Interviews – Page 78

Global pandemic, extreme divisions within the anxious Western populations, troubling American presidential elections, we’re going through some of the best ones. We have to be aware that this distressing climate distracts us from the regional tragedies experienced on this small planet…

Take for instance the very violent aggression against the Armenian residents of an autonomous but landlocked region of dictatorial Azerbaijan, whose expansionism is being revived by its Turkish ally. This Armenian enclave is named Artsakh, officially the Republic of Artsakh or Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. For decades, this territory has been the object of significant tensions, which have been at their highest since the end of September.

One thing is certain, Tigran Hamasyan is very concerned. Certainly the most famous Armenian musician of his generation, the supervirtuoso pianist laments this new ordeal experienced by his people, once again a victim of the powers of the region who are vying for territorial influence – Turkey, Russia, Iran.

Is there any need to recall the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire of which the Armenians were once victims?

Because Hamasyan is augmenting the supportive actions for which this Facebook page has raised more than a million US dollars, since he launched a video in homage to the martyred couples who fought the Ottoman army in the previous century, PAN M 360 contacted the musician at his Californian home to ask him to express himself on the issue.

“On September 27, this region was attacked pretty much on its entire border by our neighbours from Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey as well – even though Turkey is denying it, but there is so much evidence of it. Thousands of mercenaries from the region have been hired to fight in the border attack. The fact they brought terrorists to the region, creating a lot of hostility, it becomes very fragile in the south Caucasus. Last Tuesday was the heaviest attack since the war began. Even though Russia invited the foreign-affairs ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan to cease fire for humanitarian purposes, this agreement was violated five minutes after the time it was supposed to start. It is ironic that Azerbaijan says little or nothing about its deaths, which somehow confirms the hiring of Syrian mercenaries. Tens of thousands of people are displaced, at least 600 Armenian men have been killed in combat so far, especially last Tuesday. It is ironic that Azerbaijan says little or nothing about its deaths, which somehow confirms the hiring of Syrian mercenaries.”

Hamasyan felt the call of the country where he was born and raised until his early teens, when his family moved to California and he was able to pursue higher education there, and launch his international career. A few years ago, he moved back to Yerevan to take care of his grandmother and also to recharge his cultural batteries. His identity was revived and, in the current context, he’s very eager to man the barricades.

He sees this violent aggression against Artsakh as an imperialist operation by Turkey, eager to seal its influence in the Turkish-speaking countries of the region, starting with Azerbaijan.

“For a century, Turkey wanted to connect Azerbaijan to its land, so it would have more control of the area. And… ethnically, Turks and Azeris are the same people. Armenia is only a little country around there, its population is the indigenous people of the region. Armenian and other peoples have suffered for a long time at the hands of the Turks and the Ottoman empire -Assyrian, Greek, Kurdish, Lezgins.

” When the Soviet revolution happened, Stalin gave the region to the people actually living in Azerbaijan, they were called the Turks of the Caucasus. Azerbaijan as a nation did not exist – it was made by the Soviets. The real historic Atropatene (which existed long before Turkic tribes came to the area) is today located in Iran. Artsakh has been populated by ethnic Armenian for thousands of years. Even if you did a genetics analysis you would see that. Then Azeris started populating the region more and more. At some point, during the Soviet era in ’88, the whole thing erupted, Armenians started speaking out and did protests. In fact, the Soviet Union and Azerbaijan were slowly getting rid of Armenians. There were no Armenian schools there, no Christian churches were allowed, Armenian identity was going to be eradicated and at some point, Azerbaijani government had a plan to divide/merge Karabagh into 4 different regions of Azerbaijan thus killing any identity of Armenians. So the Armenian community of Nagorno-Karabakh demanded to be part of Armenia, and this created a big conflict. Azerbaijan responded very violently and started killing Armenian people in Azerbaijan. So it’s sad the way the international media are treating this conflict today.”

Like most Armenians aware of the conflict, Hamasyan disapproves of the Turkish government’s game of influence in its support for Azerbaijan, he also laments the cautious support of countries that should be its unwavering allies.

“Unfortunately, not enough nations openly support Armenia in the resurgence of these attacks against our people. Turkey’s participation in NATO, fossil-fuel money, and other geopolitical factors also cloud the issue. Meanwhile, Turkish President Erdogan wants to become the sultan of the Ottoman Empire that fell at the beginning of the previous century. ”

And what does the world have to say about this outbreak of violence? Hamasyan is astonished and disappointed at the media’s reading of the explosive situation in the Artsakh.

“Many international media are talking about the conflict, they’re often saying that the conflict has flared, which is really not the case. They are looking at Azerbaijan and Armenia as equals, which it’s clearly not the case. It’s sad, because it’s always been the agenda to clean the region of Armenians. When the Soviet revolution happened, Stalin gave the region to the people actually living in Azerbaijan, they were called the Turks of the Caucasus. They were living in the Iranian areas, but for thousands of years, there were Armenians living around there, they are indigenous to that territory.”

Hamasyan is well aware that the balance of power is clearly against the Armenian people, at least in the short term. Nevertheless…

“Times are tough, very hard times. Too many people have already died and this is not a fair fight. My country is not armed as Azerbaijan is armed, and supported by Turkey. So it is a completely unfair fight, but you know, Armenians survived this region when it was reduced to a very small country. I can’t say what the chances of victory are on our side, but I can say without hesitation that there is no chance for Armenians to leave the region. There is no way! Roughly speaking, everyone is willing to die to keep this land. Everywhere in Armenia and in the diaspora, we see lines of volunteers ready to fight. Even in his sixties, my own father applied!”

In 2013, Hamasyan returned to Armenia, spent more and more time there and finally settled there permanently. In 2019, he returned to live temporarily in California with his small family, where he is today – more or less against his will.

“I’ve been stuck there since COVID, but I hope to return to Armenia very soon. Of course I keep playing, I’m always creating music, this process doesn’t stop. There are so many projects that I am involved in, traditional Armenian music is still an important part of my musical language even if not all my projects are of Armenian influence.”

Just a few weeks ago, the prestigious Nonesuch label launched a new opus by Hamasyan, The Call Within, recorded by the pianist alongside bassist Evan Marien and drummer Arthur Hnatek, not to mention a contribution from the Children’s Choir of the Varduhi Art School, and another by guitarist Tosin Abasi.

“I wrote this music to be played by a jazz trio. However, some compositions are done with synthesizers and guests. I would say that the prominent influence of this album is rock – math rock, prog rock, metal.”

And how does Hamasyan intend to fight during this bloody conflict between Artsakh and Azerbaijan? With his music, as you can imagine.

“I’m already doing it with whatever I have. For example, we raised some funds to help out families, completely devastated by death or destruction of their houses. One first fundraising is almost completed, we raised close to a million dollars, and a second fundraising cycle is about to happen. My friends, musicians and artists, will help.”

In this case, music isn’t meant to loosen morals…

Photos: William Arcand

As a journalist, I first met CRi in 2016 when he had just graduated from a digital music major at Université de Montréal. Associated with artists such as Robert Robert and Ryan Playground (now TDJ), Christophe Dubé was a Montreal producer to watch. Four years and a meteoric rise later, the daring artist is releasing his first album this weekend, Juvenile, with contributions from Sophia Bel, Jesse Mac Cormack, and Daniel Bélanger. What happened in such a short time?

PAN M 360: Let’s go back to our last meeting. If you had to choose one word and one event that marked your career for each year, it would be?

CRi: I would say that 2017 is research, both individual and artistic. I’ve accumulated more instruments, I’ve taken piano lessons. 2018 is the break. I was in a couple with Ouri, she was my first collaborator, we grew up together musically, then we left each other. This separation allowed me to find myself again in 2019. I would say it was a revelation: who am I as an artist, and what do I want to do? Through that, there were events like releasing an EP with Anjunadeep, starting to play a little bit everywhere… And there was the song “Fous n’importe partout” by Daniel Bélanger, which I covered with Charlotte Cardin. It was a pretty intense change in my way of being, of approaching things. 2020 is the album. It represents a new era for me. I’ve acquired a certain maturity, the long format has forced me to ask myself questions and confront myself, with my art. I come out of it stronger.

PAN M 360: Do you still consider yourself part of the new Montreal electronic scene? What can you tell me about your musical environment?

CRi: The electronic scene itself is very diverse, but it is quite hermetic through its different styles. I think it’s a shame that the techno, house and trap scenes each operate in a vacuum. It would be cool if the scenes were to rub shoulders more, if they were more connected. My gang is musical but not necessarily just electronic, we’re more into indie. Sophia Bel, Jesse Mac Cormack, they’re people who not only perform on stage with me, but they’re also friends with whom I spend time and with whom I make a lot of music. We don’t necessarily share the same styles, but what touches us all is perhaps this kind of northern melancholy in Montreal.

PAN M 360: Why did you choose the electro-indie-pop angle?

