Interviews – Page 79

Photo credit: Gaetan Tracqui

Adventures in Foam (1996), Bricolage (1997), Permutation (1998), Supermodified (2000), Out From Out Where (2002)… it’s already a long time ago that Amon Tobin was flirting with old Gene Krupa-style hard swing recordings and other treasures of modern American jazz, coated with hip hop, breakbeat, drum & bass and jungle. This period coincided with an extended stay in Montreal and the rise of the English label Ninja Tune.

Preceded by Foley Room in 2007, ISAM (“Invented Sound Applied to Music”) was released in May 2011. The music on the program revealed important mutations, namely the use of new techniques intended for the production of synthetic sounds and associated with film music. This new aesthetic has been associated with innovative audiovisual performances, the fusion of music and mapping, and has been applauded at all the major festivals of digital arts and electronic music, including MUTEK, Sonar and Moogfest.

In 2015, he launched Dark Jovian, inspired by space exploration. Under the Two Fingers name, he also released the Six Rhythms EP. In 2019, Tobin founded the Nomark label and released an eighth studio album under his own name, Fear in a Handful of Dust. In October of the same year, six months later, he released his ninth album, Long Stories, largely made with an omnichord.

Released under the Two Fingers banner, the album Fight! Fight! Fight! is the pretext for the conversation, but we’re soon enough talking about six different and interrelated projects. Fear in a Handful of Dust and Long Stories, both on Nomark, 2019. Time To Run (Nomark, 2019), as Only Child Tyrant, Six Rhythms EP (Division, 2015) and Fight! Fight! Fight! (Nomark, 2020) as Two Fingers. Figuroa will make its own debut on Nomark in the coming months, with other aliases such as Paperboy and Stone Giants also making their debuts.

“Each one has their own aesthetic. Some came out under my own name. The most recent is based on catchy rhythms that could be compared to the freshest music from some of my early albums, that is, before I took a more experimental direction at the end of the previous decade. The energy and spontaneity of that time was captured and developed into a full-fledged entity of its own, with surprises added along the way, including the use of the human voice.”

It must be deduced that Tobin has not been idle, while some people associate him with an increasingly distant past.

“So there was a lot of activity, a gestation period where I developed something, doing new things that I didn’t know about, it was really intense. I didn’t want to immediately put something in place, I wanted to develop. It took shape gradually, because it was very new to me. I needed to learn before I did, and then do it again until it was good. Yes, it took time! But it’s good, I’m really happy with the result. Last year was the busiest year I’ve ever had.”

Listening to Tobin’s brand new music, it is clear that it’s both autonomous and interdependent:

“The idea is to put different things in specific lanes so that they can all develop in parallel, and they can also inform each other. Something I learn by recording a Two Fingers track will influence something in an Amon Tobin track, something I left in an Amon Tobin track will influence an Only Child Tyrant track, and so on. Then I hope to be able to feed these different projects as they grow. Nevertheless, these projects all have one thing in common, they are created with the same tools, it’s electronic music.”

Tobin’s fascination with the notion of imperfection follows a sequence in which almost obsessive perfectionism prevailed.

“At the time of the ISAM album,” he recalls, “I worked in a very technical way, in order to clarify my proposal. To achieve this very precise goal, I cut out everything that didn’t contribute to it, even if it was a nice idea. Anything that didn’t serve my purpose was excluded. It took a lot of discipline to reach a kind of end point in this process. One of the consequences of this approach was the loss of spontaneity and excitement resulting from the mistake. Because we can learn a lot from our mistakes in creation, we can have a more rewarding experience from a creative point of view.

“Hence the importance of imperfection. For me, it’s important to let this feeling of imperfection return to my artistic process. I want to welcome these things I didn’t expect, let them be born, let them live, and let spontaneity express itself in the music.”

It’s not a question of favouring the unpredictable, he notes.

“There must be a balance between random imperfection and the organization of sounds. You can’t expect to discover things from the air either, it can generate pointless music. But if the structure allows for a certain freedom, then you can reach the balance with useful elements that serve one form and also allow for reproduction in other forms. My recent music is the result of this approach.”

What are the genres found in Tobin’s recent discography? His is a multipolar and extremely diversified approach; several genres are involved, from ambient to techno through krautrock and more conceptual electroacoustics. For his part, our interviewee refuses to clearly identify the sources.

“I’m not overly concerned with musical genres, nor with the language used to describe music. If, as an artist, you are interested in the genres in the music you make, you may be more interested in an external image of yourself. This may be important when you are young, because you need to build a strong image of yourself. Over time, this becomes less and less important. Instead, it is important to feel and identify what you like. So I listen to all kinds of music created by all kinds of artists. Good music is good music, it’s in small quantities and there’s bad music in all genres… what’s the point of concentrating on it?”

One thing is certain, Amon Tobin is an artist in perpetual transformation. What he offered us in the ’90s has been constantly changing ever since. For him, the only constant is… change.

“Change,” he says, “is perpetuated by the artists but their fans are generally opposed to it. You know, this tension is understandable because artists also produce commodities, and their audiences like to understand and embrace what they consume. But my compositions don’t take the listener into account at the time of their conception. If the work is well done, however, I can change the tastes and interests of their listeners.”

Photo credit: Richmond Lam

To make up for the lack of live performances, many bands find themselves having to independently promote their albums on Instagram. The Dears followed the trend and took the opportunity to broadcast their discography live throughout the past week. A pleasant surprise for fans, who were able to chat with the band and enjoyed Lightburn’s lyrics, which are built to last, a bit like the Biblical stories that inspire him. We spoke with him to better understand what lies behind this desire to remain timeless.

PAN M 360: Lovers rock is a kind of reggae known for its romantic sound and content. Are you a fan of this genre? Does the title refer to it?

Murray Lightburn: When I was a much younger guy, I worked with someone who made me a lovers rock mixtape of all that stuff. I don’t listen to much of it now. Originally, we drew inspiration from those days, but also from The Clash a bit too. In the end, it became something totally different. Lovers Rock, for us, became a fictional place. We could have changed the name of the project altogether but it just sort of stuck.

PAN M 360: Your songs generally give the audience the incredible sense of being heard and understood. How does this benevolence come about during the writing process?

ML: That’s interesting. There isn’t a lot of intention to what we do, aside from very general things like sound and production and concrete things like that. Our work, otherwise, is abstract. We speak in terms that can be interpreted in various ways to apply to anyone who might hopefully get something from it. We take a literary approach to the lyrics. We want them to stand the test of time and hope that, even if people don’t get it now, they’ll get it later.

PAN M 360: From which paintings did you choose the covers of the singles? Do they have a symbolic meaning to you?

ML: I grew up having a depth of knowledge in Bible stories. They creep into songs from time to time. It’s not a religious thing. Some of those stories are very poetic and told using wild imagery that I’m attracted to. For example, I’m somewhat obsessed with Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Or the story of Cain and Abel. It’s some wild, wild stuff.

