits, and some really intense visual moments. We worked a lot with green screens and saturated images. This is my first video production. To the team, we added a cameo by Martine G, president of Lazy at Work, my label. I think it’s really cool to work with a label that encourages me in my nonsense instead of repressing it. That’s also true of the many atypical releases I’ve made with Martine since 2013.

PAN M 360: Can you describe in a few lines the history of each of the 10 albums, and how they were subdivided?

NC: Throughout all this, there are two series among others: Monsieur Confit au théâtre (volumes 1, 2 and 3), which compiles the music for the plays Nyotaimori, Yukonstyle and La femme plus dangereuse du Québec and Nostalgie Incubateur (volumes 1, 2 and 3), which compiles B-sides, demos, studio scraps and other experiments (a lot of stuff dating back to the beginning of 2000, instrumental and quite experimental). There’s also the concept album Aquaforme, which is mainly made up of samples of toilet, sink and guitar sounds. I’ve compiled a lot of covers accumulated over the years on Covers de rêves. There’s also a “living room show” called Bruit de fond, recorded between two albums (LP1 and LP2). And finally, a dance record (!) – the Skydancer EP (if you’re able to listen to the whole thing, I’ll pay you a compensatory sum).

PAN M 360: If you had to choose one song/music per album for a playlist, which ones would it be, and why?

M. Confit au théâtre vol. 1 / Nyotaimori: “Yoga”
It’s a track that wasn’t used in the show, but I liked it very much. It’s kind of a tribute to the melting sound of Boards of Canada, and it’s a very long, meditative, hypnotic piece.

M. Confit au théâtre vol. 2 / Yukonstyle: “Raven Requiem”
A very solemn and colourful piece, built around a mellotron, composed of samples of the voice of one of the actresses of the show, Jasmine Chen. It’s really deep. Ha ha!

M. Confit au théâtre vol. 3 / La femme la plus dangereuse du Québec: “Vulgaires siamois / Freakshow”
David Lynch meets Sonic Youth? I discovered the poetry of Josée Yvon with this show (read her work, that’s an order!). It was hyper-inspiring. And trashy. Of a great, messed-up beauty. The tracks of this album were built from a kind of jam with myself, you can hear it clearly on this track.

Nostalgie Incubateur vol. 1: “Moi aussi”
It’s the first real “song” by Navet Confit, that is to say, the first time I put vocals on one of my musical tracks, in 2000. It sets the tone for the rest.

Nostalgie Incubateur vol. 2: “JP fait de la musique”
I really like the comfortable/uncomfortable atmosphere of this track (which also has a reinterpretation later on the same album). I think it’s my first real tentative effort in electro-wallpaper.

Nostalgie Incubateur vol. 3 / Engagement, lutte, clan et rejets: “Blues plate”
…Just so you can imagine Émilie Proulx playing drums on it! Ha ha!

Aquaforme: “Aquaforme Part I”
It’s a weird concept album made mostly in one night. The Aquaforme suite (Part I to V) can be listened to when you come home late from a party, a bit drunk.

Covers de rêves: “Le monde est fou”
I never thought I’d sing Plamondon one day! That’s what I was invited to do, when I was on stage to accompany the authors at the 50th-anniversary evening of poetry from Les Herbes Rouges (a great publisher). Covered by Renée Claude, this song is inspired by the poet Huguette Gaulin (read her work, that’s an order!).

Bruit de fond: “Ambulances”
The embryo of a track that was later released on LP2, there is a certain fragility to this version, and a bit of a rough side to the interpretation that serves it well.

Skydancer EP: “Combien je veux être avec toi”
I think it’s officially the most wonderfully disgusting song I’ve ever had to record in my entire life! It was part of Simon Boulerice’s show Javotte and I’m lucky enough to be accompanied by Larche, in autotune mode, and Erik Evans of Canailles rapping.

For Rufus Wainwright, Unfollow the Rules is a return to pop music after a long neoclassical hiatus. In 2015, Deutsche Grammophon released the recording of the opera Prima Donna, composed by Wainwright in 2009. The following year, the German label released Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, a unique reinterpretation of the famous sonnets that the great American director Bob Wilson incorporated into a play of his own conception.

Four years later, Unfollow the Rules was born at the end of a loop initiated and completed in California. Well established in the world of composition for musical theatre, why did Wainwright return to more pop forms?

“I was still in mourning for the loss of my mother,” Wainwright begins. “I was ready to compose another opera after Prima Donna, I’d adapted Shakespeare’s sonnets and so I went off into the classical world. I had an incredible time, and I will return as well to opera, down the line… if we still have a planet.”

More precisely, Wainwright has seen the curve of his passion for song oscillate over time.

“All along my journey,” he explains, “I kept writing songs and I developed over time a profound appreciation for where I came from. Maybe I have been a little jaded about that, but after I’d taken a bit of distance and done my classical work, I was able to reevaluate where I came from. And then I wrote a lot of songs, quite enough to make an album. I replenished my enthusiasm for the world of pop, where I’ve spent most of my life, and enjoyed it a lot.”

This return to pop music coincided with his migration from Toronto to Los Angeles.

“I spent time with my daugther in California, we bought this house in L.A., some anniversaries started to occur – the 20th anniversary of my first album that I did in L.A., the 76th anniversary of Joni Mitchell that we celebrated here, and me returning to California – with that kind of end of a chapter, there was a tale to be told.”

To frame this formidable story segmented into twelve songs, Wainwright set out in search of the ideal producer.

“There were discussions with several producers and then, when I sat with Mitchell Froom, I knew immediately he was the guy for the job. The album started to get made. One of the things about Mitchell was his work with Randy Newman. I know Randy, I spent a small amount of time with him, but I did not immerse myself in Randy Newman until then. I listened to his records and it really did blow my mind – in a good way! I’m now a huge fan of his, I kind of admire him at the moment. Then, working with Mitchell Froom brought me close to that ideal. Thus this album was born in respect for the tradition of music-making in California.”

Mitchell Froom isn’t just anyone. Apart from three albums with Randy Newman, he’s done three with Crowded House, four with Bonnie Raitt, not to mention Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Tracey Chapman, Richard Thompson, Cibo Matto, American Music Club and Suzanne Vega, to whom he was married. Remember also the Latin Playboys, an avant-roots group he formed with Chad Blake and two members of Los Lobos in the ’90s. What was his approach with Rufus Wainwright?

“Mitchell wanted me to continue this tradition of ‘fabulous Rufusness’, to stage these grandiose and very elaborated characters I’ve imagined over the course of my career. On the one hand, he didn’t want to temper me. On the other hand, he wanted clarity, directness, simplicity. He wanted to highlight my eccentricity, to respect my knowledge, but he also cared about what people want to listen to or not.

“He was very attentive to what was going on at the heart of the songs, he wanted everyone to understand them. Yes, I’ve worked with a lot of producers over the years and they’ve been fantastic in one way or another, but I have to say that Mitchell is the best at exploiting the full spectrum of my music. I’ve made records that are so amazing, but you don’t want to listen to them all the time (laughs). But this record appeals to you, you really want to listen to it.”

Wainwright takes a moment to summarize a few of the album’s tracks.

“‘Alone Time’ is the least produced song, probably the greatest elegy of California, heavily based on Brian Wilson’s techniques, the last song time to capture this sunny melancholy that the state has so much of. Right now, this song is so poignant and meaningful!”