CRi: Through this album, which is, in a totally aware way, more pop, more dance, my approach is to democratise electronic music and take it out of the underground. It’s cool and necessary, the underground, but it’s also important that it becomes more accessible. There are people from outside the big cities who don’t necessarily have access to this scene, there’s no bridge between the two. If it’s something I manage to do, it could highlight artists who are a bit more underground. People would be more interested, a bit like what’s happened in hip-hop in recent years in Quebec. Loud, for example, confirmed the popular success of the genre, of hip-hop culture. Following that, it’s an ambition – I’m not at all comparing myself to Loud, but it’s a bit of an approach in the sense that I find that the scene is too closed in on itself. When you see the success of Piknic Electronik or Igloofest, you know there’s an audience and potential, there’s just a missing link between the scenes.

PAN M 360: The visual identity of your project is particularly eye-catching and neat, what’s behind it?

CRi: I was lucky enough to work with Will Arcand for the photos. My visual universe really got a boost because I had the time to work on it in confinement. It was important to have something punchy, with colours like blue and orange, especially as my music is colourful. We focused on the blur because in my way of making music, even if it’s controlled, the arrangements can get out of hand, you don’t really know what’s what anymore. The face in the water is like looking in the past because you are born in the water.

PAN M 360: You signed to Anjunadeep, a particularly well-known English label. The European electronic scene seems less hermetic than here, and audiences are perhaps more receptive to your style of music. What do you think?

CRi: Yes, I agree. I believe that in Europe, there’s a much more thorough education of this style of music. Burial can play in a shoe shop, it’s part of people’s everyday life, Mr. and Mrs. Everyman listen to electro. Signing with Anjunadeep is a good way to get out of Quebec, without emancipating myself, because it’s important for me to represent my scene.

PAN M 360: You have been able to do some dates in Europe, particularly in Great Britain, what was that like?

CRi: As Quebecers, the French always call us cousins. Yes, I feel that way when I go to France, but I have the impression that we Quebecers are more like British people who speak French. Culturally, there is a closeness that comes through architecture, through food. When I had the chance to play at Printworks in London, there were 7,000 people, it was a complete meltdown. It’s a bit like Piknic, Igloofest, but that was really something. It seemed like the audience already knew the tunes before they heard them.

Montreal can count on beautiful voices from West Africa. Ilam’s voice is among those that generate the most impact with the Afropop-prone audience. In the context of the necessarily virtual Nuits d’Afrique, the singer’s show is at Le National, as scheduled before the restrictive measures excluding the public from the concert halls. A webcast will compensate as will this conversation with PAN M 360.

PAN M 360: What has your journey been? Where exactly did you grow up? Who trained you as a singer and musician? How did you come to Montreal?

Ilam: I grew up in Dakar, Senegal. I’m of Fulani origin, my parents come from the north of the country. Pulaar is my mother tongue, it’s very important to me. Of course, I learned Wolof, the most common language in Dakar. So I mix Pulaar and Wolof in my songs, just like French. I started my musical career with a hip-hop group. At the same time, I was studying at the Conservatory of Music at the l’École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, where I was perfecting my vocal technique with Professor Adolphe Coly, who is not a traditional singer but rather has a Western classical background. In Dakar, you can find very good music teachers, but it’s not like in Montreal. Institutional teaching is not as well developed; musicians have to be resourceful if they want to perfect their musical education. So most competent teachers give private lessons. Personally, I’ve mostly continued to teach myself in order to arrive at the music I make today. It’s a love story that brought me to Montreal in 2014, after a short stint in Thetford Mines. I came to live in Quebec because I have family here, my son lives here. I had left directly from Senegal; I had never travelled to the West before.

PAN M 360: Let’s talk about West African pop, which had its heyday in the ’80s and ’90s. Three decades later, where does it stand?

Ilam: It’s a continuity. At the time, there was a lot of talk about Mory Kanté, Ismaël Lô, and Angélique Kidjo, who guided me a lot in my music. I can point out other influences – Fara Freddy, Baaba Maal (who is Fulani like me), Ali Farka Touré, Oumou Sangaré. Today, many artists, including myself, are inspired by this African musical heritage and are enjoying a certain success. In addition, I listen a lot to the neo-soul of Anderson Paak and Melanie Faye, or the blues of Gary Clark, Jr., or reggae, or even flamenco of Concha Buika. So my music is a fusion of my traditional influences, Afropop, and other sources from outside Africa, but the African part of my music is the basis of my work. Thus, I sing in Pulaar, Wolof, but also in French and English. Beyond languages, music is first and foremost a question of emotion.

PAN M 360: In what way can Senegalese Afropop regenerate, without sounding old-fashioned or dated, stuck to the sound of Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal, and Touré Kunda?

Ilam: Music is above all originality, but it is also emotion. It’s an identity that must belong to each artist. Certainly, artists have left their mark on Senegalese Afropop, but many new sounds are currently emerging. We’re talking about a contemporary, modern, urban Africa. This translates on several levels, including that of music. It’s this Africa in full evolution that I also want to show in my music. These same experienced artists also trust the new generation to bring new things. For example, I had the opportunity to do a duet with Baaba Maal on my last album, Néné, and it’s this confidence that I felt, this willingness to let the new generation speak for themselves. The most important thing remains to showcase African musical culture all over the world. Afropop is regenerating itself, but we must also be able to show it.

PAN M 360: How do you go about proposing something different from the Senegalese clichés regarding Afropop?

Ilam: My artistic approach is precisely to break down the clichés that most Western audiences may have absorbed. My music is a mix of Afropop, with blues, a bit of flamenco, and sometimes reggae… but Senegalese mbalax is not one of the styles I explore, even if I sometimes dance to it, like any Senegalese. So I don’t try to do what already exists, I try to create and propose my own musical universe. I like to mix tradition and modernity in my music. For example, in my sound there’s a bit of kora, djembe, “tribal”, and other sounds. Also, my modern musical influences are very varied, many different musical styles have left their mark on me. By keeping my identity, I want to make music that touches everyone and represents the current Senegalese music scene. In reality, for me, there are no clichés in Senegalese music, and that’s precisely what I want to demonstrate.

PAN M 360: Is your music gradually distancing itself from your cultural origins, since you’ve been living in North America?

Ilam: Yes, a little, because inspiration is also found through the environment in which we evolve. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many artists, to attend many different concerts here, ranging from traditional Quebecois to other musical styles such as flamenco. This cultural mix makes Montreal’s music scene very rich. It certainly influences my music. I am sad to see that some of the meeting places I used to go to are closing down at the moment. But the artists are still here. It’s a good experience that I’m living here.

PAN M 360: How do you find your inspiration in Montreal?

Ilam: Musically, Montreal is a real inspiration for me. Sometimes it seems to me like the whole world in a scale model. There is a great cultural diversity, and it’s different from where I come from. Inspiration can come from all over the place – during a jam with other musicians, when I’m nostalgic for my homeland, when I meet new people… But living in Montreal has changed my outlook a lot. I saw a lot of people playing instruments, it was very inspiring for me. I see more professional opportunities there. And my tastes have also changed. This new life has made me more open to different musical styles. I’m lucky enough to have enough fans who want to attend my shows, which is why I was scheduled to perform at Le National. I’m really happy to be able to count on a mixed audience in Montreal, from different generations and cultures.

PAN M 360: How did you put together your band in Montreal? Can you introduce us to your musicians, and the type of instrumentation you offer?

Ilam: Most of the musicians I work with today, I met at jams when I arrived in 2014. There’sAssane Seck on guitar, Donald Dogbo on drums, Mathieu Gaultier on bass. We usually play as a quartet, but I sometimes play with others as well. What’s important for me is to play with good musicians who understand my music while having their own universe, and especially with whom I share the same feeling. And, no, there’s not a lot of electronics in my music, because I like to see the instrumentalists at work. I feel more connection, a greater symbiosis. Nevertheless, I listen to a lot of electro music, but I prefer instruments to programming for my own artistic project.

PAN M 360: What are the differences in composition and production between the album Néné, released this past spring by GSI Musique, and your album Hope, which was launched in 2016?

Ilam: The album Néné is a big production for me, bigger than Hope. Néné is also an album developed between Montreal and Ivory Coast (with Sony Music Africa). It involved more musical research as well as the participation of great artists such as Baaba Maal, an African monument who came to Montreal to record a track, “Meta Jah”, with Yann Perreau. It is an album of exchange, communion, sharing, and a certain musical maturity.

PAN M 360: How is your music received in West Africa?

Ilam: My music is well received in West Africa. The general public is beginning to discover me there, it’s always a pleasure! Every year, I go to Senegal to give concerts with the Canadian Embassy or the Quebec Office. It’s always a pleasure to be able to have people discover my music there. The public is always very receptive. I would love to record my next album in Dakar. I would like to do an artist’s residency there and invite Senegalese musicians to take part in my musical journey.

PAN M 360: What are your future plans for your career, beyond the pandemic?

Ilam: I’m working on my next album, it’s my next big project. And I hope to be able to hit the road again in the next few months and bring the album Néné on stage, on several continents, as planned. We have to do shows in other forms, but I can’t wait to play, with my band, in front of a real audience!