PAN M 360: It seems like the lyrics can be interpreted at different levels, introspection that’s personal or social. What kind of discussions do you hope to start?

ML: On this album, we examine choices that we make. There is a dark path and one guided by light that leads to love. We have to clearly define each path so we know what is clear. We feel that love is something we want to know more about, and so that is what we will always be looking for. We’ve been covering this for 25 years now. It is what we offer.

PAN M 360: The lyrics seem to reflect our current reality and what we are going through. What is your insight about the current changes we have to face individually?

ML: We’ve always sung about this stuff. Challenges are always going to be there. Some are great and universal. Some are very personal. And some are both. You could listen to almost anything in our work and apply it to what is happening now. We are like the boy who cried wolf.

PAN M 360: You said that Lovers Rock is in a way related to No Cities Left, which was written after the events of 9/11. What are the common thoughts that you had during the writing process of these two albums? What are the differences?

ML: People in charge make decisions on our behalf that we have almost no choice but to live with. It sets up a backdrop of constant impending doom. Our approach to doom is now grizzled. It strengthens our resolve. We are determined more than ever to hold each other.

PAN M 360: Your albums have an apocalyptic background for sure. At the same time, they are about love and rebirth, which makes the apocalyptic subject even more tangible or easier to grasp. How has this contrast evolved during the writing process of this album? And in comparison to your previous ones?

ML: I think what it possibly boils down to is this: I don’t take my life for granted. My life could end or the world could end. When that happens I want to be surrounded by people I love and I want them to know that I love them. And so now as I approach 50, I find myself saying “I love you” to a lot of people these days. And I do love them. I really do. Even if they drive me nuts sometimes or we don’t always agree on everything. When push comes to shove, I want to hug them and tell them that I love them and that I’ll be there for them. It’s a genuine feeling that I have inside me. That feeling was not always there. It was taken up by lots of unimportant bullshit.

PAN M 360: What do you think of the evolution of the Montreal music scene since the beginning of your career? Do you know any upcoming band or artist that you would like to talk about?

ML: I’m not really aware of many new bands in Montreal and that is 100 percent my fault, and I’m a little ashamed. I have two kids and maybe go out once a year. But at the same time, the way we find out about bands now is driven much more by bigger international press and stuff like that. When we were coming up, there was a much more robust local network to engage, and to hear about cool upcoming artists. You would come up locally first, then nationally and, if you’re lucky, internationally. There’s barely any of that kind of structure now.

Photo credit: Christian Zidouemba

“We’re a bit penalized. For sure, [radio stations] are going to prioritize the stars, Drake and company, instead of local artists. That’s the difference when you’re an English-speaking Quebec artist.” Koffee K is categorical: the road to success is harder for rappers speaking the language of Shakespeare in Quebec.

Real name Christian Zidouemba, he believes that English-speaking artists are somewhat out of the public eye in Quebec, “unless you really make it” outside the province. He’s not wrong, the gap is wide between the success stories, like Kaytranada or Arcade Fire, and emerging DIY artists.

To remedy this, Koffee K has launched a first single in French in 2019, “Diva”.

“It was to give me visibility in Quebec, and it still worked very well.” He had carved out a place for himself in the media sphere, with interviews in several major media outlets. “I’m probably going to release another song in French in collaboration with a Quebec artist… it could be another string for my bow.”

Moreover, if he had to choose a term to describe himself, musically speaking, he would choose “versatile”.

“My music, I’d say, can correspond to many vibes,” he says. “When I was growing up, I listened to a lot of different styles of music – electronic, rap, R&B, rock, metal, reggae, dancehall… It’s reflected a bit in my versatility as an artist. I’d even like to make a rock album one day. I would like to explore as many genres as I can.”

His new song, “Human Drug”, stands out from his discography and his most popular tracks, often in a lighter trap mode. In this R&B serenade, Koffee K depicts his emotional dependence on his girlfriend. “When you’re in love with someone, you develop a habit. And when you’re cut off from that person, you can go into withdrawal,” he says.

He’s recently begun to refine his style to write songs with more complex lyrics, with the aim of connecting even more with his audience. “Over time, I’ve started to make songs that go deeper, where I tell stories about how I feel. Someone once wrote to me one day to tell me he was having suicidal thoughts, and one of my songs helped him with that. I’m happy to be able to do good and at the same time do what I’m passionate about,” he says.

Looking at his Spotify profile, where more than 50,000 different people listen to him every month, you can see that references to drugs are omnipresent in his work, with tracks like “Xans”, “Backwoods” and “Lotta Dope”. However, he never intended to glorify or promote drug use. “By the time I released ‘Xans’, I wasn’t doing drugs anymore. It’s been eight months since I quit smoking. Every song I write about it is part of my journey… but I don’t want to advertise it.”

Although KK produces instrumentals and provides them to other rappers, it’s the German beatmaker ALECTO, whom he met on the web, who composes and records the majority of his tracks. It wasn’t until 2019, during a trip to Los Angeles, that he was able to shake his hand for the first time. After a call from a club promoter inviting him to perform at his establishment, he travelled to California. He took the opportunity to network with a number of players in the field.

“I don’t think I’m going to have to leave Quebec to achieve my goals. There are artists from Montreal under contract with major labels who are doing that today. But I’m going to have to go there more often, make contacts, lead a kind of second life there. The more I think about it, after the virus, I might go back and forth to L.A.,” he predicts.

The COVID-19 pandemic inevitably had an impact on Koffee K’s career, as he was in the midst of negotiations with several Montreal and American labels. “Everything is in slow motion,” he laments. While waiting to sign a contract with a record company, he will be content to release singles.

From a local perspective, the 21-year-old rapper laments the flagrant lack of solidarity between the 514 hip hop artists. “I would say that the rap scene in Montreal is pretty exclusive gangs. People don’t help each other enough. Everybody wants to be the Montreal Drake, the first person to really break through and put Montreal on the map,” he says critically. Compared to cities like Atlanta or Toronto, where Young Thug and Drake built empires in their respective area codes, the big names in Quebec rap often prefer to go it alone.

Koffee K’s ultimate goal is to collaborate with the artists he admires the most: Travis Scott, Dom Kennedy, or Snoop Dogg, to name a few. “When I’ve seen artists like them on stage, I realized that they’re human like you and me. It made me realize that it was possible to work with them someday.

“All of this, representing Montreal,” he hopes.

PAN M 360: How did your respective musical approaches connect, to become what your band is today?

Silvia Konstance Constan: Coming to Barcelona in 2014 and working in Màgia Roja, both a label and an alternative cultural centre closed last December, completely changed my life. Here I discovered most of the music that sculpted my tastes. After a few years of immersion in this underground community, I decided that I wanted to do something on my own, and I ended up jamming with Víktor and recording what would become the first song of Dame Area, “Luce”. It was at the end of the year 2015.