“Damsel in Distress”, he says, “is an homage to Joni Mitchell, whom my mother very much disliked, and kept saying she was a kind of a fraud. My mother was a real purist, she loved the real folk music. She had a valid opinion but she was also very jealous (laughs). So Joni Mitchell was fobidden in our house. And then years later, Jorn [Weisbrodt, his husband] became a huge fan, he celebrated her 70th birthday at the Luminato Festival – where he was the artistic director. We became friends with Joni, and I discovered her world for the first time at an older age. And so came my homage to her, musically. This song isn’t about her, but about her vibe.”

“This One’s For The Ladies (THAT LUNGE!)”, Wainwright explains, “is one of those Mitchell Froom moments, it’s what he’s done for years in his production. It’s not Laurel Canyon at all, it’s more ’80s Ohio or something (laughs). But I’m so happy that we got that in. Mitchell worked really hard on that background.

“Unfollow the Rules is an epic journey which I take the listener through. It’s one of those incredible panoramic journeys of this music inspired by Laurel Canyon in the ’70s, through which, with this piece of music, you can be totally carried away to this fantasyland, you can be transported into your own imagination. There is depth and also darkness in this music.”

Here’s another bridge between classic pop and chamber avant-pop, between generations and styles, between pop and classical music, courtesy of Rufus Wainwright. We know him to be a prodigy of creative pop, a sort of Cole Porter for our time, and one that is also based in a great family tradition.

“My new album is a continuation, but also the final product of a long process. During all these years, I didn’t struggle or play too much with words and sounds, but… I sometimes caught the tiger by the tail, or found myself in an imaginary and crazy country. Some people have been there and some haven’t. But it was always an effort for me to get there, and this time I landed. The journey is coming to an end, I am not necessarily confident but I am at peace. Musically, a little more. I am at the end of an era, I also consider it the beginning of a new one. So watch out! I have to get to the very end to get to the beginning!”

Unfollow the Rules, a title of circumstances? The very opposite of Trump’s base, which is resolutely anti-quarantine as we know, Rufus laughs even louder at the end of the phone.

“More seriously, this does not mean breaking the rule, but to examine it carefully before acting. Every morning of this pandemic, we wake up and feel very strange. It is hard to imagine anything more dramatic than this. And with this horrifying president, we thought this mandate would end by an election, and… it ends by a plague! Fortunately, some state governors in America, I think California or New York State, make the best of people.”

As for live concerts in front of an audience, they are obviously postponed for the moment…

“We’re assessing the situation on a daily basis. When I come back, however, with my group of five musicians, I will insist more on music than on theatricality. Having said that, I might become exasperated after five months of touring and we’ll do more eccentric and exuberant things again. I can afford to stop in this context, it’s not ideal but it’s important.

“There will be much more to do. When I start the next cycle, a French album will be important in this process. I’d like to make an incredible album, off the beaten track, and for now, Unfollow the Rules is the end of the first act of my career. I hope to have three of them!”

Photo: Erick Faulkner

PAN M 360: Tell us about this new project. Who and what are Les Éditions Appærent?

Jesse Osborne-Lanthier: Pierre and I have been talking for a long time about starting a label to have a platform to help the community of artists around us. I was working for another label [Halcyon Veil] with our other partner Will Ballantyne, and then things went sour. So Will, Pierre, and I joined forces to start this new structure. Asaël Robitaille, who has been working with us for a long time, also joined the team.

Pierre Guerineau: We’re a whole team of friends and collaborators who’ve been working together on various projects for several years, and we wanted to pool our efforts. Every time we complete a project and release an album, we look for a label to work with, be they Italian, English, or New York labels, but often it’s not really our aesthetic, we have to deal with agendas, make compromises, so we wanted to have a platform that would allow us to represent our work, our aesthetic, and be in control from the source to the release of the record. To control all aspects, from composing to recording, mixing, design, and distribution development. So it’s a way to gather our strengths, and have something that reflects us.

PAN M 360: What are the objectives in the medium term?

PG: We already have a lot of things planned. We’ve got L’Exil, Bernardino Femminielli’s album, which will be released on July 14, and will give a sort of theatrical view of his exile from Montreal to Paris. So this record will be the first volume of a trilogy that will be released in 2020 and possibly 2021, we’ll see how it goes. There’s also a movie he made, in addition to all the videos. It’s a film that lasts a good hour. In the future, we’ll also develop something other than music. For example, Marie [Davidson, Guerineau’s girlfriend, with whom he’s teamed up in Essaie Pas] is currently writing a poetry book, and I’d also like to develop something with Madison Dinelle, Jesse’s wife and photographer. Otherwise, we have an artist from Cairo, MSYLMA, who’s going to release something excellent that we can’t wait to share. We also have bela, a Korean artist who lives in China. And right now we’re working with Montreal’s Anna Arrobas who released an EP that I mixed last year, and we’re talking about developing something with Alex Zhang Hungtai [aka Dirty Beaches, featured on the Feu St-Antoine album]. We also have a project with Heith, one of the founding members of Haunter Records, who lives in Milan… We have a lot of projects. Stylistically speaking, our vision is very broad, it goes from electronic experimentation to more dreamy pop stuff. We don’t restrict ourselves, we really go for it. So we’re pretty much in line for the year 2020 with all this big family.

PAN M 360: Let’s get to Feu St-Antoine, your first release on Appærent. The name of this project, which has been circulating for some time in Montreal, refers to the collective hallucination phenomena – and severe pain, similar to burns – that entire villages suffered in the Middle Ages following the ingestion of ergot from rye bread.

PG: Yes, I’ve been doing live performances under that name for the last two or three years. There’s a track that came out on a compilation, but this is really the first album I’m doing solo. I started composing the songs about three years ago and I’ve continued to do them occasionally without having the concrete intention of making an album, it was more like experiments that I was doing on my own in my spare time. After a while, I started putting the pieces together and finding an aesthetic that seemed coherent, to build an album. It really comes from a personal approach. It was an opportunity for me to try out new things in terms of composition and composition techniques. I think it’s music that really passes through the prism of memory and childhood memories. In fact, I dedicated the album to the memory of my mother, who passed away. So it was a work of reconnecting with a part of my identity. And I think the result is more emotional than what I’ve done in the past. I’ve always liked developing the hybrid side, with more acoustic or pseudo-acoustic sounds like string samples or guitar samples, so as to create a universe between something more electronic and something more kinematic or contemporary in terms of sound. The idea was to have a music that was both dreamlike and nightmarish at the same time, which comes more from my unconscious than my cerebral side.

PAN M 360: A word about the title?

PG: It’s from a poem by Emily Dickinson that I thought was very beautiful and it goes like this – “Water is taught by thirst…”

PAN M 360: Was this record a kind of outlet for you?

PG: I learned a lot from making this record. I’ve been making music since I was really young, but I think I was really struggling, I was accumulating one demo after another without ever feeling like it was good enough to share, so in the end, it seems a little bit absurd because a lot of my job is to help people finish their album, to go from the demo to something fine-tuned. I’ve learned through this album to find my own language and finalise something that is worth sharing. But it’s thanks to the advice and support of those close to me, Marie, Jesse, Asaël, and all the people around me who’ve been involved in this album that I’ve been able to make it happen.

Photo: Jocelyn Boulais

PAN M 360: What made you want to record a concert?

Hugo Lachance: We wanted to show our presence on social media. Initially, the goal was to record a song to put on YouTube, just to offer a performance during the pandemic. Eventually, the situation evolved and the project grew to become a one-hour show in two parts.