NUITS D’AFRIQUE OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Photo credit: Chen Xiaohua

Tation is a Westernized approximation of the post-rock quintet’s Chinese name 天声, or tiān shēng – “heavenly sound”. Like the enormous expanse of sky reaching past the horizons of the Tibetan plateau on which their home province Qinghai is situated, their recently released Coordinate Plan 2018 extends beyond the borders of the standard rock-band EP. It’s a series of multidisciplinary moments in time and space, selected and executed with great precision during the cold months of 2018, then captured as breathtaking audiovisual mementos. PAN M 360 connected with Tation, who responded collectively with further insights into the four facets of Coordinate Plan 2018.

PAN M 360: Your project Coordinate Plan 2018 is an interesting exercise in contrast and paradox. With exact geographical coordinates indicated, each of the four videos is of a carefully planned event in a very precise place and moment in time. The event occurs, and comes to its conclusion – and now exists as a document, which can be viewed and appreciated by anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. Also, two of the four videos are filmed in urban environments. The other two, in the wilderness. Artificial, and natural. Local tradition, and global modernity. What is the basic intention of this project?

Tation: We simply wanted to inject a more sensory and experiential dimension into some of the anonymous coordinates we were interested in, or had inadvertently experienced, returning the coordinates to space – a field of real human presence. There’s real thought given to modernization and especially datafication. The coordinate system is a kind of data-based place-name system that creates a network of data-proxy spaces. On the other hand, the coordinates actually cancel out the real space, just like data will eventually cancels out everything that is ambiguous. Of course, there’s nothing we can do to change anything, we just want to redeem or memorize the space through our work.

Coordinate Plan is about experiencing and feeling the space, in which a lot of things will emerge naturally. We cultivate and reshape the space by way of creation, and the work that happens in the space can be considered a commentary on the actual coordinate location. The live performance as an event will forever be entangled with those coordinates, and become a piece of history. There should be a taste of human warmth in the sea of data, and this could be our chance, and probably mankind’s too.

PAN M 360: “Nothing orgy” is an interesting installation at the centre of a city, by the street artist XXX. It seems to present the band like mannequins in a store window, and only allows one to see, at most, two band members at any one time – it never tells the whole story. It feels like a comment on the dishonesty and evasiveness of commercialism. It also features the Wang Meng’s saxophone – an instrument that is very strongly associated with the city (the same way an acoustic guitar is heard as “rural”).

Tation: The piece started from a concept and a title, then the space for implementation was chosen, and we began to plan the specific project only after the space was defined. At that time, the collaborating artist wanted to make some real glass cabinets for the musicians to perform in, but since the whole project was financed by the band members ourselves, except for the free support for the recording equipment, the glass cabinets were really a bit expensive for us, so the artist eventually changed the scheme.

Of course, the scheme after that had the effect we expected, even had a bit more of an unanticipated meaning – for instance, as though the windows were open, but the musicians were tied to their instruments – wasn’t there a feeling of false freedom? The isolated musicians playing alone but in a group also conveys the image that the physical distance between people is so close, but there are impenetrable “walls”… As for the saxophone, the idea was to add a factor of disturbance to the overall orchestration. Compared to the other works, the structure, arrangement, and orchestration of “Nothing orgy” is more ordinary and disciplined. Without the addition of the saxophone, it would be relatively easy-listening music, a reflection of an unconscious commercial culture. If the overall performance by the band presents a collective consciousness, the saxophone here displays the looming presence of the individual.

PAN M 360: “Flowing” is the most positive and uplifting of the four pieces. The video features an environmental installation by the artist Ma Yongjin, who has used a large sheet of reflective material to suggest an expansion of the Yellow River that absorbs Tation as the band plays.

Tation: First of all, it should be noted that all the works in Coordinate Plan were created specifically for the selected coordinate space, which is one of the principles of the project: to relate to one or more actual spaces. One month before the performance, we and Ma Yongjin, the artist, went to the river for location research. It was a beautiful day, and the water flowing under the sunlight brought us an inner auditory sensation, a canonical feeling. There’s a Chinese proverb, “chuan liu bu xi” (“the endless flow of the river”), which describes the never-ending, cyclical state of the river. That circumstance conveyed a lively, hopeful feeling to us, which we brought into the music as the “positive and uplifting” style, like you said. Following the music, the artist came up with the idea of extending the river. We could say that we worked with the artist to divert the Yellow River at those coordinates through music and environmental installations, and we created a one-day tributary of the Yellow River.

PAN M 360: You collaborated with the poet Zhang Zheng on “My heart is not like me”. His words, and the heavy-metal aspect of the music, suggest some very intense emotions. The physical environment of the video seems to be a ruined warehouse or factory.

Tation: It was the workshop of a dying state-owned factory, and although production hadn’t stopped completely, the end was in sight. We (the post-’80s generation) grew up during a period of social and ideological change in China, especially in the remote and backward western regions, and we seem to have a deeper discomfort with this change. Such a condition of anxiety, or symptom of division, was always present while we were growing up. So when we first became familiar with rock ’n’ roll during our teenage years, we could easily find a sympathetic response while listening to restless music like metal, punk, and garage rock. This condition, or state of division, exists in our lives all the time. When a person is torn apart, he shrieks, but this shriek is utterly ineffectual, like a baby’s cry, an impotent pain, and at the same time, this shriek has no direction because we don’t know what we are really stung by. So Zhang Zheng’s poetry seems to answer our question by providing a direction for this shriek, which is the deep darkness of the mind. Like psychotherapy, the poem guided us to a passionate conversation with our past, through the heavy metal that we used to love, in this familiar, nostalgic factory.

PAN M 360: Filmed at Qingsha Mountain, at a very high elevation, “Flying around flame” is a collaboration with the conceptual, multidisciplinary artist Liu Chengrui. This one seems to be the most connected to your region’s traditions and folklore.

Tation: This is a local customary dance celebrating victory, in which villagers act as messengers of the wind god, raising their hands and stamping their feet around a bonfire, yelling and circling, begging for the god’s blessing. The work was executed in artist Liu Chengrui’s hometown, and he said about the work, “I was born at Qingsha Mountain – my childhood time and space is complete, though a little ragged now, but these stories I imagined in the background of Qingsha Mountain, have now become part of reality. ‘Flying around flame’ was an outburst to rebuild new memories for Qingsha Mountain.”

He knows the land very well, he knows many of the villagers who attended the show, but everything there was unfamiliar to the band, and although we’d communicated with the artist beforehand, we couldn’t anticipate it – what exactly would the scene be like? So we chose to improvise on that day, rather than a set piece prepared through fieldwork, like the other three works. The unstructured, improvised performance is like throwing yourself into a gravity-free space, and into the ritual that’s created by the artist. The sound of the wind, the cries of birds overhead, and the shouts of the “wind messengers” gradually brought us into a kind of oblivion in our imaginations, and the performance finished automatically. In addition, the temperature of -15°C forced us to make some unusual changes, such as having to wear gloves to play, but the rough sound was surprisingly suitable for the atmosphere of the day. All in all, it was one of the most exciting and memorable days of the whole Coordinate Plan 2018.

PAN M 360 thanks Xige Yi for her translation assistance.

Photo: Marc-Étienne Mongrain (Le Petit Russe)

In the fall of 2018, a few dozen at a transitional concert by Antoine Corriveau and a band built around Simon Angell (Patrick Watson, Thus Owl) were stunned witnesses to the premises of a new cycle of creation: more rock, more noise, more punk, more art-rock, clearly outside of the consensual parameters of Quebec. Against all odds, a big wow! The Feu de forêt EP was released during this period and… here we are in October 2020.

Two years later, this same cycle is in full swing with the imminent release of Pissenlit on Secret City Records. This album puts the writer, composer, and performer on a very singular track. A change of personnel, a new musical direction, audacity, and some of the best lyrics to come from the local songwriting community. Could the 35-year-old man have acquired the maturity essential to long careers? Ask the question of Corriveau, and more are sure to follow.

PAN M 360: Your 2018 EP Feu de forêt set the table for Pissenlit. More rock, heavier, more corrosive, more muscular, more daring. What do you say?

Antoine Corriveau: I agree. It’s really another approach. When I presented this concert and released the EP, it was the first time I played with this new core of musicians. My challenge then was to work without string arrangements, as I had done for the previous album and the concert that followed. It was a question of seeing where it would go. At that show two years ago, we had an almost punk segment. I really liked that! I felt like putting together a show where I would come off the stage more tired! In this new cycle there are elements of music that I’ve been listening to for a long time and that I’m starting to digest. Today, I’m not trying to do the same thing again.

PAN M 360: This third studio album is the result of a very different methodology from the previous ones. Can you briefly explain what it’s all about?