We started doing other songs again only in early 2017. At the beginning, we didn’t talk about the identity we wanted to have, we just started to play and little by little, we realized that we had something special.

Víktor Lux Crux: In addition to producing and recording records for several musicians, I’ve played in different projects over the last 15 years. My first serious project was the band Qa’a. The concept had to do psychedelic and tribal minimalism, combined with what Can, This Heat and Nurse With Wound were doing in the studio. At the end of 2013, I started a trio, Ordre Etern, where I did vocals and developed homemade guitars and instruments, very influenced by Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten, power electronics and black metal. In 2015, I started to have weekly DJ gig in Màgia Roja until it closed. A few months after the death of Ordre Etern in 2017, Dame Area was born and I immediately understood that I had never had a collaborator like Silvia.

PAN M 360: Màgia Roja seems to go beyond the simple framework of the show-bar. What effect has this creative space had on your musical project?

SKC: First of all, Dame Area wouldn’t exist if Màgia Roja hadn’t existed, and that explains quite well the close link between the two. Everything we experienced, learned, and discovered through Màgia Roja shaped us as people, which then translated into the music of Dame Area. A kind of symbiotic relationship.

VLC: We’d never known such a place before, which makes it harder to describe. Maybe you could say it was an anti-club, a place of freedom, very wild. The members nevertheless behaved there as a kind of extended family. People danced there in communion to sounds you’re only supposed to hear in your room. Weird and surreal situations would occur spontaneously.

PAN M 360: Given the current crisis context, how was the launch of this latest EP carried out?

VLC: There was no official launch, but before the virus arrived, I played almost all the songs at some point in Màgia Roja before playing them live, to test them somehow. In particular, “La Notte É Oscura” and “La Soluzione É Una” became kind of local hits.

PAN M 360: This is your fifth release in only two years, in addition to travelling a lot – how do you divide your time between recording, rehearsals, and touring?

SKC: Since we created Dame Area, the band has always been our passion. When we worked at Màgia Roja, we could organize ourselves to tour whenever we needed to, and I think that’s a key point compared to a normal job, where you depend on your holidays to tour. We live on the first floor of Màgia Roja and we have always rehearsed and recorded – and we always do – in the room itself, which is very convenient, because all the material is already there and all you have to do is go downstairs. This makes it possible to record songs quite quickly too.

VLC: We are both very creative and we complement each other quite well. I’m more obsessed with details and sound, while Silvia is very good at not complicating things and finishing what we are doing, so you could say that we balance each other. Our music is a free-for-all, we keep the best ideas, no matter who did what. In the end, the music is divided fairly evenly.

We don’t like to take out filler tracks, so there are a lot of discarded songs and failed experiments. So far, all our songs, without exception, have been played on the radio, which is quite remarkable for us and it would be nice if it stayed that way.

PAN M 360: On La Soluzione é Una, we find the industrial-tribal signature of your album Centro Di Gravitá. How did you approach the creation of this latest opus?

SKC: The songs of La Soluzione é Una were recorded between 2018 and 2019. It was only in the fall of last year, when we decided to release another EP, that we chose from our library some existing songs that would fit together, and the EP took shape. Three songs are like that, because that’s how it sounds for us, but it was neither intended nor planned.

VLC: There are two or three songs with tribal elements, but we consider this release as more industrial-synthetic. We didn’t put more tribal songs in this EP because we kept them for our second LP and we created a lot of songs in a ‘cold tribal’ style, so to speak. There are some Throbbing Gristle accents, but I think we are more and more influenced by ourselves, by the idea of the band.

PAN M 360: The lyrics play a central role in your music, how do they come about?

SKC: The words are always mine, even if sometimes Víktor suggested a subject or a concept. I’m very interested in the process of learning new languages and how the mind of a polyglot works. This has eventually led me to write lyrics in most of the languages I speak.

I started singing mostly in Italian. It was a way of connecting with my inner self by speaking my mother tongue that I never use while living in Barcelona. And not using it regularly helped me to find my own musicality of the language more than if I had lived in Italy and spoken it every day. Somehow I felt like having fewer rules in mind and more freedom in the use of words and syntax. Then I started to make songs in Spanish and also in Turkish, as on the song “Zaman çabuk geçiyor”, and in German.

Each language has its own musicality, and searching for it is like a challenge and a game at the same time that leads me to new ideas and melodies. Each language is linked to a different part of my character and personality and it is a door to express different aspects of myself.

PAN M 360: The situation relating to the COVID-19 crisis has been quite difficult in Spain. How can this situation, however complex, be translated into music?

SKC: We don’t count the days of confinement anymore. On the one hand, this forced break has given us time to work on our music. We’ve finished our next two releases and we’ve made about 10 new songs in the last few weeks. The music of these days helps us more than ever to escape the reality of the outside world. We’ll have to find the light at the end of the tunnel, I guess. And music will help us get through it. But who really knows what’s going to happen two weeks from now?

Photo credit: Chantal Anderson

Editor’s note: That was May 22, 2020. It was our first interview with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith on www.panm360.com and you know the rest… so far: the pandemic brings back the same topic, just as relevant a year and a half later, and 21 months after the postponement of the Caribou / Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith program originally scheduled for March 2020 and… held this Monday, November 22, 2021. That’s why we’re bringing you back for the next 48 hours this text… that you may never have read.

In her most recent creative cycle, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has linked daily exercises for physical flexibility with the practice of composition. Every day, her movements became different, and so did the music.

The multiplicity of her poses and movements, somewhere between contemporary dance, contortionism and yoga, thus constitutes a constantly renewed language, a “mosaic of transformation” intrinsically linked to her sound explorations.

It was an opportunity for her to reflect on the circulation of energy flows, both in her body and in her works. Here is the holistic expression of body movement and sound through the flow of energy: electricity.

“Electricity,” Smith points out, “allows my analog synthesizers to produce sounds, and also what makes the sound reach the ear, strikes the imagination. I was inspired by the simple fact of thinking about the capacity of electricity and how it brings my instruments to life. For me it is the most fundamental source of energy.”

As a result, The Mozaic of Transformation is a sonic testament to that admiration for electrical energy.

“You know, when you see something beautiful, whatever you can think of to replicate translates into sounds. It’s like when you’re watching a beautiful sunset – wow, it’s so beautiful. I wish others could see it – I felt like I was overwhelmed by the beauty. The inspiration for this album was electricity, and the only thing I could do was to give it sound. The intention was also to show how amazing electricity is.”

The notion of sharing is also important for Smith, who rejects the idea of shutting herself up in an ivory tower.

“I always think of music as a language, that is, I always try to refine my ability to translate inspiration and what I feel inside into a sound form that I can pass to others so that they can feel inspired in turn. This inspiration of electricity is like when I see a sunset, so beautiful that I wish others could see it. The intention is to share this inspiration.”