PAN M 360: I liked it, the editing of the images makes your performances dynamic. I have a hard time watching a TV show for 45 minutes, and I wasn’t bored!

HL: That’s the fun you’re talking about, because it was really a goal. In doing this project, I decided to use my skills as an editor and director to offer something different, even if it’s not live. The goal was to use the advantages of editing to make a slightly different show, one that offers a diversity of images. It also allowed us to integrate small interviews. I didn’t want to fall into the music video or the documentary. When the opportunity to make a video came up, we decided not to just do a one-song project. So, yes, it was important for us to offer different and diverse content, to make the show work better.

PAN M 360: It reflects the personality of WD-40.

HL: Ah, that was important! The world of Alex [Jones, bass, vocals, lyrics] had to rub off on the project. It’s fun because in 6” 1, you can see everyone’s universe. Alex’s world is always very colourful, with spots of light, and smoke. We get a little bit into our personal lives.

PAN M 360: Is “Route 170” the song you wanted to put on YouTube?

HL: During the project, I suggested to Alex and Étienne [“Jean-Loup” Lebrun, guitarist] that they do a solo song, and I told Alex that it would be cool to have a new one. Since we couldn’t rehearse and come up with something very elaborate, Alex came up with an idea that had been on his mind for a long time: to do a cover of “Route 66” by Depeche Mode, but adapted to suit WD-40. He sent me what he’d recorded, I added the drums and then the guys [Étienne and Pat Mainville, guitarist] added the guitars. “Route 170” isn’t a new official song that will end up on an album, it’s the little treat we managed to cook up during the pandemic. It sounds silly, but it’s a complex project and it wouldn’t have been possible if the guys hadn’t participated 100%.

PAN M 360: What was the hardest part to do, the part where you’re each at home, or the recording of the concert at Musicopratik? In the second case, you had to comply with the many guidelines of COVID-19.

HL: These are two completely different worlds. With 6″ 1, it was easier to have some control, because we had given ourselves a way of doing it: everyone filmed themselves with their iPhone. On the other hand, 6″ 2 was like a roll of the dice. It took a lot of organization. We stood crosswise in front of each other, we brought all the phones we had at home to film. For example, I filmed Alex with my iPhone, he filmed me with his iPad, Étienne filmed Pat and Pat filmed Jean-Loup. We put several other cameras in the corners, I even used an old VHS camera I had! Jocelyn Boulais was also there, filming with a camera on her shoulder. Alex, Étienne, and I were in charge of the cameras and Pat was responsible for the sound. Alex was also responsible for the lighting. We had to adapt on location.

PAN M 360: where was the song “Te souviens-tu Jean-Loup?” on 6” 1 shot ?

HL: In the yard at Alex’s house. He lives in Saint-Hubert and he has a big yard with chickens. Knowing him, I knew he’d like the idea. As for Pat, he’s at home, on his balcony, to add the guitar tracks. All this allows us to see the band from a more intimate angle.

PAN M 360: There are some songs in there that you haven’t played in a long time.

HL: Yes, we mostly do our own classics, but we’ve taken the liberty of revisiting songs we rarely do live on stage, like “Je veux vivre dans la forêt”, “Te souviens-tu Jean-Loup?” and “Ton corps qui brûle”.

PAN M 360: Your last album, La nuit juste après le déluge… dates from 2017, can we expect a new record?

HL: What’s coming up for WD-40 is a solo album by Étienne. The pandemic allowed him to move things forward. For WD-40, the fact that we got together to do 6″ allowed us to see that we were getting bored, and it gave us a new taste for working together because we’re able to do it and we like it. I’m not announcing anything, but maybe there will be something new for the band.

FIND OUT MORE

The attitude, the words, the tone of voice, the assurance, everything seems to work for this 27-year-old woman. What gets Marie/Chloé so fired up? A few months after her solo flight, PAN M 360 wants answers!

Her trajectory, as she tells it:

“I was born in Lasalle. I grew up in a beautiful part of what some call the Bronx of Montreal. I had a beautiful childhood. After high school, I studied arts and communications at Cégep du Vieux-Montréal. At the age of 19, I travelled by bicycle for six months in India. When I got back, I reoriented myself – I got into rap and science.”

On the frosted side, Pilon-Vaillancourt is passionate about beatmaking, electric bass, and rap. In her early twenties, she loved hip hop like her friends. It suddenly became a real commitment.

“I started listening to a lot more of it when I began doing beats. I found my footing while listening to a lot of music. I’m currently a big fan of Belgian rap, so much so that I’ve been to Brussels twice in a year to meet people. That particular scene inspired me.”

Her first group was Bad Nylon, and she’s been in different feminine configurations since 2014. For an EP by Bad Nylon, she needed a stage name.

“I was squatting on a neighbour’s internet connection and the network name was Marie Gold. Perfect for me! The first name Marie is typically French, Gold has the bling of hip hop.”

Her parents don’t really listen to hip hop but her father, Gaétan Pilon, is a sound engineer. He owned Studio Victor, and later transformed the family home into a recording and mastering studio.

“I did a lot of stuff at my father’s studio myself. He lent me some equipment and I set up a small studio at home. And I do a lot of stuff there. School during the day, the studio at night.”

Passion for rap coincides with engineering. Upon returning from her nomadic post-adolescent year, she caught up on her high school and college studies in science to eventually enroll at the École Polytechnique of l’Université de Montréal. Today she is at the end of this long process and will soon become an engineer.

“I’d still like to swing between science and rap. But rap is not a plan B! I want to go all the way.” You can understand her. If Marie Gold’s career really takes off, Chloé Pilon will have to soft-pedal the physics.

And why persist in science at all when you have a rap career?

“I gained intellectual confidence by studying at Poly,” she says. “It gives me a sense of perspective, a capacity for analysis and a capacity to question things. These values are very important. As an engineer? I don’t see myself working at Bombardier, but rather in a startup, in an NGO dedicated to the environment.

“It’s going to be a game of elbow room, but there’ll always be a presence on both sides. I’m really glad I did this! I’m always going to do rap and engineering. I’m also a big reader, I don’t have the internet at home. Either I read, or I make music, or I study, or I see my friends, that’s my circle of activities. I’m an artist trying to find a balance between her personal, artistic, and intellectual lives.”

After having reformed Bad Nylon with a new cohort of collaborators, she chose to bring Marie Gold to the forefront.

“For my first EP, I produced myself with the support of a musician. I was doing my beatmaking, I was doing my bass tracks. I’m not doing that anymore. For the album, I surrounded myself with several producers. The Parisian collective Novengitum came to Montreal for a year and contacted me on Instagram. Since then, I still collaborate with them, even if they’ve returned to the Paris region. Igor Dubois mixed the whole album, there’s Déjà Vu, Comat, Francis Leduc-Bélanger, Désir Lister, mammouth, Daysiz, Mowley, DJ Kool, 2300.wav… a lot of beatmakers on the album!”

The content is not exclusively synthetic, the MC explains.

“Several instruments have been added. For instance, I had a beat and I’d go and see Francis, who’d make arrangements with me, involving various instruments – the violin section on ‘Impatiente’, the trumpet on ‘Pousse ta luck’, the double bass on ‘J’irai cracher sur vos tombes’, the piano on ‘Doser’, Clément Langlois-Légaré’s guitar on ‘Aucun bling’, etc. – and I’d go and see Francis and he’d do the arrangements with me.”