AT: I first invited five drummers to play together in my room, I wanted raw material to compose from their beats. I suggested a tempo they should play, I let them take off. Immediately, the impact was felt: I composed differently. I tried to identify usable segments and I composed around them with a bass or bass synth, rather than a guitar or piano. If I sit down at the piano or with my guitar, I find my comfort zone, which I won’t deny; there are softer songs on my new album, it’s important for me to make these ways of doing things fit together. I’ve imagined moments of respite, otherwise the album would just be slaps in the face and breaks in tone. So at the beginning, I didn’t have chord structures, I just had a fundamental around which I added stuff. Then I would call in other musicians, without sending them material they could prepare themselves with. I would record their material, and then I would clean it up. I had a bank of other guitar riffs that I would try to mix with beats or other contributions from the musicians who came to my place. I also recorded alone with a bassist or drummer. Many paths would lead to the same place. And it fell on my shoulders.

*Photo: Marc-Étienne Mongrain (Le Petit Russe)*

PAN M 360: So you were the one who led the entire production project and provided the musical direction?

AC: Yes, I had never done that before. It was done instinctively, naturally. It was also a challenge I set myself, to see how far I could take this project. For the previous one, I relied heavily on Marianne Houle, who created the string arrangements. In this case, I wanted to go as far as possible myself, based on the contributions of the musicians.

PAN M 360: With few exceptions, your group is pretty much the same as it has been since the beginning of this new cycle. Who are these artists?

AC: I hire musicians that I respect and like very much. Their contribution is very important to me. Stéphane Bergeron (Karkwa), drums, Marc-André Landry (David Marin, Chloé Lacasse, Tire le Coyote, etc.), bass, Simon Angell, guitars and arrangements, are at the center of the project, they play on almost all the songs. Erika Angell (vocals) also joined us for some sessions. The same core will be with me on stage, when the conditions allow it, and also at the virtual launch of the album – October 13. On keyboards, Sheenah Ko (The Besnard Lakes, etc.) is added to the band. We are currently rehearsing to edit the songs we never played other than during the recording process. We’re kind of relearning, in a way. We don’t have the same contingencies as on the previous album with strings, it’s simpler. With guitars and keyboards, we are very close to the versions of the album, and our live versions will make the interpretations evolve. After the virtual launch, however, everything becomes blurred again on the live side.

PAN M 360: What’s the tone of the vocals this time?

AC: I sing as I sing, I do my thing as before. But I’ve allowed myself more freedom in interpretation. At times, for example, I sing in high notes, which I didn’t do before, but it’s not a revolution. How do you describe moods and emotional states? There is a second degree in the tone, an irony, something quite close to me. I have allowed myself to go further, to give myself more.

PAN M 360: We can see that your poetic environments have changed to a degree. In what ways?

AC: Perhaps it’s more direct, there’s less fog in the writing. I spent a week in a workshop with Gilles Vigneault, and had lots of discussions with artists about songwriting. I myself taught it a bit at the Granby song festival. You give a speech about clarity, and then you question yourself. As I get older, I have to say, I have less reservations about revealing what I really think. That’s where clarity becomes essential. Wanting to show that we can write is also a fear of saying things that are personal to us. I told myself that if I couldn’t do that, there was no point in writing. And I worked harder than ever on the lyrics. Also, I took the liberty of writing more Quebecois words, which I wouldn’t have done before. I’ve lost my complexes about that. That’s why I think it’s my most keb record.

PAN M 360: Choose songs that are representative of the album, spontaneously, and tell us about them.

AC: Okay. I’ll take “Quelqu’un” first. The first half of the song was the first literary gesture of this album. I had just given a writing workshop on identity at that time, and I asked the people who had signed up to do it to talk about themselves. I told myself then that I had to give myself up too, that led me to push the idea further for this album project but… I was stuck for a long time with half of the text, unable to finish it. Then I had discussions with a psychoanalyst neighbour, we talked about childhood, the symbolic death of the father and other subjects inherent to psychoanalysis. That led me to dig out something hyper-personal, it was the spark that allowed me to finish this song… a year and a half later!

PAN M 360: This introspection was also linked to a revision of your identity, this album is full of evocations of Quebec’s culture and territory, of its farflung regions. Roads, cars, houses, thoughts, feelings… and what else?

AC: Taking the example of the song “Il parle”, a bunch of stuff. I’ve been thinking a lot about the division of the territory… how do I fit into that? I felt guilty about our people’s history with the First Nations. I had discussions on the subject with my father, who grew up in Abitibi and lived close to the reserves. I also talked about it with people from the North Shore when I performed there, and did an artist residency in Natashquan. With friends, I remembered brief our history classes on the Amerindians were – the fights between Montcalm and Wolfe took priority. We don’t talk about this issue in enough depth, we have a hard time with more challenging discourse, we have a hard time with what intellectuals think about it. Personally, I have a lot of difficulty with the management of the indigenous question in the public sphere. My misgivings are also related to this fear of immigrants in Quebec, to this fear of other religions and other cultures, to this fear of disappearing. In retrospect, racism is an issue that was very much on my mind while I was writing the lyrics for this album. In the song “Les sangs mélangés”, the chorus line is not mine but an adaptation of a phrase by Éric Plamondon, from his novel Taqawan. I found a song refrain there – “En Amérique, on a tous du sang indien, si c’est pas dans les veines c’est sur les mains.” (In America, we all have Indian blood, if it’s not in our veins, it’s on our hands.)

PAN M 360: Your evocations of the Quebec territory are not limited to the Indigenous question, there’s also the river and the sea, no?

AC: I took full advantage of that when I was on tour, and also when I was looking to buy a house in the Lower St-Laurent area. I did a wide sweep, I visited several places. I came within a hair’s breadth of buying a house in Saint-Fabien-sur-Mer, at the foot of the cliff. It didn’t work out, but it made me write a story: “Peut-être”. Buying a house by the sea in 2020 is a strange idea, it’s very risky. So I questioned myself about my motivations, I went far into the fantasy. I imagined an apocalyptic scenario where the character in the song settles on the seashore because he wants to have a front-row seat at the end of the world. As for me, I finally bought in Bic… but high up! We have a great view of the sea.

A Radio-Canada Revelation in “world music” for the 2020-2021 season, Mateo expresses both a globalist rock culture and an inspired mix of Afro-Latin music, including Colombian, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Nuyorican music. Presented as a webcast at Nuits d’Afrique, the Montreal singer, lyricist, and composer defines in his own way what a modern-day Spanish-speaking artist can express in the now, wherever he is.

PAN M 360: What were the reasons for your migration from Bogotá to Montreal in 2015, at the age of 19?

Mateo: Passion, curiosity, and love. Very broad, but quite simple. I would say, very good reasons! But it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s leaving one’s parents’ home, and on the other, it’s immigrating on one’s own. Both at the same time, it’s quite an adventure. In Colombia, I had just obtained a degree in scenography and artistic direction for the performing arts; it’s a profession I’m still in love with, and I wanted to specialise in stage and lighting techniques. I wanted to do everything I could to reach this goal, Montreal was my destination for its reputation and its show-business possibilities. So I came here with the goal of learning French and English, and then continuing my studies.

PAN M 360: Has music always won out over this interest in the performing arts?

Mateo: So, yes. I think that an artist’s completeness consists of a global understanding of what happens on stage but also behind the curtain, from both a technical and philosophical point of view. In Colombia, the only school that offered a complete program in scenography and design was LaSalle College – yes, they have a branch in Bogotá! However, the degree levels are different. After finishing, (given my economic possibilities as a foreign student) I came here to study at l’École du Show Business.. But music has always been a part of me; at that time I didn’t see it as a priority of exploration in my life. Music has always been there since I was five years old, it’s something innate in me, I would say. Today, music is much more important in my professional and personal goals.

PAN M 360: Your music is a real mix of pop/rock culture and Caribbean and Latin American styles. Can you describe this mix?

Mateo: My music includes rock, cumbia, reggae, dancehall reggaeton, salsa dura, son montuno, guaguancó, bolero, Afrobeat, pop, lo-fi, jazz. This search for identity seems very honest to me. It is a serious study of my “pure” influences, which then leads me to offer something digestible and accessible, because the aim is to transmit. In this sense, Afro-Latin rhythms represent a major influence in my work. Salsa, son montuno, rumba, and guaguancó are everywhere in my compositions, even before I sang here. Just to name a few, there is the clave, pregones, and mambos, phrases normally played by brass instruments, but which are sung or played on the guitar.

PAN M 360: How do you think you stand out in the current Latin scene?

Mateo: First of all, I need to understand the ocean that Latin music represents, its origins, its influences. It’s mega-vast! So, as an active artist in this community, I consider myself just a spokesperson for the values of my culture and its roots. My music is just an open window on the potential that already exists. Yet, I find myself outside the Latin productions homogenized by the media, I try to stay away from clichés. As a result, my team and I have found something unique in the Latin scene, in Canada and elsewhere. What we offer is fresh and honest. Already, metaphorically, we try to get away from the colourful, the hot, the exotic, and the sexual, while keeping our roots. We prefer candela, sensuality, taste, charm. One concept, one feeling: Mateo = sexy candela. We don’t do collage, it’s really a thorough search for the fusion and integration of stylistic elements. Then, on the studio and production side, the work is carried out by my producer and impresario Léon Perez. This whole process takes us out of the mould.