The dramatic arc of The Mozaic of Transformation is thus constructed:

“The short tracks follow one another and build up this framework until the last track, much longer than the others. This dramatic ascent takes you on a kind of transformation, the journey is made through constant back and forth between the combinations of sounds and music. I try to mix a lot of things. The last piece on the program was the first one I composed. The intention was to record it with a full orchestra but I didn’t find a taker. I always wish I had the resources of a chamber orchestra or a symphony orchestra. In this case, therefore, it is I alone who creates my orchestral sounds – especially from instrument samples.”

Smith, a native of Orcas Island adjacent to British Columbia, lives in Los Angeles. Trained as a musician, the 33-year-old artist followed a typical path before branching off into the atypical. “I started playing classical guitar and learning to compose for the orchestra,” she explains, “and then I switched to analogue synthesizers, and then mixed it all together. I really like the mixing of these sources.”

The composer thrives on music whose references are not immediately identifiable.

“When I studied music,” she says, “my brain was trained to identify music theory, instrumentation and production elements. Today, I’m inspired by music excluding the analysis of its construction. I like music when my brain gives in to it, period. The Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, for example, is a great source of inspiration for me. I didn’t try to find out how he made his music, but I know now that it’s a mixture of orchestral and electronic music.”

After the release of her excellent album The Kid in 2017, Smith has directed her creative energy in several directions. She founded Touchtheplants, a multi-disciplinary ecosystem for projects hosting the first installments of her instrumental electronic series and texts on the practice of inner listening. In the same vein, she has continued to explore the textural possibilities of electronic instruments as well as the forms, movements, and expressions found in the relationship of the human body to sound and colour.

One of the most accomplished American composers of her generation, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith also acknowledges the feminine electricity that nourishes her work, although..

“I’m glad that this feminine energy is received as such, but I try not to compare my work with that of other women. And… if the feminine energy is always there in the music, I don’t think it comes exclusively from female bodies. I hear a lot of female energy coming from male bodies as well. I’m not exactly sure… it’s a complex thing…”

Let the mysteries do their work.

Photo credit: Anna Webber

Sparks are a nice anomaly in the little story of the big pop family. Since their debut record in 1972, and more particularly their breakthrough with the now-classic Kimono My House and the 1974 masterpiece This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us, brothers Ron and Russell Mael have never ceased to surprise and reinvent themselves, from one album to the next. Slightly strange and nonconformist, always hyper-stylish, the two musicians have touched on all kinds of styles over the years, from glam-rock to electro-pop, bubblegum, baroque pop, classical music, music-hall numbers and film scores. While the duo has never had the success of Queen, with whom one could vaguely compare Sparks, their influence on popular music is enormous. From Björk to New Order, from Faith No More to The Smiths, Depeche Mode, and Franz Ferdinand (with whom the Mael brothers formed the band FFS in 2015), the Los Angeles duo is what you might call a cult band.

Now in their seventies without sounding it, the Mael brothers are back with A Steady Drip Drip Drip, a refreshing album that follows from their previous, Hippopotamus, released in 2017 – a record that catapulted the Sparks to #7 on the British charts, 40 years after their last Top 10 appearance.

Which longtime artists can still boast of being as relevant as ever after more than 50 years of music? You can count them on the fingers of one hand. One wonders then, what is it that still motivates Sparks so much? Ron Mael, the keyboard player with the perennial little moustache, didn’t answer this question, but he told us about his influences, Jacques Tati, Leos Carax, aesthetics, humour, the new Sparks and many other things.

PAN M 360: Does A Steady Drip Drip follow a bit what you did with Hippopotamus, that is, a return to shorter songs and a more pop format?

Ron Mael: In a way, yes. Stylistically and aesthetically, it isn’t a radical departure. There have been albums that we’ve done where we tried to completely sever the line from the previous album and started from zero, but we felt that we came up with something strong with Hippopotamus, that maybe we could continue from that sort of a mood or general feeling behind it. The songs don’t sound like they’re from that album, which is the idea that it’s a collection of songs done in a variety of different styles we enjoyed working in. It’s a progression from that album. You know, it’s very hard for us to judge it objectively, but we feel there is more depth and substance to this album than Hippopotamus.

PAN M 360: Who did you work with for the new album?

RM: Russell does all of the engineering. We produced all of our last six or seven albums. Russell has a studio in his house, about seven minutes from where I am, so it’s pretty easy for us to record. We worked with many great producers in the past but I think we’ve learned enough to be able to make good decisions about things, and be really merciless as far as choosing the right songs and that sort of thing. For the Hippopotamus album, we gathered a band that we felt was strong, young, and passionate, and also true to sounding like Sparks, so we had them over in the studio to play on the songs that are more rock- or pop-orientated on this new album.

PAN M 360: On some tracks, you seem to have gotten back to a sound that you had in the ’70s, with more guitars, more pop-rock sounding and less electro…

RM: Not necessarily. There’s all kind of different styles on the album. Something like “Please Don’t Fuck Up My World” [the album’s first, premonitorily titled single, released in December 2019], “One for the Ages” or “Left Out in the Cold”. Those, I wouldn’t consider particularly ‘band’ songs. There are things that are more aggressive, like “I’m Toast” and others, but the intention was never to be going back to our ’70s sound, because we just don’t do that.

PAN M 360 : To what extent do you attach importance to aesthetics or image?

RM: We kind of don’t separate music from the image and the visuals, since the very beginning. When we were starting in Los Angeles, the L.A. bands in general were only into the music, and if you had any kind of visual sense at all, you were seen as detracting from the music. So we felt a kinship with British bands, where the visual side was something that was very important. I think that’s carried through to this day, it’s just natural for us to put a lot of emphasis on the visual and our personas as well.

PAN M 360: Is this why you’ve always had these kind of tongue-in-cheek lyrics? To counterbalance the aesthetics? To show that you guys aren’t taking yourself too seriously?

RM: There is humour, but we always try to have another side to our lyrics, a more serious side, because we don’t want to be a comedy band, so our lyrics need to have depth but yes, there is a lot of humour on the surface and if you dig deeper, there is another layer that’s either bittersweet or has some kind of other meaning.

PAN M 360 : A Steady Drip Drip Drip is your 24th record. Over the years, you’ve made a lot of different-sounding albums. What would you say are your main influences, from the early years to now?

RM: When we first started, our influences were early Who and The Kinks. British bands who were really flashy and were writing about subject matters that were very specific, like writing about tattoos and all that sort of things. But over time, we kind of don’t really feel like we’re getting that much out of other people in order to incorporate it into our music. There have been influences along the way as far as producers, like when we worked with Giorgio Moroder in the late ’70s [No. 1 In Heaven and Terminal Jive], it was with the intention of incorporating an electronic sound into what we were doing, so he was more than just an influence, he really had big responsibility for that.

PAN M 360: After some 50 years of making records, in retrospect, what would you say you are the most proud of?