Pop enough or pop too much? Marie Gold is looking for the ideal dosage.

“I think some songs, like ‘Impatiente’ or ‘Mémoire’, are more pop, whereas ‘La seule règle’, ‘J’irai cracher sur vos tombes’ remain within a pop structure, but are a bit less radio-friendly. I was looking for the right balance. I want to reach a wider audience on one hand, and also my own initial audience on the other.

“I don’t see myself being simple, musically, but I’m fully into my more pop songs. I also want a certain complexity. My projects must have their own personality and address a variety of themes. With me on stage are a drummer and a DJ. In addition, I am currently preparing a new EP and a mixtape.”

One can guess that big names like Lydia Képinsky and J-Kyl (Jennifer Salgado) afford her a lot of credibility, since they agreed to join her in the studio for her first album. Marie Gold wants her lyrics to be solid and poetic. “I don’t have any direct literary references,” she says. “I try to tackle a variety of themes in the same way that I explore many musical directions.”

https://youtu.be/OmVwk3ke7xc

What’s more, Pilon-Vaillancourt fully embraces the feminism underlying her approach as a hip hop artist. The fact that she has regularly involved other women in her creative projects is certainly not a forced or uptight ideological gesture, the marked presence of strong feminine voices is self-evident.

“I certainly don’t want to be a female voice on generic beats for a rapper. I want to get out there! Like Sarahmée, MCM, Naya Ali, and Meryem Saci. There’s a feminine presence in keb rap, and WordUP! battles – Tyleen, Sereni T, Coco Béliveau, and Marie Vans for instance. But still, too few women are considering a real career in keb rap.”

This critical stance in no way prevents Marie Gold from claiming her allegiance to the local scene.

“I feel totally into keb rap. I’m very proud of this movement, I’m part of it, I have a sense of belonging. Loud’s first EP, for example, was a real source of inspiration. Keb rap takes all sorts of directions, but the Quebec identity is there. It’s an extended family.”

An inspiration for the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec?

Photo: Luke Orlando

After the acclaimed EP No. 1 and months of touring, Pottery has gone from a somewhat loose band to a much more tight knit and precise unit, while remaining as capricious as ever. All the concerts the Montreal quintet have performed really made a big difference, on stage on one hand, and then in terms of compositions on the other. This great leap forward can be noticed on the band’s first full-length album, Welcome To Bobby’s Motel, released a few days ago. Over 11 (generally) groovy tracks, Paul Jacobs, Austin Boylan, Tom Gould, Peter Baylis, and Jacob Shepansky touch on funk, dance-punk, psychedelia, and post-punk, sometimes in a casual way but very often out loud, reminding us here of David Byrne and Talking Heads, there Television, sometimes XTC or Parquet Courts. Welcome to Bobby’s Motel is a bristling record, where percussion has a preponderant place. An often raucous and wild album, very much in the image of the Montreal quintet. The guitarist and sometimes singer of the band Jacob Shepansky met with us to talk about the creation of the album, its production in the company of the renowned producer Jonathan Schenke (Bodega, Public Practice and Parquet Courts, among others)… and Bobby and his motel!

PAN M 360: What are the differences, if any, between EP No. 1 and Welcome To Bobby’s Motel?

Jacob Shepansky: The difference is just that they were timestamps of two periods of us as a band. We recorded No. 1 in 2016, I believe. We were a very new band, very hungry. And we were also figuring everything out as we were going and then, by the time we made Welcome To Bobby’s Motel, we had been touring a little bit more, and I think the touring affected the record a lot in that way that we were kind of able to test some of the songs that we’d written for Bobby’s Motel. We were able to play it to crowds every night and see if people moved to it, to judge their reactions and then kind of gauge what had a better response with the audience.

PAN M 360: Do You think that the new album might be more playful than the first EP?

JP: Yeah, I’d say so! Because we recorded it in 10 days, whereas No1 was recorded in two. So we didn’t have much time to experiment on the first one, while on this one, we definitely let our freak flag fly. Spent more time poking around and experimenting.

PAN M 360: With songs like “Texas Drums Pt I II”, it seems there are more drums on the new album.

JP: Oh yes, because when we did the first record Paul (Jacobs) didn’t have enough time to do all drums he wanted to. He’s a very good drummer. He grew up playing death metal and stuff like that so yeah, he’s got a good base.

PAN M 360: Although there’s a lot of groovy stuff on the album, there are also different vibes, softer songs like “Reflection” or “Hot Like Jungle”.

JP: Those we kind of forced ourselves to write, because we didn’t want to have a record of all the same vibe, we also wanted darker and slower stuff.

PAN M 360 : How was Welcome To Bobby’s Motel conceived? And who is Bobby. and where is that motel?
JP: Well, I guess it was us trying to contextualize what we had made, we were trying to put a figure on these songs. We just fell in love with this picture of Austin and Paul’s Face Swap, and that’s what Bobby is. So we kept looking at the picture and thought it was the funniest thing ever and when we were working on an album cover, we kept coming back to that picture. It’s like Bobby is the mascot of all the songs. I don’t remember who named it Bobby, though… Maybe it was Paul because he often likes to spit out names. But I’d say the album was born out of that crazy night we spent in a cheap motel in California, all in the same crappy room with nothing to eat but raw hot-dog sausages. That affected the music a lot. Originally, we had this big plan to go hang out in the woods and then cook our meal over a campfire and drop acid, but that didn’t work out so we ended up at that cheap motel. It would have been a bad night but we managed to have a great time. We hung up by the highway, under these wires and just walked around, did drugs… it was great! So that’s where a part of the concept of Bobby’s Motel came up. This motel we were at is the closest thing to what Bobby’s Motel could be.

PAN M 360: Why did you choose to work with Jonathan Schenke?

JP: I was looking through my records, and looking at who produced the records I like, and I saw that Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold was produced by Jonathan Schenke, and thought I should check him out. And then I realized he produced a lot of interesting stuff. We had a call with him, then our manager went to meet him in New York and he was just a sweet, sweet guy. And that’s the kind of producer we wanted with us in the studio, a nice guy but a driving force we could get along with. We understood each other from day one. He understood where we were coming from, and I think we understood his intentions with all of it. There’s a fair amount of his input on the album, like some subtleties of production, but he was mostly just very good a pushing us to get our best take, or when we were going down too deep in a rabbit hole, trying to do a specific thing on a song, he would tell us to forget it and move on, keep the ball rolling. So he had a big impact there, and taught us a lot about microphone placement as well. He was everywhere. We recorded the album here in Montreal, at Breakglass studios.

PAN M 360: What did you want to achieve with Welcome To Bobby’s Motel, was there a plan or something?

JP: Hmm… No. We had these songs and we wanted to give them to the listeners. You know, when you put a song out, it’s not yours anymore. So that’s essentially all we wanted. Just give these songs away so we could keep on working. We didn’t want to be precious with these songs, just record them and get them out, just like we will do with the record we’re currently working on. We’re just trying to do the same thing, which is to create a record that encompasses a certain time in our lives.

Photo: Benoît Paillé

Like so many dedicated artists, propelled by the mechanisms inherent in pop culture, Klô Pelgag has ridden, and roughly, the inevitable whirlwind generated by the profession that welcomed her. She found it very cool at first, then less cool… to the point of disillusionment. At the bottom of the barrel. against all odds, she tried to understand the ins and outs of this negative chaos.

Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs is the culmination of this creative self-care effort, during which she made peace with the physical places in the village whose name had terrified her when she travelled with her parents between Rivière-Ouelle (where they lived) and Sainte-Anne-des-Monts (where they worked).

“Starting in 2013,” says Klô Pelgag, “I didn’t stop recording. At a certain point, it went a lot faster. I had to learn how to work with it, how to approach each thing at a speed that was too high for me. We did a lot of touring! You go to Europe, you travel with seven people in a van, you come back to Quebec to record again, you go back to France? Anyone would end up hitting a wall. I had a bit of anxiety after the tour for the first album, I told myself I was going to slow down for the tour for the second one, but that’s not what happened. I just didn’t have time to deal with it anymore.”

At the end of the second album’s cycle, the singer hit that wall and visited the symbolic hell of which Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs would speak. In real life? Klô Pelgag doesn’t hesitate to talk about depression.

“I went through an amicable break-up, that was very painful! At the relational level, I experienced other breakdowns, other wounds. You don’t want, when you do this job in life, that people envy you. People think what you do is hot. And then some of your friends get harder on you, read too much into things you’ve been through… that happened a lot! It happened while I was rushing, doing hundreds of shows, interviews, public events, galas, things that are not natural to me. All I wanted to do was make music! What I didn’t know at the beginning was that this job comes with all these media things, the impact on your personal life, the way people look at you… You’re kind of helpless in that regard.”

This is what Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs is all about: escaping from overwork, regaining one’s balance and reference points, taking one’s creative process in hand. Pelgag sums up the process as a “natural path” through which she regained her strength, and gave birth to a human being and a third album.

“I have always tried to bring my feelings and emotions into my music. My music has always been at the service of that, with healing properties. The lyrics of my songs allow me to name things, it’s also a way to heal them. This album, however, is much more frontal in its lyrics. It’s more direct, more raw, more transparent, less metaphorical, but also true and authentic.”

Leaning less to the semantic proliferation that’s become her trademark, and that some have misinterpreted, the new album puts forth a limpid evocation of its emotions, without denying earlier outbursts, for all that. Her words can’t be summarized with a superficial epithet.

“When, for example, my style is described as absurd, I get shivers of frustration. I’m talking about real emotions and real things! Calling it absurd, or other such adjectives, is reductive. Yes, I did absurd humour when I was first seen on stage – I was really shy and my defence reflex was to fool around, to make jokes. Some people saw only that, and classified my work… I understand that maybe they didn’t have time to see things more clearly.”

One of the highlights of Klô Pelgag’s still-early career was a concert for chamber orchestra, given at Montreal’s Théâtre Maisonneuve in June 2017 in the context of the Francofolies. The Orchestre du Temple Thoracique echoed the title of his second opus, L’étoile thoracique. It was the culmination of his collaboration with her brother Mathieu (Pelletier-Gagnon), a composer and arranger… and it was also a breaking point.

“Until the second album, the instrumentation was very much like what my brother had brought to my music. After that show at Théâtre Maisonneuve, there was a shift in the staff and instrumentation of my band. I found musicians with whom I had a real affinity, a new core that was going to be very influential for the third album.”

Here is that core: Étienne Dupré on bass, synthesizers and a little percussion; François Zaidan on guitars; Pete Pételle on drums; Sylvain Deschamps on co-production and various instruments. Brother Pelgag is no longer present, devoting himself to other projects, starting with his career as a composer of contemporary music.

How to explain this change in direction?

“I needed to free myself and trust myself as a musician,” says the younger sister. “I’ve always admired Mathieu, just as I admire my other older brother, who is currently doing a post-doctorate on the impact of video games on Japanese youth. When I was working with Mathieu, it is important to remember that I was co-arranging and composing with him. My brother would use my ideas, melodic or harmonic, but I didn’t have the confidence to carry them on my own.”

This is one of the fundamental differences between this album and the two others by Klô Pelgag: the total reclaiming of one’s potential, the consolidation of the ego.

“I kicked myself in the arse to break my fear of composition, technique, and software. I started creating compositions on the computer, organising several voices, better understanding polyphony. Sylvain helped me to put that down on paper, the cellist Marianne Houle, who also plays keyboards and sings very well, also helped me with that.

“I co-produced everything with Sylvain, I arranged all the instruments, except for three songs where I called on Owen Pallett – ‘Soleil’, ‘J’aurai les cheveux longs’, ‘À l’ombre des cyprès’. I took the risk to contact him, he was super busy but he accepted, and we corresponded by email. I wanted to recruit someone who’s a little inaccessible, whom I admire a lot, and who’s from outside the French-speaking Quebec milieu.”

Born from a desire for simplicity and a return to balance, the project gradually became more complex.

“At the beginning, I was in reaction to the whirlwind I wanted to get out of. My intention was to do something lighter. Then I realised that I wanted to explode, to really go somewhere else in terms of composition, to do things I’d never done before, to get rid of my fears as a musician.”

Pelgag subscribes to the notion of systemic sexism in the world of music.

“The group Femmes en musique encouraged me to trust myself musically. It’s sneaky and unconscious, but you often get the impression that we women need someone else to achieve what we want to achieve. I’ve been composing and co-producing my songs since I started out, but I had the reflex of putting my male colleagues forward and giving them all the credit. I grew up listening to women performers, but I grew up listening to a lot fewer women guitarists, composers, and producers… That’s what shapes your imagination. I had to take responsibility for my musical side, my ability to do things and evolve. I love myself more, I hate myself less.”

Having left Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs for good, Klô Pelgag hurtles full throttle towards Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption, “free like violence”.

At the age of 36 and a father of two children, Emmanuel Lajoie-Blouin may not have the freedom of earlier days, but he says he uses his responsibilities as an anchor in his projects. “My approach hasn’t changed,” the Quebec City MC explains. “I just have less time. I spend a lot of time with my family. Afterwards, it’s a source of motivation too, to do something more organized. It hasn’t changed the art as such, but I may have less time for research and development. It has to be effective, when I go into the studio.”

On June 26, he launches 1036, an album almost entirely produced one year before the beginning of the collective confinement caused by COVID-19. “During the pandemic, I had time. I was thinking about going on tour with Alaclair, but I had time to do some mixing and arranging. That’s the positive side of it,” he says.

Although he enjoys brainstorming sessions with his colleagues from Alaclair Ensemble, the conception of a solo album has brought Eman something different as an artist. “I had more time to ask myself questions instead of doing more spontaneous stuff. I developed the making of the album more, the creation of the music. The step back is just different.”

The album is partly a tribute to his roots in the rap industry. “1036 is a civic address in Quebec City. That’s where it all began, in our musical careers, in the days of Accrophone. Twenty years ago, like, we built a studio there, it was a meeting point for a lot of Quebec City rappers,” Eman recalls.

While the first 12 tracks on the album were produced by Eman, it was his lifelong colleague, Claude Bégin, who took care of the mixing, mastering, some of the arrangements, and the production of the thirteenth and final track.

“When we made the album with Claude, we were witnessing the end of an era, which is over because we have more responsibilities. It was to bring this episode to a close. We don’t have a roommates’ life any more, more like an old man’s life, thinking about his mortgage,” Eman self-mockingly philosophizes. Bégin, described by Eman as his “musical brother”, has accompanied him since his beginnings in the business, whether with Accrophone, Movèzerbe, Alaclair Ensemble, or on tour with Karim Ouellet.