PAN M 360: How did you choose your musicians? Can you tell us about meeting with them, and what motivated your choices to keep them on your team?

Mateo: My musicians were rigorously selected. They were chosen according to the desired instrumentation – two guitars, bass, percussion, drums – and for their cohesion, their musical maturity, and their own voice. As with any good recipe, the quality, integration, and originality of its ingredients guarantee the quality of the result. The format chosen here is also a really important factor. Despite the demands of the composition and the Afro-Latin elements to be included, we have chosen not to have brass or piano.

First of all, we needed a guitarist with a vast language that would stand out from the Santana clichés and who was still able to explore the montunos on the guitar as well as the finger-picking technique. We wanted a guitarist with good taste whose playing could blend in with mine. The incredible Tito Sono is a classical guitarist at root, he has Gypsy, jazz, funk, and flamenco influences. In addition, he’s a great connoisseur of Latin-American folklore, which is quite unique.

The bass player, Diego Cruz, was my music teacher in Colombia when I was eight to ten years old! We then toured South America together. Chance or fate, or life… we both ended up in Montreal without having planned it. Diego is a very special bass player and very present in the Latin scene here. I wasn’t looking for virtuosity, but rather for his groove and his language, especially someone who listens to others. His influences are diverse – prog, metal, rock, salsa dura, folklore, etc. He is very versatile my teacher, my bass player, my friend!

On the other hand, on percussion, we needed roots and vocabulary: aguanilé, saoko, virtuosity, interpretation, stage presence, character, open-mindedness. For me, he is the best percussionist in town, Hanser Santos Gomez candela!

And as the last element, the drums… What a challenge! But here we are, this true artist reinforces the colour and identity of my project. I didn’t know Dan Fyah Beats, my producer Léon Perez spotted him and suggested him to me. He had only seen him play once, and he called me immediately and said, “I have our drummer!” It had to be him and nobody else. After (at least) four months of trying, we managed to invite him to a rehearsal. For the first time, I saw this Jamaican, in his late thirties or early forties. He crossed the threshold of the studio door, not a word. He sat down, listened a little. Léon says to him, “Dan, just be yourself, don’t try to play Latin or whatever, just play your shit.” Suddenly, we discover what a specialist of the one-drop style can do on a bolero! Great drummer, multi-instrumentalist, singer, producer, very creative. Dan is a very professional person who made me rediscover my own music.

PAN M 360: Who are your models? Which artists have really marked you?

Mateo: Singing-wise, I have several influences, both for their vocal technique and their interpretation – Ismael Rivera, Andrew Stockdale, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Hector Lavoe, José Feliciano, Ile Cabra, Angel Canales, Myles Kennedy, Bruno Mars. And here are some of the musicians who really made an impression on me – Jack White, Omar Rodriguez Lopez, Hector Lavoe, Angel Canales, Cabas, Josh Homme, Pedrito Martinez.

PAN M 360: What musical genres are you currently interested in?

Mateo: It’s quite vast, I’m very much into rap, R&B, salsa dura, reggae, jazz, boleros, rock. Also, I try to be very objective in identifying a good song, whatever its musical genre.

PAN M 360: How does it feel to be a Spanish-speaking artist whose career started in Montreal? Do you think you can conquer the Latin market while staying in Quebec?

Mateo: I feel honoured, proud, and grateful. This is my home, I want to continue to be a creative agent of Quebec and Canadian culture. So, yes, the goals are big enough for the Latin market. We see a lot of potential in what we are proposing.

PAN M 360: How do you perceive the local public’s interest in you, well beyond the Latin community in Montreal?

Mateo: It’s been really incredible! I feel that I’m not only from the Latin community, but also part of the Montreal music scene. I’ve been around quite a bit and I finally realized that language is not the determining factor in liking someone’s music. A good example in the industry is Burna Boy. I can tell you that I am surprised to see how much people vibrate with us when we are on stage, that they even sing with us sometimes. It’s all about transmission, a fundamental goal for us.

PAN M 360: How does it feel to be an expatriate in a cosmopolitan city with a French majority in North America? Do you feel you are welcomed there as an artist? What are the pros and cons?

Mateo: Let’s just say that Montreal for me is the city where everything is possible. I firmly believe that it’s all about determination, emotional intelligence, hard work… and a bit of luck. I quickly learned the language (French) to be able to integrate. I also think that to be well received, you have to offer and work. The pros? The available spaces and the diversity to develop as an artist. It is also the open-mindedness in the majority of musical scenes and the sick talent that can be found in our city. The cons? It is the clichés and prejudices that lead some people to underestimate my work and that of others. The ultimate goal is to keep building!

SEE THE SHOW

With Generations, released a few days ago, Will Butler is the third member of Arcade Fire to put out an album this year. Recorded in his Brooklyn studio, Generations is an eclectic work, with varied colours, sometimes closer to the vitaminized punk or the exhilarating flights of Arcade Fire, and other times not very far from cabaret song, a kind of antimony or emotional paradox between the engaging side of the music and the darker themes that are evoked.

In the five years since the release of his debut album, Policy, which served as a sort of tentative premise for the more assertive Generations, Butler hasn’t been idle. He travelled the world as a solo artist, then released the live album Friday Night, went on to design and record Arcade Fire’s Everything Now, travelled the world again, earned a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard, and organised a series of town-hall discussions to debate issues such as police contracts, prison reform, paid sick leave, voting rights, and so on. He also spent a lot of time playing father to his three children.

Sitting on a couch at home in Brooklyn with a mug in his hand, Will Butler is there to talk. Smiling, very comfortable and above all affable, it seems to give him pleasure to talk once again about his album, and to invariably answer the same questions about Arcade Fire that all the journalists ask him…

PAN M 360 : During the last five years, you’ve done film, recorded, studied, you are the father of three children… With such a busy schedule, how did you find the time to conceive and produce Generations?

Will Butler: I’ve been building up songs over the last two years, and mostly playing them live when I can, at shows, and figuring them out. I hadn’t had time to sit down and figure out if I was doing another record or not, and last year I knew that I would have time in the summer to sit down with my touring band and record some demos, to see what these songs feel like. So I have a studio in a basement in South Brooklyn, and we recorded for a week, and at the end of those sessions, I was listening back to the takes and said, “this is the record, It sounds great! We have six songs here, we have a couple more, so let’s keep moving!”. So after the band sessions, I would take everything and put that on my laptop and work drafts of lyrics, cross some words, write other drafts… And I did that for about nine months, and the record was done. My last bit of recording was March 9, and then New York shut down on March 14… (laughs). So yes, it was a bit long between the two albums, but so much has happened in the last four or five years. (laughs) Not just in my life, but in the whole fucking world.

I knew I needed a stretch of peaceful time to process all that. And my wife and I, we have an older kid and we had twins two years ago, so you know, all this takes up a lot of brain space! But it was also trying to synthesize what was happening in the world since my last record. 2015 was a year of protest, there was Ferguson and Baltimore and then the election and the shit show since 2016, and now it’s the same thing again, with the pandemic on top… So I was basically trying to figure out how to respond to that with art.

PAN M 360: Who worked on the album with you?

WB: There was Miles Francis (Antibalas) on drums, who has been playing with me for the last five years, Julie Shore and her sister Jenny, who is also my wife, and Sara Dobbs. Everybody sings on this record, and the rest of it is a lot of synthesizers. Miles also took care of the guitars, and I played a little bit of guitars too, as well as some piano and keyboards, and I took care of the recording and producing. I did a bit of everything!

PAN M 360: What are the main themes on the album? It feels like you touch on fatality, despair, but also hope…

WB: Yes, there is a lot of despair on this record, especially in the lyrics. I don’t think there is much despair in the music. The music is always pretty forward-moving. But the songs are the words and the music, so there is always a tension between what your mind is thinking and what your body is doing. (laughs). I’ve always absorbed the lyrics last, so I always process music through my body, and then it ultimately reaches my brain. Besides despair, it’s being overwhelmed, like not even knowing what to do or where to turn or how to begin to formulate an answer to the questions that have been posed, particularly in political life, but it’s the same on the personal side. You know, some of the songs, like “Promised” or “Surrender”, are about friendships that have broken over the years, or have faded or twisted, and not knowing what to do with someone that you love but that has fundamentally lost you. So what do you do with that besides feel bad about the past, or wish that things were different? So both on the political level and the personal level, I was overwhelmed by giant forces, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

PAN M 360: There are several shades of sound on this record. It starts out a little punk, and then slides into the indie rock and pop that we know from Arcade Fire, it flirts with Bowie, LCD Soundsystem, to finish with something more reflective, cabaret even, à la Destroyer… It’s a very interesting pacing on this album.

WB: Yes, there is a strong A-side, B-side feel. It doesn’t mean you have to listen to the record on vinyl, I listen to everything on Spotify anyway, but it has a first act and a second act. The first act is a little more urgent, a little more punk, whereas the second act is a little more electronic, and then “Fine” is like the afterword or something, it’s like an author’s note.

PAN M 360: Seems like you’ve worked on your voice since your first album. You seem to have a lot more confidence and emotion.