RM: Just maintaining a level of quality for that long is very difficult, because at a certain point, you can kind of say, “I’ve done all I can and now I just wanna relax and do an easy album that’s kind of looking backwards”. Thinking retrospectively, we’ve never done that, we’ve always been pushing. So from our perspective, the thing of having many albums that we think are of really high quality, and also moving things forward in one way or another, that’s something that we are especially proud of. And we’re also proud that there are people that have been following Sparks from the very beginning, and that there are new people coming in.

PAN M 360: Do you have any regrets?

RM: Not for something that we did, but rather things that did not happen. We were working for a short time in the mid-’70s with the French director Jacques Tati, but that film unfortunately never came to pass, just because of health issues and money issues to get that film made. So in that sense, yes, we really regret that that couldn’t happen. It was a film called Confusion and we met with him several times in Paris. He had this idea of a small French TV station and that we were brought in as experts from America to help solve their problems, all in a Tati kind of way. We were huge fans of his. At least we were offered the opportunity to work with him for a short time, and just to see how amazing he was, just like the Hulot character in real life.

PAN M 360: You have a strong penchant for theater and movies. You directed the radio musical The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman in 2009 and also presented it on stage in 2011, and you recently worked on another film project.

RM: Yes, a movie musical directed by Leos Carax that was finished being shot towards the end of last year. We shot mostly in Brussels and a little bit in Germany and Los Angeles. Leos Carax finished editing the film in time for it to be premiered at the Cannes film fest, but unfortunately that’s not happening, so whenever the next festival is occuring, it will be shown there. Maybe at the end of August, there’s the Venice film festival and the Toronto one in early September. But no one really knows what is gonna happen. It’s a project that we came up with about eight years ago. We never really intended it to be a movie, but rather a live show and maybe a Sparks album, but we went to the Cannes film fest around that time just to try to sell that an additional project we were working on. We were introduced to Leos Carax, who had used a song of ours in his movie Holy Motors, so we talked with him for a while and, once back in L.A., we thought that we should send him this other idea we had to see what he thinks… and he told us he wanted to direct it! But it took eight years for everything to come together, as far as financing and finding actors. So its starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard.

We’re hoping we can play Montreal at some point
because it’s been way too long.

PAN M 360: You do all the music for this film?

RM: Yeah. The story is something we came up, with and most of the music is close to what it was eight years ago. It’s just that Leos Carax wanted to have some of his personality in the thing, so there are additional pieces of music that we wrote and other things that were slightly altered, but in general it’s quite close to our original idea. Ninety-five percent of this film is songs. And both actors do such an incredible job. It’s just a thrill for us to be able to hear things that we wrote and have actors of that quality doing performances on that music.

The movie is called Annette. It’s basically about a shock comedian that Adam Driver plays. He’s really abrasive and kind of abusive to the audience, but also really popular, and he has an affair with an opera singer played by Marion Cotillard. So it’s kind of an unlikely pairing of the two. Then they have a child, and that child has some special talents, which the film is about. His career is taking a nose-dive while hers is skyrocketing, and the conflicts between the two set off a lot of fireworks. I cannot reveal more.

Photo credit: Béatrice Vézina-Bouchard

“Since 2015,” he begins, “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Gaspésie, but I have been there full-time for the past two years. I lived there in a yurt until 2018 and then I bought a house in the area of Maria, at the foot of the mountains. I had a girlfriend at first, then we split up, I ‘hermit’. I won’t always live alone, but I needed that quiet.”

Chocolat, the band that once introduced the singer to the world, and which has returned to the forefront in recent years to the delight of its fans, is on an indefinite break.

“It’s a group effort! Decision making and all that,” sighs the singer. “When my father passed away, we were in the studio doing Jazz engagé, I was between Gaspésie and Montreal at the time. At the end of the sessions, I felt that I might not be able to continue. But we went on tour in France anyway and… at the end of it all, I didn’t feel like doing any more shows, I didn’t feel like doing anything at all. I’d had some creative years with the return of Chocolat and three more albums. I’d squeezed that lemon dry.”

The death of his father was a turning point.

“It’s always a time for great reflections on life, for introspection. My father and I didn’t see each other physically very often, but we were very connected. Sometimes I didn’t see him for several months, I rarely saw him towards the end, once a year. Since he died, I realize we had a lot in common. He had really influenced me, much more than I thought.”

After death, life: Jimmy Hunt conceived Le silence in his Gaspesian solitude. The project of long-form writing finally turned into that of writing concisely.

“I thought I’d decorate my preferred texts, but in the end, I liked them that way. Things can happen when you read such lyrics, the imagination can work more. In the beginning, the music was ambient around the lyrics, rather shapeless. It was interesting but too flimsy. I chose chords and melodic lines while keeping the lyrics super simple.”

Apart from Hunt’s voluntary simplicity, the minimalism he chose was appropriate at the time.

“We’re bombarded with information, an overflow of pitches. It feels good to have a little space created by a minimalist statement. I talked to the people from Dare to Care about the short duration of the record. Add a bit of filler to get to 40 minutes and a bit? Uh… no. It’s the result that counts, which is a good thing in itself. It’s a good time for creation in that sense, there’s room for all formats.”

Hunt walks us through his new record, song by song:

“Étoiles”

“I’m still planning to write and I’m going to end up doing a songbook. Obviously, I have several fragments of a longer format on my computer. Like this: one evening, I was coming back from a neighbour’s house and I thought that my literary work wasn’t making sense. The sky was starry at the time, I had a panorama of beauty in front of me while I was living this doubt, this creative malaise. I finally came up with this text about doubt in creation. Aesthetically, it creates a beautiful image, I think.”

“Les gens qui m’aiment”

“Being publicly recognized can turn into a form of narcissism, that’s what I’m talking about in this song. Towards the end, the lyrics become darker, the narrator becomes the the holy light of the people who love him. In real life, I’m not a superstar, these lyrics are ironically pompous, exaggerated. With the music, however, the text becomes more touching, more sensitive.”

“Recommencer”

“Doing my life over, wanting to start over, that’s a typical midlife crisis reflection. The text is somewhat ironic when the narrator wants to become a virgin again and fall in love with a writer. Since he can’t be one, he might admire one. I didn’t add anything to the original text of this song because I would probably have weakened it.”

“Vieux amis”

“I was taught about the microbial phenomenon in science shows. These organisms are found in our intestines and have existed for millions of years. Microbiota cause us to exchange microbes with other humans, they influence our behaviour. They encourage us to socialize and share, which is something we avoid at present. Microbiota don’t like the pandemic! In short, our intestines steer us; we are less in control of the boat than we might think! So, I brought the subject back to the context of isolation and solitude, and to the questioning of my own identity and control over my life. »

“L’arbre”

“I wrote this erotic text, I reworked it into song form. It’s a kind of forest myth (laughs).”

“La chute”

“This waterfall exists, it’s on my land. In winter, it is covered with turquoise ice, the water flowing underneath produces beautiful sounds. I think it’s wonderful that it’s been happening like this for a very long time, usually without a spectator.”