Although retrospective moments abound on 1036, Eman doesn’t see nostalgia as a guideline for this project, but rather autonomy. “I’m here in my life now, trusting myself with this, mixing and recording. I’m very proud of this project because I practically did it on my own. It’s a milestone in my life. Producing the whole album and doing the cover is a bit of a control-freak trip,” he concludes with a smile.

Indeed, the cover is a self-portrait painted by him, but he plans to get it out of the studio soon. “I don’t really like to see my face all the time,” he jokes.

Beyond the conceptualization of the album and the cover, Eman wanted to produce a more organic sound than before, limiting his use of sampling. “I’m proud of that – I did some acoustic drum takes, I played bass and guitar,” he says. “It’s something I’m exploring more and more, getting out of the rap context,” he says, adding that he draws inspiration from the San Francisco and Oakland scenes in his productions. From a local point of view, he argues that certain pillars of keb rap, such as Muzion, Dubmatique, and Sans Pression, forged his musical identity.

Although the end result is a consequence of his hard solo work, Eman invited several collaborators on board for 1036, including Lary Kidd, Obia le Chef, and Sarahmée. Although it’s very rare to see Quebec hip hop artists invite women to rap on a track, Eman assures that the latter’s presence is in no way premeditated. “There’s nothing gendered about it, I love what she does and we’ve known each other for 15 years. The image, afterwards, I find it beautiful. The image of the black woman with the white man, there’s something strong, a message of love. In 2020, we need that image,” he says.

Although he throws a few bricks at his fellow rappers and the music industry in Quebec on 1036, he argues that he does so with a touch of sarcasm. “It’s more like the gears of the music economy, shady producers who take everything for themselves. I don’t have much to reproach the other rappers, they motivate me. It’s really more for bragging, rap is a sport. In 2020, more than ever, we have to work together as a team. I’m calling for a rally. The term is funny during the pandemic, though,” the rapper says ironically.

Claiming that he’s “running out of space for his Felixes” on the song “Pression”, Eman implies that he’s already accomplished everything he hoped for, professionally. On the contrary. “I’ve got lots of ideas. Now I’m more independent than ever, in terms of recording and producing. But I still have a lot to learn. I’m extremely hungry to make more music.”

LBDA’s 1999 album, Right Back, provided for most an adequate coda to the sad fortunes of a band who lost their enigmatic frontman, Bradley Nowell, to a heroin overdose shortly before soon-to-be legions of obsessive fans outside their SoCal stomping grounds would first hear of Sublime.

But music lovers who paid enough attention to become enamoured with LBDA in their own right have long lamented the group’s retreat into relative obscurity after their 2001 studio sophomore, Wonders of the World, dropped on the unfortunate date of September 11, 2001. The band imploded shortly thereafter due to a mix of personality clashes, substance issues, and the general downpressing of those strange, early-aught end-times vibes.

LBDA frontman Opie Ortiz – whose prior claims to fame were designing the ubiquitous Sublime sun logo as a tattoo for Nowell, and later being the toothless weirdo on the cover of Robbin’ The Hood – and his friends, ex-friends and bandmates would go on to form and disform myriad offspring projects, such as Hepcat collab group Dubcat, and Long Beach Shortbus, with the prospect of an LBDA reunion seeming increasingly less likely as decades passed.

The story between years gone by and today is too fraught to get into. The good news is simply that LBDA are back with a self-titled third outing that knocks, blending breezy roots reggae and subdued ska that doesn’t dwell in its own past. Names like Miguel Happoldt, Jack Manness, Marshall Goodman, and Tim Wu (familiar to many either from Sublime album credits or as LBDA personnel) are back, alongside vocalist/composer Ortiz.

And while dearly departed brothers Ikey and Aaron Owens may be better known for work with Jack White and Hepcat, respectively, they called LBDA family, and their deaths, as Ortiz explains, is where the story of Long Beach Dub Allstars, which dropped May 29, began.

PAN M 360: So I’ll start with a simple question and build from there. Why now, after all these years?

Opie Ortiz: I think it came as we were kinda doing baby recordings here and there. Me and Miguel would kinda work on tracks. Miguel would be consistently recording different people for different tracks. We were just kind of hammering away at little things. We wanted to actually just start putting out music, so me and Miguel and Marshall agreed to put out some songs.

We were working with Aaron and Ikey Owens. They were an integral part of Long Beach Dub Allstars and Dubcat, another recording venture that we did, and they passed very closely apart during that time, around the 25th anniversary of Skunk Records.

We had been working on tracks together and to be honest, I wanted to be sure that those tracks were used for the LBDA project, because that’s what we had all given our time to, you know?

That being said, with their passing, it was kind of like a push to finish the tracks and get them done. We had five tracks we had been working on, and there were others on the table that weren’t finished enough. We were also just kinda playing some live shows, that also pushed us. We played some festivals and that was the beginning of getting back out there.

Aaron Owens actually wrote the guitar lick [for memorial album track “Owens Brothers”] and had actually addressed it to me like, ‘Look, this one’s for you.’ I believe I sat on it for a while. And then I just started writing about them in the song and it just sort of happened.

PAN M 360: There’s a certain sense of what sounds like nostalgia on this record, combined with a greater feeling of coming into its own, compared to the earlier LBDA projects.

OO: If you listen to the song “Breakfast Toast”, that’s like, one night that happened, you know what I mean? Just taking in some of the stuff going on around, funny little things, and that’s my analogy. Some might say that time’s wasted but when you’re there in the moment, nothing is wasted. Everything’s great. So you’re toasting to really just doing nothing and partying in that moment. (laughs)

“All Gone Crazy” is like, how your chick just drives you crazy in some sense and you kinda have to… not necessarily put her in check, but like, as I say, ‘do you know what time it is?’ Funny little reminders that me and my chick have.

I was working on it for a while, and she started humming another song to it. I was like, ‘what are you doing? You’re gonna ruin me!’ She brought it to my attention that it reminded her of another song from this band called Dry & Heavy. So I ended up putting an interpolation of that in “Gone Crazy,” and it just sort of happened. I wasn’t forcing it but it just took form like that. So she kinda helps me. She helped me with “Owens Brothers”. My daughter helped me, too, ‘you should use this word instead of that word,’ that type of thing. Little nuances.

PAN M 360: Are your kids aware of the legacy of your band? Or to that end, do they care?

OO: Yeah, they’re very aware. My front room is an homage to music and I have the Sublime plaques up there. And I have a lot of pictures of Brad, and everybody from all the scenes. So they’re pretty aware of who’s who and why we’re doing what we’re doing. They were laughing like, ‘how come you haven’t put out any music in so long, dad?’ Well, I was kinda raising you guys, you know?

PAN M 360: I’m an old-school Sublime devotee and a huge fan of the first two LBDA records, and it was exciting at that time to get to see and hear your band spin things off and keep going. That said, the new record really stands on its own to capture where LBDA seemed to be headed, back then. How did creative decisions made now lead to bridging that gap?

OO: I think it’s a mix of the fact that we had some songs written and ready to go, and others that we were gonna approach the old Dub Allstars way where, say, I had the chorus, and we asked Moises from Tomorrow’s Bad Seeds, Jack and Tim, and they just kinda pieced together “Easy” in one night. That’s the old LBDA format, where there’s four or five dudes in a room and we just brainstorm, and go, and write.

That’s how [Wonders of the World track] “Lonely End” was born, and a lot of those Dub Allstars songs, that was our formula. This time, we did our homework before, had the songs all ready to go, and then decided who (could help). It was a pretty quick process.