WB: I think that comes from very deliberately working out most of these songs on stage, learning what the core of the song is. Policy was more something that was created in the studio… I don’t know… I was experimenting. The bulk of Generations is something like, “we’re here, we know what we’re doing and we’re doing it.” As nebulous as the lyrics can be, there is still a musical mission. And I’m a better singer, I guess. From having to sing as a frontman, you just become a better singer (laughs).

PAN M 360: Looking back, how do you perceive Policy, how would you compare the two albums?

WB: Policy, to me, is like a bunch of different characters. Like every song is like in a different suit or skin. This record sonically changes a lot, but it’s still one perspective, whereas Generations has a bit more of a coherent vision. The record as a whole has a bit more of a sonic arc. It’s not a concept record but it’s tied together both sonically and lyrically.

PAN M 360: Would you say that your solo work allows you to express yourself in a way that you couldn’t with Arcade Fire?

WB: Yeah, I think that’s true! But also, Arcade Fire lets me express myself in ways that I can’t on a solo record. Update one is that I don’t write any words for Arcade Fire (laughs). That’s like a very big difference. And there is a slight difference in ethos, and in approaching recording… Generations is a collaborative effort but I’m more the director, and Arcade Fire is more fighting with co-workers, in a creative way. But to me, it’s also like the same project. You know, it’s like Marcel Dzama, who sometimes does movies with Amy Sedaris and sometimes does paintings, but they’re all from the same body of work, a little bit.

PAN M 360: And what does your brother think of your music?

WB: I think he likes it. In the band, we all think we’re all talented. We like each other and we trust each other. So if they wouldn’t like it, they’d tell me.

PAN M 360: How’s it going with the new Arcade Fire. Should we expect a record soon?

WB: We can’t really work separately. We can do a little bit online, but we’re not good at it… So if the virus stays calm, we’ll get back together and be basically on track… It takes us so long to make a record anyway, it takes us a year or a year and a half. The timing has been different, the process has been different, but the process is always different…

Above: Hotdog in the 1970s (Rene Garcia, left, and Dennis Garcia, 3rd from left)

In the 1970s, the Philippines were under the bootheel of the kleptocratic Marcos regime and its policy of permanent martial law. In the minds and hearts of so many Filipinos, however, there was a bright side to that era. It was represented by, as much as anyone, the Garcia brothers Dennis and Rene, and their celebrated band Hotdog. Their first hit, “Manila”, is credited with sparking a movement called the Manila Sound. This was at a time when local music wasn’t in very high demand, ignored in favour of pop and disco from abroad. Hotdog were pioneers in fashioning a fun, free-spirited hybrid, mashing up those foreign sounds with local flavours, setting the stage for the OPM (Original Pinoy Music) wave that followed.

Rene Garcia passed away in 2018, and in January of this year, Dennis followed him. This chapter in Filipino music history isn’t quite closed, though. Paolo Garcia, son of Dennis and a musician himself, has paid tribute to his father’s legacy with the recently released Muling Kagat, selecting and fortifying a treasure trove of rarities, sure to please longtime fans while attracting the attention of a new generation of music lovers worldwide. PAN M 360 connected with Paolo Garcia for more details.

PAN M 360: How would you explain the significance of Hotdog, to those who are unfamiliar?

Paolo Garcia: My father and the band crafted countless hit songs that became anthemic and resonated so much with generations of Filipinos, some thirty-plus years ago. To this day, people still know the tunes, which proves how timeless they truly are.

PAN M 360: Hotdog’s first record was 1974’s Unang Kagat, which translates, if I’m correct, to “first taste”. Now here’s Muling Kagat… “another taste”. It’s not a greatest-hits record – if it were, the first track on side one would be “Manila”. It’s a different kind of tribute.

PG: The idea came about when dad passed away last January. I couldn’t bear to let his memory fade away without doing a special tribute. The plan was to touch on obscure and overlooked tunes from the ’70s and ’80s, and stay away from the hits, which everybody already knows.

PAN M 360: The music on Muling Kagat is a wonderful mix of funk, jazz, disco, pop, rock, psych, salsa, samba, boogie-woogie, and of course kundiman, the Filipino love-song genre. It’s very certainly music of the 1970s, but also quite timeless. How would you describe the Hotdog sound?

PG: A mix of clever witty lyricism and tasteful pop sensibilities. Hotdog formed in 1972 and helped cultivate “the Manila Sound”, typified by soft rock, catchy choruses, and a thick dose of sentimentality. They made love songs – about girls, about dancing, about Manila. They did this in both Tagalog and English.

PAN M 360: What do you yourself do, musically? What path have you followed?

PG: I am a music producer, director, editor, DJ, and vinyl enthusiast. As a practitioner of the art of sample-based music, ancient archetypes get broken down and reconstructed, giving musical pieces new life through modern technology in a way that is palatable to today’s youth. I am here to serve.

PAN M 360: The recent video for “Don’t Touch Me” is really fun. Could you tell us a bit about it, and who was involved?

PG: The video is a great example of guerilla-style filmmaking. Shot in the safety of my village with a small, tight-knit crew, a colourful cast, and minimal pageantry. I reached out to some breakdancers. Pedro Lachica, the lead, plays Lolo groovy (Filipino slang for “cool grandpa”). The hot Metro Aide breakdancer is Bea Lesaca. The music and style are based on 1970s Filipino aesthetics, so we tried to keep things period-correct. A satire of life during a pandemic.

PAN M 360: Muling Kagat is sure to appeal to nostalgic Filipinos, at home and around the world. Beyond that, though, I think it will also appeal to audiophile fans of vintage vinyl from the analog era. I’m sure they’ll want to know what the vinyl plans are for the record!

PG: The plan is to press Muling Kagat, hopefully in the next few months… just working out logistics, etc.

PAN M 360: Do you have a particular favourite track on Muling Kagat?

PG: They’re like my children (laughs)! I love them all the same.

PAN M 360: As a music-maker yourself, what would you say was the most valuable piece of musical wisdom your father passed along to you?

PG: Dad taught me to always beware of mediocrity. If you’re gonna make music… break boundaries and blaze new trails for future generations to follow.

Sienna Dahlen (Photo: Ricardo Hubbs)

Dóttir is a female duo, a magnificent encounter between the emerging electroacoustician Véro Marengère and the renowned singer, composer, improviser, writer, and jazzwoman Sienna Dahlen. Two sound universes, two generations, two approaches, a common Nordic ground. This is certainly one of the highlights of the now-virtual programming of the Off festival de Jazz, presented in Montreal this weekend.

Sienna Dahlen generously responded to our questions.

PAN M 360: Can you describe your interests in electronic music? Bands, artists, styles?

SD: Honestly, I haven’t listened to a lot of “electronic music” in my life! Over the past six years or so I have checked out people like Nicolas Jaar, Nils Frahm, James Blake, etc., and I love the ambiances that they create. Radiohead has always been a source of inspiration for me too. I tend to need more than just a “deep beat” to keep me interested in a piece of music, so melody, production, space, movement, direction, vibe, harmony to a certain degree, and colour are all of interest to me in this style. In general, I love experiencing darkness as a beautiful place to be, and artists that create this sensorial effect in their music have always attracted me. To a certain degree, this has also been a theme in my own work, whether it’s in the songs I’ve written and recorded over the years, or in this new project.

PAN M 360: What is your vision of jazz meets electronic, compared to those examples? Some jazz artists are interested to electronic instruments since the late sixties – all the musicians around Miles Davis during the In A Silent Way, Bitches Brew period, etc.; Soft Machine in the UK; Weather Report, Return to Forever, etc.; acid jazz in the 90’s: Galliano, Ronny Jordan, Groove Collective, Stereo MC’s, Gilles Peterson, etc.; drum & bass with jazz in the late ’90s – Roni Size, etc.; musicians recording for Jazzland Records in the late ’90s and early 2000s – Eivind Aarset, Nils Petter Molvaer, etc.; electro-jazz musicians: Cinematic Orchestra; hip-hop jazz electronic producers – JDilla, Terrace Martin, Flying Lotus – and so much more…

SD: I enjoy and have enjoyed listening to many of the bands/artists you’ve listed here… Miles, Nils Petter Molvaer, Weather Report, and Cinematic Orchestra, among others. I would add Sidsel Endresen and Bugge Wesseltoft to the list as well. I don’t really have a vision of what jazz meeting electronica should sound like. I am simply a result of all of the different experiences I’ve had. My work with people like Christine Duncan and other Toronto-based composers/musicians is where I was first exposed to spontaneous musical creation, extended vocal/playing techniques etc., and it was there that I was given a chance to explore my voice in a plethora of various ways. My work with DJ MHBee (Marie-Hélène Brousseau) in our duo Klardrøm saw me mixing those improvising and vocal techniques with pedals, beats, synths etc., bringing the electronic side of things into the mix. My background in jazz has taught me how to hear deeply. Creating contrasts, exploring timbre, improvising, knowing how to support and lead, etc. are all factors that guide my musical vision. In Dóttir, I have a desire to keep things raw and uncensored. This is not to say that I’m not always trying to put 150% of myself into this music but I’m excited by the possibilities of imperfection. I’m not concerned with my voice or the music sounding pretty. Sometimes it does, and that’s great too, but I’m trying not to make it a priority. I’m striving to tap into my authentic, primal response to the moment and to somehow sculpt something out of it that makes sense to me rather than imposing some sort of pre-constructed, intellectual direction on the outcome.