“Ambulance”

“My father died alone in his cabin. A neighbour found him, my brothers and I arrived when he was at the morgue. I was shocked that strangers brought his lifeless body back in an ambulance and put it in a drawer (which is quite normal).”

“Mental”

“It’s a love separation song. Someone was writing my bio for the album and thought I was still talking about my father… you can see it that way, I’d rather leave it open. It’s also about mental illness; everyone has their own problems, there are moments of peace when you reach equilibrium and then you get caught up. We’re only safe from our ills for a short time.”

“La décroissance”

“There are these social movements that question consumption and capitalism, which I’m putting here in perspective with my own distancing. The ultimate goal is to take a step back to find a more viable path, to be distant from others to finally get closer to them.”

“Le silence”

“Winter was beginning when I wrote this. I couldn’t wait for the snow to set in, to think about something else while the scenery changes and the whiteness appears.”

The lyrics on this album, as you can imagine, are not carried by heavily weighted music, although…

“I wanted to go for experimental sounds at first, but it was a bit too much. We recorded some pedal steel, it steered the matter towards a kind of Americana folk, while highlighting more instrumental moments, close to psychedelia, prog or space-rock à la Pink Floyd. But no musical genre manifests itself very clearly.”

What’s the bottom line, Jimmy?

“It’s not a fireworks display. It’s composed and calm, it’s a good representation of my state of mind, where I was during its conception.”

PAN M 360: The album was written and recorded before the passing of important people in your life. Mike, it was your wife, and Rob, it was your dad. How does it feel to promote it?

Mike Di Salvo: What’s past is past. You know, personally speaking, I live in every day. It’s in the past, so when I listen to that record, it’s a record that speaks to me of perseverance and strength. We were one unit that put this album out together, even through all that craziness that was happening. It’s an album that I can listen to and feel quite good about, actually.

Rob Milley: I can never be in Mike’s shoes and he’s not in my shoes, but, basically, the album is like a moment in time for all of our lives, and unfortunately, some sad events happened. Now that the album is out – and I only speak for myself – but it’s kind of putting a finality to whatever I was feeling through the making of it. I definitely feel good, now that the album is out. That, in a way, I can move on?

PAN M 360: If we say that an album captures a moment in time, do you feel that Come Forth to Me is still prevailing because you began working on it in 2012 and we are now 2020?

MD: The album is still fresh to me, even though we started this up in 2012. I think it’s sort of a testament of my belief in the record and the songs. When I listen to it, there’s not a moment where I want to fast-forward through it. The record was built through a bonding, you know. We wrote this album collectively, even though Rob and I had some ideas before we brought the other two in [bassist Oli Pinard and drummer Tommy McKinnon], but ultimately, this is a real testament of four people putting together an album that in the end I still feel is very, very fresh.

PAN M 360: Did you have a goal when you started working together?

RM: It was basically just me and Mike. We just wanted to get together for the pure goal of creating music. Just the creativity, not to make a name for ourselves or anything like that. It was just to create music together because we’ve been friends for a long time and were also jamming prior to that. It was just pure creativity, right, Mike?

MD: Yeah, it was for the love of music. Rob would come in with songs pretty much already seasoned out. And then, I had some words. We crafted the two together and then it just spun out to where we are now.

PAN M 360: Did you want to explore a specific style of music together, or just go with the flow?

MD: Everything that you hear on the record was by design. We didn’t want something that was gonna be cookie-cutter, everything just sort of 1-2-3-4. We did want something that was gonna be technically sound, but also progressive in ways that could expand the sound and head in different directions. These songs were written for us. So that’s the starting point. We wanted to expand on the sound and bring people into another territory that perhaps they wouldn’t be expecting. I think that we achieved what we were looking for.

RM: We spent about four to five years, taking our time, like Mike was saying. We were doing it for ourselves. There was no deadline, where we had to have something finished and then maybe have regrets after. We took as much time as we thought we needed and that’s why we’re saying that we are very, very satisfied.

PAN M 360: You could have worked another five years.

MD: That’s true! (laughs)

PAN M 360: So who told you to stop?

RM: We could have, but I mean, we also realized that we felt like it was nearing the completion. We can tell these songs are now complete. You asked about our goals, and one of our main goals was to record this album with all the musicians together in one room. Kind of old-school, like they used to. So that when we listen to the album, we can actually feel the human energy. I don’t want to sound mystical but you can feel it’s humans playing this. Not like nowadays, everybody recording everything on a computer where everything is separated and it’s very robotic.

PAN M 360: My favourite song on the album is “Souvenir Gardens”. This is your cinematic song.

MD: I think that’s largely thanks to Luc Lemay’s talent and generosity. We had been speaking with Luc, because we are obviously big fans of his. He was also very motivated and interested in doing something for us. When we heard the results of what he sent us, we were blown away! Basically, we were not expecting what we heard, in a good way. It is very cinematic in a way, and it complements perfectly the rest of the songs, once it gets into the heaviness. It’s a perfect combination to have that.

PAN M 360: The first songs on the album reflect what I was expecting from Akurion. Then come “Souvenir Gardens”, that show us that Akurion is more than that.

MD: We did want that, for sure. We did want people to have a journey with this album. We wanted to have an experience that was going to hopefully bring something new to the table. Then again, when we were putting this album together we weren’t thinking about what people were gonna think. It was really if we’re listening to this, we want to have this soundscape, this projecting kind of album that brings you in different directions at every turn. Then, of course, once everything is realized, then you can start to sort of say, well, hopefully people fall on the same sort of path that we’ve been on.

We reached Jason Williamson in Nottingham, stuck at home like everyone else. Dressed in a dressing gown, the vindictive singer of the minimal rap-punk duo he forms with beatmaker Andrew Fearn talked with us about glue, politics and Brexit, his enemies and of course the Sleaford Mods.

PAN M 360: Jason, can you tell us a bit about the album and its title?

Jason Williamson: All that Glue is the name of the first song we ever wrote, me and Andrew. It was written in 2012, or maybe earlier, possibly 2011. It’s going to be available as a flexi-disc on the ‘gold ’ version of the album. We thought it was a good answer to what Sleaford Mod is. There’s obviously echoes of punk in it. It’s a very DIY-orientated style of music, very minimal, very street-sounding…

PAN M 360: Was it difficult for you to choose among all your songs? You have a good ten albums and four EPs.

JW: It was not too difficult to choose the songs for the album. We just didn’t want to put out a greatest-hits album, or a singles album, you know? We are not a greatest-hits band for a start, we haven’t sold millions of records, we are not internationally known on a larger scale and we didn’t want to do a singles thing because we thought it was too obvious, so we collated a lot of stuff from all our albums, along with some singles and also some unreleased stuff.

PAN M 360: Where do the unreleased songs come from?