PAN M 360: The first record came out at the end of ’99, when everyone was all paranoid. And the second one came out on 9/11. And now this album is coming out in the middle of a global pandemic and a social revolution. Any reflections on that?

OO: I try not to pay attention. Do you think that Picasso or Salvador Dali cared, when they were debuting their art, if anything was going on in the outside world? (laughs) Probably, to them, they were like, ‘this is the happening. This is the awareness.’

Of course, I mean, you have to be aware, to some extent. And on September 11th, yeah, we did get pretty stifled by that whole deal. This one was gonna drop April 17 and [the band’s management] decided to hold off because I think we knew that shit was gonna get weird. I think this music is more needed now. It’s kind of helping people out, in a sense. [In 2001] we were all so distraught by the news that I don’t even think we were listening to music. But if you think back, Wonders has some of our best work on there.

It’s funny to think back, but now when I look at this one, I feel more accomplished, and the album tells a good story, I feel. Even if it’s just a little reggae and a little ska, it feels right.

Photo: Yann Orhan

Diana Krall, Stacey Kent, Iggy Pop, Jeff Goldblum, and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top are among the artists who agreed to join Thomas Dutronc in revisiting some of the greats of French chanson, numbers by Piaf, Trenet, and Claude François – in their international version, in English. All of this is enhanced by a cool, jazzy, and most sophisticated musical showcase, produced by the excellent Jay Newland (Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, Juliette Gréco). And this, thanks indirectly to a certain… Donald Trump!

“We were looking for a project that would allow us to travel a little bit with our music in non-French-speaking countries. And we thought of this idea around the time of Trump’s French-bashing. We said to ourselves that France is nonetheless a gentle way of life, a sense of humour, beautiful songs, wine and cheese… At first, I wasn’t necessarily enthusiastic about the idea of covering songs that exist in sublime, historical versions,” Dutronc explains, insisting that if it was a question of just doing covers, even with very good musicians, it would have been banal. So it had to be only the finest flowers from the Hexagonal garden. The only way, according to him, to reach a state of grace.

Triptych?

When it came to choosing the songs for the conceptual album Frenchy, did he toy with the idea of drawing on the discographies of his father (Jacques Dutronc) or mother (Françoise Hardy), neither of which lack for classics, or did modesty prevent him from doing so?

“I would have liked to, but they don’t have any songs that have gone round the world. It’s the same for Gainsbourg, he doesn’t have any internationally famous songs. We could do a second volume, by the way, because we weren’t able to record everything. We haven’t even touched on songs by Aznavour, Trenet or Michel Legrand… We could even make a third album with songs that would have deserved to be known around the world, like ‘Syracuse’, composed by Henri Salvador, Gainsbourg’s ‘La Javanaise’, and Brassens – none of them are well known abroad – and yes, of course, some of my parents’ songs,” says Dutronc fils in a very sympathetic tone from Paris, where he’s on a promotional tour before returning to Corsica to meet up with the legendary creator of “Cactus” and “Playboys”.

Diana and the Iguana

The discussion then forks to great covers of songs throughout history and, although it’s a toss-up in terms of tastes, there is agreement that some Johnny Cash covers surpass their original versions. “My father called him le Taureau [the Bull], I don’t know why…”

Speaking of animals, let’s talk about the iguana – Iggy Pop. “He was approached through his European tour agency, to tell him about the project. He loves France and our musical culture, the 1950s and 1960s, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Gréco. He has often covered French songs, such as ‘Les Feuilles mortes’. So he agreed, and told us, ‘Diana Krall wants to do something with me. If we all did that together, do you think Thomas would accept?’ Ahahahaha! We were too happy. I thought it was great. He is both very professional and very simple in his superstar role. Awesome!” So says Thomas, who adds that he improvised a song with Iggy that could never be released due to its surfeit of dirty words!

Possible tour

It’s easy to imagine that Dutronc’s pedigree also facilitated matters with Mr. Pop. “Yes, he’d met my father a long time ago, he’s familiar with Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin songs, and my parents’ songs. It’s nice, there are people like that who are big fans of my father, like Johnny Depp. And Leonardo DiCaprio, on the other hand, is a big fan of Django Reinhard. We’d organised a gypsy jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, and he came…” Dutronc is still astonished, regretting not being able to sing on stage with the legendary Iggy Pop, as planned, because of the coronavirus.

As for an eventual tour, it will take place with the same gang of French musicians, to bottle lightning a second time, and yes, Quebec and the United States are in the battle plan.

In conclusion, asked if his father had finally passed along his famous piège à fille (girl trap), as he had told a French TV journalist when Thomas was just born? “Ahahahahaha! We’ll leave that to the imagination. But yes, it works, joujou extra…”

Photo: Ariana Molly

PAN M 360: What were the main steps forward on this new album?

Raphaelle Standell-Preston: We definitely wanted to attempt to capture the live energy that we have on stage. A lot of our previous records were built bit by bit, like narrowing in on things, almost squeezing the life out of things to get it to be perfect. This time, a lot of the captures were done with all the instruments, drums, vocals, bass, or synths at the same time, so we could get that palpable, visceral energy that is so pronounced in our live performances. And yeah we accomplished that.

PAN M 360: Things took a major turn when you brought in Chris Walla [guitarist, producer and former member of Death Cab for Cutie] to produce the record.

RSP: Chris became a dear friend of ours and was involved in our last record. When we started working with him, we thought the songs were done. And… he said we needed to throw a lot more stuff on them and develop them. He said our songs were very live, but not done. He really pushed us to see how lush and wide the songs could be, while still capturing the live energy.

PAN M 360: Isn’t the quest for more succinct works a sign of maturity?

RSP: Yes absolutely. We’re adults ! Fully formed! Yup, we both just turned 30 in the wintertime. I personally had a thirties midlife crisis meltdown. But we’re easing into it! Getting more precise. It’s something we strove for, to have more potency in our songwriting. I think previously, we felt we’d been a bit long-winded with things. With these songs, we wanted to create a nice, compact package of balanced emotion and balanced energy, and really tried to flex and challenge ourselves as songwriters. I think that’s part of why the record took so long.

PAN M 360: How has this change of course taken place over time?

Taylor Smith: There was an intense need for our music to be unlike something we’d heard before, with a strong emphasis on creating sort of an otherworldly feel. We were mostly using guitars back then, the idea was that if you could no longer recognize it as a guitar then it was a success! We were trying to wrangle songs out of experimental texture or sonic exploration. With this record, we wanted to write really good songs that existed no matter whether you dressed them up on a myriad of different instruments – piano, guitars, synths, drum machines, etc. Instead of songs being placed on top of experimentation, experimentation being placed as decoration on top of songs. Or, if someone wanted to cover it, that could actually be possible, because there is a song in there. Our relationship with that is always in flux as we grow as musicians, even now I see us having finished this record and learning back into more experimental pastures, but time will tell where this leads us to.

PAN M 360: As for the lyrics, is there a thematic direction?

RSP: There was a very conscious effort to have songs conclude hopefully, and for there to be hope in the lyrics. I’ve always been comfortable exploring human struggle and my own struggles, but with this record I wanted to put the listener hanging over the cliff, and wanted them to be put on solid ground, and in turn, put myself on solid ground. Writing the lyrics was very healing for me, very therapeutic, I wanted to have feelings for other people, being very vulnerable and very honest. I wanted to find healing and hopefulness through these songs. One of the inspirations for me was the poet Mary Oliver. I really got into her observations on relating human nature to real nature. So evocative for me.