PAN M 360: Is Dóttir – which means daughter in Icelandic, right? – a confluence between electroacoustic, experimental, ambient, and improvised music?

SD: It does mean daughter, and yes, I would say you’re onto something there…

PAN M 360: Tell us about your musical partner, Véro Marengère. Where is she from? Where is she based? What are her own tastes in music? What styles?

SD: Véro is originally from Gatineau and she’s currently based in Montreal. We haven’t known one another for that long – we met in January of this year, thanks to Kathy Kennedy – so I’m reluctant to comment on her musical tastes but she has an extensive background in composing and performing electroacoustic music. Her bio says that she’s “finding a balance between digital processing and organic sources”.

PAN M 360: Can you describe some of your working sessions? The gear involved, each contribution, the whole spirit of this project.

SD: The music on Mûremers comes from two or three jams that we did just prior to the lockdown back in March. In general, we enjoy the idea of playing and recording ourselves in a simple, low-fi, low-pressure fashion. We didn’t set out to create an album of this music however, which is why it has so much life to it I think. We simply wanted to document our explorations. Once we began to listen back to our sessions, however, we realized that there were many special moments, some long, some short, some explosive, some gentle and harmonious, some naïve and funny, some sad and brooding. We covered a lot of emotional ground in a short time! I have a very basic set-up. I use two TC Electronic guitar pedals that have delay, reverb, looping, and reverse functions on them, along with an SM 58A Beta mic. I also played some melodica and acoustic piano in our sessions. Véro uses various kids’ toys that she has inserted pick-ups into, several mini beat machines, controlled feedback techniques and pedals, as well as her voice at times. Because we didn’t plan to mix and release this music as an album, my mic and her sounds were all going through one channel on her mixer which made things a little tricky in the post-production stage, but we embraced the process and decided to accept “what was” as “what would be”. I added extra vocal parts to a few pieces and in some areas we layered bits from other moments in our jams to create a varied collage of sound but most of what one hears on the album was how it came out initially.

PAN M 360: Does this project have something to do with free jazz, but the textural spectrum is much wider than what we hear from acoustic or electric instruments?

SD: I feel that we’re sitting a good distance away from free jazz (as I know it) in this project. Certainly improvisation plays the largest role in what we’re doing though. My pedals are digital but I’m pretty sure most of Véro’s machines are analog. I also sometimes like to use an unaffected vocal sound alongside affected vocals through pedals so having two mics on hand is ideal.

PAN M 360: Is it an issue for this musical path, often redundant in free improvisation with “traditional” jazz instrumentation?

SD: We’re not trying to fit into any category and therefore we’re not trying to adhere to any style. It’s not an issue for us. Not yet, anyways!

PAN M 360: Is there a dramatic structure in those 10 pieces? How did you imagine this “storytelling”?

SD: As I mentioned, we did not set out to create an album or a story with this music. The narrative surfaced on its own and I believe it’s rooted in the mysterious beauty of nature and the absurdity of human behaviour. I think we all have recurring “themes” in our lives and as creators we often use art to express some of those themes. I try to always tune into whatever sort of emotional string is being plucked in me in any given moment and if I feel that spoken words are needed to enhance the story, for example, I will read from the various poems and texts I’ve written over the years but in a way that strives to feel fresh and new. Sometimes I’ll just start speaking, not aware really of what is going to come out. In other cases, I will draw out certain words or lines from books that have inspired me.

PAN M 360: Are there some other musicians involved in the live version of this new record?

SD: We will be playing with Claire Devlin (saxophone) and Ana Dall’Ara-Majek (theremine) for the Off Festival show, but otherwise we haven’t discussed involving other people in this project.

PAN M 360: Can you see some precise achievements in this project?

SD: From a work-ethic standpoint, I’m proud of the fact that we took the time to complete this project from a distance during the lockdown. The album was performed and produced entirely by us, including the cover image which Véro created, and this process was a first for me. I’m also glad that we are willing and able to bring this music to the public (!). The fact that L’Off Festival de Jazz booked us and Jeunesse Cosmique has agreed to help us with the release is really encouraging. From a playing standpoint, I’m proud of our ability to continually remain open to our internal voices and to greet those impulses with gratitude and confidence. I feel that Véro and I have fairly different musical backgrounds, along with a substantial difference in age, and yet we are somehow able to find common musical ground and inspiration, which is really gratifying and inspiring.

PAN M 360: What about those apparently key words: Dottir? Mûremers?

SD: Because we both identify as women and we wanted an unconventional sounding name from a Nordic part of the world, Dóttir seemed fitting. As for how we chose Mûremers as a title, given that we’re a bilingual duo, we initially tried to find a bilingual title for the album. After going through several lists of titles though we eventually settled with Mûremers, which we thought some anglophones might mistakenly pronounce as “murmurs” and our music can sound like that at times so we liked that connection. In addition to this, we wanted the title to capture the organic and fluid nature of our music, hence “mers”, which also sounds like “mères” (and Dóttir, as you know, means daughter), so that was an interesting play on words as well. And finally, “mûre” refers to the fact that we feel that this music is ripe and ready to be experienced… and we love blackberries too!

SEE THE SHOW
October 3rd at 6 pm on L’OFF Festival de Jazz de Montréal‘s Facebook Page

A resident of his native Calgary at the time, Jean-Sébastien Audet gained attention under the pseudonym Un Blonde before migrating to Quebec, where he became known for his atypical approach to the territory of avant-pop. In 2018, he abandoned Un Blonde and chose Yves Jarvis. He’s on his second album under the pseudonym (and on the Anti- and Flemish Eye labels), and the material from Sundry Rock Sound Stock is the subject of an audiovisual performance broadcast on Pop Montreal.

“Yves Jarvis,” he explains, “is shorter and easier to pronounce in both languages than Jean-Sébastien Audet, my real name… which has never been an option for my career. When I started the project in Calgary in 2014, the name Un Blonde appeared in a group context. So Yves Jarvis describes the solo approach to my career better. On my birth certificate, Yves is my grandfather’s name and Jarvis is my mother’s last name… so it’s also my real name.”

Jarvis’ albums and performances are iconoclastic. The choruses of his songs are linked by long sequences, bridges of sorts, many of which deliberately go beyond the harmonic and melodic conventions accepted by pop music, long since become redundant in this respect. On stage, the artist triggers structural changes in real time and constantly transmutes his repertoire. No change of direction is planned in the programme.

“I still like to experiment, even if the song form is traditional,” he confirms. “I like this slightly offbeat with abstract parts, I always want to change the context. I also like the impulse of the moment, I want the music to move. In live performance, it has always been important for me to stay tuned to my impulsive side and initiate changes in real time. I love working like that.”

To help us better understand his style, Yves Jarvis doesn’t hesitate to cite his pop, indie pop, electronic, Brazilian, and experimental influences, an archi-eclectic mix at the source of such a special approach. Here’s a brief selection :

“I have been influenced by a number of artists and styles: Brazil’s Walter Franco, Italy’s Franco Battiato, Jamaica’s The Upsetters (Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry) and the Kingstonians, Robert Fripp and King Crimson, the American country singer and guitarist Kacey Musgraves, the American songwriter Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, the rock band Guided by Voices, the first albums of Kanye West, David Byrne, Brian Eno…”

After long episodes of experimental freedom, brevity was the order of the day when Sundry Rock Sound Stock was created.

“It was very important for me to create long and expansive songs with bridges for experimentation. This time I wanted 10 very original songs, with lots of interesting fragments, but I wanted them to be more fluid and concise. In the end, there are fewer experimental sequences, so that people grasp the point better. My previous albums were easier to digest with headphones, but with this one I think it also works in cars, kitchens, living rooms… in any context.”

Yves Jarvis has himself chosen to be concise.“I didn’t receive any pressure from the record companies (Anti- and Flemish Eye) for that, there’s a lot of freedom in this album,” he says.

The recording sessions were conducted in the environment of the Tree Museum, located in the Musoka region of Ontario.

“I spent the quarantine period at my parents’ home in Montreal, and I’ve been living at the Tree Museum since July, so I plan to stay there until the beginning of winter. Most of the material was recorded there, most of my videos were shot there. Why the Tree Museum? Because my girlfriend’s aunt is the manager and gave us an artist residence there. It’s really ideal, there’s a lot of space. Last year, my girlfriend and I did an installation there together, we presented performances on the grounds around the museum – my girlfriend is also an artist; Romy Lightman, who with her sister Sari forms the experimental folk group Tasseomancy. She and I have a very exciting new project that we’ll be starting soon.”