JW: These more obscure songs were recorded mostly when we were doing albums or EPs, between 2013 and 2016, and we thought that some of them deserved to be put out because they’re just as strong as the albums tracks. We also wanted to give an atmosphere to the period of time, which is from 2013 to 2019. There are no live songs on the album, but all the songs have been remastered. A lot of these songs are very difficult to find today because you can’t get the albums they’re taken from anymore. So it was important for us to make those available once again.

PAN M 360: And as for your material released before 2013, that too is very hard to find.

JW: None of the stuff I did before Andrew is on this album though. There’s actually a double album called Retweeted, where it’s all pre-Andrew stuff on it.

PAN M 360: On the albums recorded before Andrew’s arrival, you had a different sound, with more sampling and sounds that were often punk and ’60s, whereas now you advocate a much more minimal, hip hop-like musical approach. Have you thought about going back to your sound from the first albums?

JW: We tried it a couple of times but it doesn’t work, it’s just not us. Andrew’s music is very personal. And it doesn’t need fucking with a lot. And I think using guitars the way I used to does not work. He does use guitars but in his own way. There was a time and a place for that music. Things move on, at least that’s how I look at it.

PAN M 360: You usually attract an older audience, which you don’t see so often in concert halls. Why do you think people over 35 like you so much?

JW: I think it’s a kind of music older people relate to. It’s got a lot of history to it, a lot of punk and post-punk. That first wave of authentic ’70s punk, I mean. It possesses a lot of that, and a lot of new-wave punk as well. That’s generally why we get a lot of older people at our shows.

PAN M 360: Many of the Sleaford Mods’ lyrics have a socio-political angle. Do you think that music can change politics?

JW: No, no. I think music can change people’s opinions a little bit but I don’t think it can change politics. It’s not a powerful enough machine in order to shift the monster that is politics. Politics are complacent, and it affects every little bit of our lives. Music too, you could argue just as well to a certain degree, but I don’t think music is a big enough vehicle to go into combat against politics. But there have been times where it shifted the social landscape. There have been times where it made politicians aware of it. But generally speaking, as we go forward, as the world becomes smaller, more controlled by right-wing factions, it’s not something that’s on an equal playing ground.

PAN M 360: What do you think of Brexit?

JW: I don’t like it, it’s horrible. I voted to remain in the European Union. We’re not prepared for it at all, there is no justification for it, absolutely none. If there was a justification for it that made sense, then fair enough, but there isn’t! It was just political games played for and by the elite. Its a neoliberal idea that is just stupid. It’s not for the people, it’s for a few business minds and that’s it. It’s gonna be a disaster, absolute disaster.

PAN M 360: In your lyrics, you often flay artists, politicians and other personalities in passing. Do you think you have a lot of enemies?

JW: Yeah, I would imagine there are some people who don’t like me very much (laughing). You can’t blame them, you know (laughing again). I wouldn’t like me very much. But generally speaking, fuck ’em! It’s a competition, come on, let’s see what you got, what have you got? Are you bleeding when you do this, because if you’re not, then it’s of no interest. A lot of people out there claim to be something that they’re not, which is a problem. It’s fine if you wanna be Britney Spears or One Direction, that’s fine, there’s a place for that music, but don’t try to say you’re something else when all you are basically doing is that. That’s what angers me.

PAN M 360: Your words are never limited to a few banal sentences and avoid the many clichés. What inspires you? Does this pandemic inspire you?

JW: Life! And stuff I’m listening to now, sometimes. Before, I would only listen to hip hop or punk, but now I listen to a whole range of things, because I’m a different person, I’ve grown more, I’ve started communicating with other musicians and not necessarily people that play the same music as me. Yes, this pandemic does inspire me, in a little way. We’re gonna see what happens. This is such a massive moment in history that it has to be handled correctly. You can’t just write some shit about it. It’s gotta be communicated in a way that will make me remember it for what it was.

PAN M 360: For the first time in your career, you made Top 10 with your previous album Eton Alive. How does it feel, after that?

JW: (laughs) It’s alright, it’s nice to have a top-ten. Look, I’ve got it tattooed on my arm, Eton Alive. I’m really proud of that, you know? Moving forward is more of an issue. You’ve got to constantly be aware of the music and not let the quality of it slip. You got to constantly please yourself and ask yourself, do you really like this still? Is this something you’re still interested in? All of these things, I’m more concerned with.

PAN M 360: Do you feel pressure for the next album? Do you have one in the works?
JW: No, because we don’t really put ourselves under any pressure. People expect a good album, and that’s what we’ll do. We’re not going to reinvent ourselves because there is no point, we don’t need to. We’re not a massive stadium act. All what people expect from us is to be Sleaford Mods, and that’s what we’ll continue to be. Yeah, we’re working on one now. We were fortunate to go in the studio at the start of the year, so we managed to do three good tracks. Now Andrew is sending me some new music so hopefully lockdown restrictions will be lifted a little bit, so we could go to the studio, at least just me and him and someone else.

It’s 4:30 in the morning in Montreal, and we have a video appointment with Blixa Bargeld at his Berlin home. No way to get a more accommodating time slot. That’s what his assistant tells us, Blixa prefers to do his interviews in the morning.

Always a bit overdressed, in a black suit, the man, in quarantine for 63 days (“I’m super careful,” he tells us), welcomes us in what seems to be his office. Behind him, we can see files, books, notebooks, impeccably arranged. White walls, no decoration. The leader of the German band – which also includes N.U. Unruh, Alexander Hacke, Jochen Arbeit, and Rudolf Moser – seems wide awake. He has just done three interviews before ours, and a few others will follow, because very soon Einstürzende Neubauten will release Alles in Allem, the fruit of 100 days of studio work and at the same time a review of the 40 years of activity of the Berlin noise collective.

“Alles in Allem is a fairly common expression in German, the sum of all sums. But in the context in which I used this expression, it’s more of a holistic statement that would rather mean, everything is in everything,” explains the singer and guitarist. “I’ve always preferred to name an album after the title of one of the songs on it. It’s a pretty classic method, I admit, but for this album, the original title was supposed to be Welcome to Berlin, except that the song “Welcome to Berlin” didn’t end up on the album after all. On reflection, I thought Alles in Allem fit well as a title, especially as our previous album was called Alles wieder offen. So there’s a sort of sequel aspect to it.”

Released in 2007, Alles wieder offen was the last “official” EN album, i.e. including new compositions and intended for the general public, but it’s not quite the last album from Einstürzende Neubauten. The German band hasn’t been sitting idly for thirteen years! There was the fourth installment of the Strategies Against Architecture compilations in 2010, Lament in 2014 (a studio reconstruction of a performance commissioned by the city of Diksmuide in Belgium to mark the beginning of the First World War), the Greatest Hits of 2016 (a rather ironic title), then Grundstück two years later, an album intended only for the band’s supporters, i.e. those who follow and help the band financially.