Yeah, there’s actually moments on the record said from my perspective, but there are observations on friends’ relationships going through turmoil. Even though I’m talking about my own experience, it felt really important to me to widen my interpretation and presentation. I wanted to be very thoughtful with how I conveyed certain feelings or issues, such that the audience could truly relate to the lyrics, and see themselves in them.

PAN M 360: To make such a shift towards songwriting concision possible, what exploration have you conducted?
TS: The records that we reach for and listen to went through a phase in which we were reaching for really classic music – Joni Mitchell, CSNY, etc. – and seeing what our world looks like through that lens. But it doesn’t matter, at the end of the day. All the matters is how the music makes you feel. Sound is sound, whether you’re making it with traditional instruments or not.

RSP: Specifically for me as a vocalist, I was very drawn to big, beautiful voices, big singing, Freddie Mercury, Whitney Houston, Adele, Alanis Morrisette, big, belting vocals. I was also obsessively listening to the record Blond from Frank Ocean. I really wanted to learn to do this, and it felt so fine, physically, to do this.

PAN M 360: Was the album completed during the pandemic?

RSP: The album’s been done since October 31, 2018, so it’s been a while. Since then, we made a lot of music videos, and put a lot of work into the visual presentation of the album, and have been working very, very hard on a live set – and then COVID happened and everything got cancelled. Which has been a difficult blow, but we’re making the most of it, trying to continue experimenting and growing as artists. That’s exactly what we’re starting to do right now, working on new material, experimenting. I think we have five or six songs we’re working on right now. Blue Hawaii, my other band? I’m finishing a Blue Hawaii record right now. I was finishing the latest mixes last night, having so much fun, it’s going to be a really uplifting record.

PAN M 360: Do you feel that the long process has brought you to a successful conclusion?

TS: I think this record marks a big change for us as people in growing up, so to speak, and part of that represents a culmination of influences across our entire musical career. For me, it’s a notable summit of inspiration and development since we first started. This record was just as inspired by Animal Collective as the first one, even if you can’t hear it, it’s part of it. This is record number four for us, there are so many layers of inspiration over the years that culminate in the moment, after making 10 years of music.

This record very much feels like home – where all the skills and development and inspiration across our career have been pointing to. It’s not us trying to step out and do something entirely brand new, it’s rather a narrowing in, a focusing in, a chiseling of the group’s identity. Braids is an intimately personal project, and it’s very honest – what we are putting out as our music is a very close reflection as who we are as people, and it’s very close to our own identities, we place a lot of personal sense of self into the music. That’s been the case since we first started; it’s been a consistent through-line throughout the entire project.

Photos: 張實伶

From its Paleolithic and Gaoshan inhabitants, through successive waves of immigration and colonization, Taiwan has many layers of history, some of it rather dark. The small but vitally located island country is also incredibly complex in terms of its political status – and sacred beliefs.

A visit to the famous Longshan Temple, in the capital city Taipei, reveals something like a shopping-mall food court for divine blessings, to be sought from an assortment of Buddhist, Taoist, and folk deities.

It’s not surprising then that Taiwan has such rich folklore – especially the vengeful ghosts! – and so much room for outré perspectives.

There’s plenty of all that to be savoured on Mong Tong’s Mystery, released on Guruguru Brain, the label for Asian underground music run by Japan’s Kikagaku Moyo. Mong Tong is, more precisely, the brothers Hom Yu and Jiun Chi (who answer here mostly as a pair, due to linguistic challenges, or maybe some frightful fraternal psychic link… who knows?).

“The voice in ‘Chakra’ was sampled from a famous reporter talking about aliens and chakras in Hinduism,” Mong Tong say of the album’s first single. “So basically, this is a song for those who love alien TV shows and conspiracy theories!”

There are further dusty, uncanny wonders lurking in the grooves of Mystery, such as the elements that make up the second single, “Jou-tau”.

“In the beginning, we sampled the voiceover from the Monkey King movie,” Mong Tong explain, referring to the 1999 Taiwanese production Heavenly Legend, one of countless film, TV, and comic-book tales of the superstar simian demigod Sun Wukong. “The song is basically Chi’s organ riffs, plus guitar improvisation, plus Yu’s funky bassline, all put together.”

Then there’s “A Nambra”, which suggests that’s somewhere on one of the many levels of Diyu, or Chinese hell, there’s a decent dancefloor.

“‘A Nambra’ is our disco-funk hit! Funky ’70s basslines are our favourite, so we were making our version of disco-funk. We brought the synth leads into the funky song, to see what would happen.”

“In the K. Court”, meanwhile, subtly suggests a certain ’70s prog-rock reference, the mention of which delights Mong Tong.

“Glad someone finally found the King Crimson reference! In our live shows, we always combine this song with ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, and surprise the audience – totally worth it.”

*A selection of book covers from Hom Yu’s Instagram page*

Back to the crazy conspiracy-culture stuff, and Mong Tong’s celebration of it specifically as they existed before the Internet, when lurid paperbacks, dubious magazines, and printed propaganda by mail were the primary platform. With all that, it has to be said, came an incredible visual aesthetic, entirely unmatched by the graphic mediocrity of today’s dabblers in the delusional. Taiwan, for its part, had no shortage of such fringe beliefs in their heyday.

“In ’80 and ’90s Taiwan, there were magazines that talked about ghosts, Taoism, and UFOs, and had supernatural photos. After decades, these themes are no longer popular. Most of these books are lost, and can only be found at a few second-hand bookstores. We’ve spent much time searching them out, and chose some of our favourite book covers, then put them on Hom’s Instagram.”

The cover of Mystery is a salute to that scene, and itself a sort of puzzle, a secret coded message to decipher. Pressed to provide any hint or clues, the brothers offer only this cryptic morsel. “There’s a conspiracy theory called Q33 NY, that’s all we can tell!”

Last fall, just a few months prior to the powerhouse Mystery, Mong Tong released an EP and book called Music From Taiwan Mystery – a sort of tourist’s guidebook to Taiwan’s rich reservoir of occult weirdness. There was even an amazing video for it (see above), bursting with black magic rituals and supernatural kung fu. Obviously, Mong Tong’s music is more than well suited to visual interpretation (see below, now, for the video for “717”).

“We’d love to experiment on any kind of artform! Basically, we do everything by ourselves, so we’re able to put Taiwanese elements we love into our music, videos, cover artwork, etc. Now we’re planning to release a second Taiwan Mystery, an EP for plants, and maybe in the future, we’ll make a video game – everything is possible.”

Mong Tong is just one of several arcane activities the brothers are involved in. They’re more than happy to talk about those, as well as the larger Taiwanese underground scene they’re so involved in.

“Dope Purple is a noise and psychedelic rock band,” says Jiun of one of his other projects, “mainly influenced by Acid Mothers Temple and Les Rallizes Dénudés. We’ve released a record on Senko Issha, a label for noise music and free improvisation lovers in Taiwan. Mong Tong has collaborated with labels like Future Proof and Karma Detonation Tapes. Both of them have great artists and release good-quality cassettes.”

“I play guitar and synthesizer in Prairie WWWW, an amazing experimental psych-rock band,” says Hom. “You should definitely check our latest album, Pán (yes, the same name as PAN M 360!). There are artists under the Lonely God label, including Scattered Purgatory, FORESTS, and Prairie WWWW, all making experimental rock and electronic music you will definitely love!”