Sundry Rock Sound Stock is a more compact album, but total freedom was nevertheless at the heart of the creative process:

“I wanted to live a production experience without walls. I often set up my studio outside, around the Tree Museum. I recorded and filmed what I was playing there, it became the foundation of this production. I developed other songs on tour, the lyrics came out of me in front of the audience. I worked alone as on my previous albums, I played all the instruments, I produced everything. This time, however, there are fewer overdubs, the focus is more precise. The catchphrases, melodies and chord progressions were better circumscribed, I improvised around them during the recording. I love the studio and recording experience, it’s an ecstatic practice for me, a great pleasure that I renew daily.”

As for the lyrics, Jarvis likes brevity and an anti-conformist stance.

“Generally speaking, the themes of this album are against authoritarianism and the establishment, it was already prevalent in my previous lyrics. I express this position in general and abstract terms, I present them in the form of poetic reflections. My immediate and everyday reality is my main source of inspiration, there’s also a lot of self-criticism in it. From a formal point of view, I love to write in aphorisms, briefly.”

As for the concerts… we will have to wait until the end of the pandemic, with a few exceptions.

“I would really like to collaborate with musicians, I have people in mind but I don’t know what will happen in the future… For the moment, I prefer to create in the studio, I’ll do it until the end of the crisis. For Pop Montreal, I recorded an audiovisual performance on a boat. I play on the water, it’s pretty cool.”

“When I was younger, in high school, I often spent my nights writing. I would wake up in the morning with big black circles under my eyes, so my friends called me ‘the raccoon’.”

The year 2020 was a banner year for Raccoon. After being named Radio-Canada’s Hip-Hop Revelation 2020-2021, and publishing a monograph on systemic racism, he unveiled his third album, Le set up.

“This is a very good year for me, I realized that I got more attention than I thought,” says Shamyr Daléus-Louis. “However, the fact that it was a tough year for everyone was a bit detrimental to the branding.”

The quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is also at the source of the concept of Le set up.

“During the lockdown, there was a lot of negative energy in my head,” he explains. “I imagined it was like a big trap that we fell into. I remembered where I’d been and thought I’d seen worse.”

The rapper from Pointe-aux-Trembles wanted to push this trap concept as much on the substance as the form of the album. Working notably with French producer 94showtime, Raccoon has somewhat modified the mood of his music to make it more accessible.

I felt I didn’t want to do anything too aggressive, too dark,” he says. The productions that 94showtime sent me were very upbeat, very soul, very pop. It allowed us to make an antithesis in the music, with heavy subjects and a light atmosphere. »

In early summer, as a major movement for racial equality was taking shape here and elsewhere, Raccoon released the song 19-2 “in support of the troops who were demonstrating”.

“I come from a housing project in Pointe-aux-Trembles,” he explains. “Given the large majority of black boys living there, we were often subject to profiling. I wanted to be a model, to say that we can also use rap to talk about that today.”

However, the rapper abandons the issues of systemic racism and police brutality on Le set up, which is intended to be more introspective.

“It’s really a project that concerns me personally,” he says. “Gentil pour un noir was an album to introduce myself. Le set up is more for those who already know me: here are eight tracks while waiting for the rest.”

Although he considers that he may eventually have to leave la Belle Province to make a living from his trade, Raccoon proudly defends the Quebec hip-hop scene.

“I think we have the most complete rap scene. It’s wonderful, what’s happening with keb rap. The disadvantage we have is that we lack structure, and people who talk about us. We’re brand new and fresh, it’s normal that it takes a little time.”

From a personal point of view, Raccoon feels that he still has a lot to do in his career to move to the next level – and with that, the pressure that comes with his growing notoriety.

“I can’t stay an emerging artist all my life,” he jokes. “My career is evolving and I’m under a bit of pressure to fill rooms and really make it.”

While waiting to make like Loud, his favourite local rapper – Raccoon is “fascinated by winners” – who boasts of only playing to full houses, Raccoon reminds us of his desire to remain authentic in his quest for success.

“My goal is to be the best, the one who sells the most,” he says. “I want to go as far as possible while remaining myself, with as little compromise as possible.”

A gifted singer, author, instrumentalist, composer, and improviser, culturally omnivorous, Thanya Iyer was born on the island of Montreal. Her family comes from southern India, and she’s been handed down the culture of the region. This is one of the transcultural materials of her cyber-songwriting art, a superb blend of human sounds and songs that was discovered in the middle of summer via Kind, an eminently appealing album on the Topshelf label. Her appearance on Pop Montréal should be noticed, needless to say.

PAN M 360: You grew up in the suburb Pierrefonds, where a large part of the Indian community in the greater Montreal area resides. First, tell us about your cultural origins and your Montreal journey into adulthood.

THANYA IYER: My parents immigrated to Canada in the ’70s and ’80s. My father’s from Mumbai, my mother grew up in Kerala. At a very young age, I learned the piano, then I studied Carnatic singing before switching to the Indian violin. There’s so much to learn! As a teenager, I formed bands and started writing songs. Then I enrolled at Vanier College to study the violin, and I met some great people there. Something always led me to music.

PAN M 360: Did you continue your studies in music at university?

TI: I did a major in music and another one in science, I have a bachelor in psychology. It took me a long time to get there because I was touring, recording, and composing during my studies, which I completed almost three years ago. When the quarantine happened, I started a music therapy program at Concordia University. Music is a powerful healing factor for so many illnesses! Last year, I had the opportunity to teach music and engaging songwriting to young people, which allowed me to heal myself because I was part of the process. Music therapy is a one-year program, possibly two. We’ll see when the shows will happen again… The core of my being is artistic? Yeah I think so. I love what the psychology program gave me, but I love performing, interacting with the audience is such a great feeling.

PAN M 360: How did this passion for music become a profession?

TI: In 2008, I started playing in different bands, writing songs, and with this band, six years ago. We played a lot in Montreal, small tours in Quebec and Ontario, and then we were invited to the United States for some film festivals. Then we realized we had to get a visa, which we did. We then traveled all over the United States and Canada until the pandemic.

PAN M 360 : Your music is not necessarily Indian, you’re inclined, rather, to mix a lot of things together. What is your vision?

TI: There is a bit of Indian music in my singing and violin playing, but this cultural heritage is only part of the sound; my songs and music mix everything I’ve learned. However, I have to remind you that Indian classical music always includes an element of improvisation and I was soon interested in musical improvisation. When I was a student in CEGEP and university, all my friends played jazz, I was even more seduced by the beauty of creating here and now, with what’s inside of me. I think that an important part of the sound of my songs comes from this freedom to improvise, even when we play live. With Daniel (Gélinas) and Alex (Kasirer-Smibert), who are my bandmates, I’m constantly imagining new motifs and melodic elements, the arrangements of my songs are constantly changing. Sometimes I make a mistake and the audience may never know because it’s part of the overall sound. And so yes, improvisation is an important part of it all.

PAN M 360: More specifically, who does what in your group, and how do you create together?

TI: Alex plays the electric bass, the saxophone, and works on electronic sounds; Daniel plays the drums and other percussion, he also programs the drum machine; I sing, play the violin and keyboards. Usually I give them a song and then we improvise a lot around its structure. The shaping happens by playing with each other, or even in concert. For Pop Montreal, we invited our friend Sophie, who creates beautiful visual projections, the music and the images generate a beautiful immersive universe. On other occasions, we invite artists who lead their own projects, for example, the guest horn players in my album. Yes, I love brass and woodwinds! And I’m actually getting into string arrangements, I think there will be a lot of them on my next album.

PAN M 360: You like open forms. So there’s no question of sticking only to the versions of your recordings?

TI: We have different versions of my songs even though there is a basic form for each one. There’s always room for change, these things revolve around a form that we try to keep open. When COVID is behind us, by the way, I plan to present three different evenings at Café Résonance: one with strings, one with brass, one with a choir. It will be a real celebration, we won’t have to worry about anything.

PAN M 360: There’s great formal work in your music. What about the lyrics?

TI: I don’t have songwriting models, my lyrics express what I feel… feelings and reflexions from my inner world. I feel something, I sing it! There are some metaphors in there but not so much, it’s still pretty straightforward in general. It does me a lot of good to express myself in this way, it’s very healing for me to do that! So I don’t think my songs fit into any model. Some of them are really composed, some of them are just one sentence, those songs are a lot like mantras. In the next album, I think that the lyrics will be a little bit longer.

PAN M 360: By the way, how is your multi-genre and cross-cultural art perceived by people in your home community?

TI: Older people, friends of my mother’s for example, might tell me that they don’t get it. On the other hand, many younger people and musicians from the Indian community understand and appreciate. So I can count myself lucky, because I always feel the support of the community. Very often in my concerts, I see a large group of fans of Indian origin. Having said that, my goal is really not community-based, even though I share a lot with artists of Indian origin living in Canada.

PAN M 360: How do you see yourself through your multiple identities?

TI: This is something I should think more about. I am very connected to Montreal… I can see myself as a settler who immigrated here, living on someone else’s land. That’s why I try to see where we are and remember who we are. But for sure, Montreal is my home. It’s really great to live here, it’s the best!