“I didn’t feel like making another official album, that is, intended for the traditional market,” says the former Bad Seed Bargeld. “But it was after I came back from Hong Kong in January 2019 that I got the urge to do it again. I couldn’t sleep because of the jet lag and suddenly I thought, it’s time to make a new album! So once again, with the help of our supporters, we decided to spend 100 days in the studio, and then there would be an album at the end.”

How was Alles in Allem created? Who are the fans and what was their role in this record? To these questions, Blixa Bargeld launches into a long explanation: “Crowdfunding was invented in 2002, before the term even existed. My wife (Erin Zhu) actually invented it and created the platform to collect donations because we wanted to do what we wanted to do, without the constraints of a record company, and for that you need money. So, depending on a certain amount of money, we allow fans to follow us live in the studio, listen to our rough mixes and give us their comments and suggestions. Then, we see if it makes sense or not, and if it’s a good idea, we apply it,” Bargeld explains.

“No record company would be willing to spend money on such a project. But thanks to our supporters, we can do it. It allows us to continue working the way we like, the whole band in the same room and not separated in several cubicles. I would even say that it forces us to concentrate on knowing that our supporters are watching us. From the moment we turn on the webcams in the studio, I know that we’re going to be efficient and that we’re not going to waste any time. So what we have to understand is that the fans don’t collaborate, they don’t tell us what to do, they tell us what they like or don’t like. And I think this kind of feedback is very constructive and important, just like a friend would do if you play your demo songs and asked him or her what he or she thinks, except that we have a lot of friends! So for this album, there is a single version and a box that includes an extra disc, a DVD that summarizes the 100 days in the studio and a 140-page book that tells the whole creative process of each song, from beginning to end. This box will be commercially available, but we are offering it to our supporters.”

Ich bin ein Berliner

Born in West Berlin in 1980, Einstürzende Neubauten has always afforded the city an important place in its music, an influence that is particularly apparent on the new album, with tracks such as “Am Landwehrkanal”, “Grazer Damm”, “Wedding” and “Tempelhof”.

“Of course this city is an influence. If you grew up in West Berlin and still live there today, you can’t forget the Wall. It’s part of you. For me, living in this city cut in two and lost behind the Iron Curtain was normal. Like I was on an island. It was when the band started playing outside Berlin, in Hamburg, Cologne and elsewhere, that I realised how different and unusual West Berlin was,” says the versatile musician, who has also collaborated with Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, in the experimental electro group ANBB.

“I left Berlin in 2002 to settle in San Francisco, then moved to Beijing in 2004, and returned to live in Berlin in 2010. The neighbourhood where I live (Scheunenviertel/Mitte) is the most expensive in the city, completely victim to gentrification with a lot of new modern buildings. But when I left in 2002, it looked like the Second World War had just ended the day before, with half-kaputt buildings, whose facades were still marked by bullet and shrapnel impacts. So I’m technically in Berlin, but for me, it’s not Berlin.”

Multiple tongues

Since their beginnings, the Neubauten crew have been advocating the use of the German language in their lyrics, but in the mid-’90s, they started to include lyrics in all sorts of different languages, a way of writing that has more or less become the band’s trademark – and Montrealers are the originators of it.

“We always had German lyrics until we started working with the Montreal dance troupe La La La Human Steps, who asked us if we could have more than just German lyrics. So we tried, especially with the album Tabula Rasa (1993), which was largely designed for this dance troupe. I managed to write multilingual lyrics for all the songs on the album and since then, I’ve never stopped writing in that way, I find it far too seductive,” Bargeld reveals. “For instance, ‘Ten Grand Goldie’ (the first single from Alles in Allem) has lyrics in German, English, Czech and Tagalog. There’s only ‘La Guillotine de Magritte’ (found on the box set) with lyrics in English only, apart from the title! But my wife prefers when I write in German…”

It’s in the bag

Apart from the multilingual aspect (and the emblematic logo!), the other characteristic of Einstürzende Neubauten is of course its DIY instruments, invented from scratch and not necessarily reused from one album to another. For Alles in Allem, the pioneers of industrial music opted for a common, everyday object, but one not as banal as it might seem. It all depends on what you do with it.

“The only new things I’ve wanted to use for a while are these… bags! The only new things I’ve been wanting to use for a while are these… bags,” Bargeld says as he shows us, on his phone, a picture of a grocery bag with handles – bright eyed, like a child showing off his best toy. While the man may sometimes seem uncompromising, not hesitating to correct you if you use the wrong word, he is not lacking in humour and playfulness.

“You know those bags? In Berlin slang, they’re called migrant koffer (migrant suitcases),” laughs Bargeld. “You see them everywhere, they’re made of a kind of thick plastic that makes a noise when you crumple them up. It’s not the kind of object that jumps out at you and says, I want to be a musical instrument. You have to have a certain strategy to get something out of it. My first idea was to fill them with helium because I thought it would be great to have them up to the ceiling of a concert hall during our performances, like balloons. But it couldn’t work. Then we filled them with these Styrofoam pieces that we use for the postal parcels, except that not everybody in the band liked it because we’ve already used this kind of material, so we decided to fill them with cloth and put a microphone inside… and it was perfect!

“There are no good or bad sounds. All sounds are okay,
it’s the context that’s important.”

“It creates an impressive bass sound, very loud, and hitting the outside of the bag with a stick almost sounds like you’re playing on a drum set. Then we came up with another idea: solo bags! For the song ‘Taschen’, we filled the bags with small containers in which we put coins, nails, noodles and peas, and then handled them as if they were maracas. We used that on the rhythms of machines I’d recorded on a construction site in China a few years ago. To this, Rudolf (Moser) added some of his gamelan made from small pieces of metal. That’s when I realised we had something, and it inspired me to write the lyrics for ‘Taschen‘. It’s for this song that I wrote the last lyrics of the record. I woke up in the middle of the night with the words, wältz die Wogen (“roll the waves”) in my head, and I thought it was a strange sentence in German, so I googled to see if anyone had ever written it and I came across Friedrich Nietzsche. So I figured, if Nietzsche wrote it, I can, too,” Bargeld says.

“What it illustrates is that there are no good or bad sounds. All sounds are okay, it’s the context that’s important. If the use of these percussion bags, gamelan, and solo bags helped me find lyrics for a song, it’s because the sounds make sense.”

Photo credit: Nathaniel Huard

PAN M 360: This new project is quite ambitious. How did the creation and composition process go?

Carmen Ruiz: We took the time to think about it, to go deeper into what we wanted to communicate. It took a lot of patience, love and resilience…

Juan Sebastian Mejia: It’s a beautiful puzzle. If it holds together, it’s thanks to our artistic vision and the values we share, but above all thanks to the great creative freedom of each of our members. And all this creativity is then put into the big, collective pot.

CR: Our greatest challenge, and at the same time our greatest success – and we’re proud of it – is to be able to present this great diversity while maintaining artistic coherence.

PAN M 360: Are there any new influences that have been added to your palette since Revuelta Danza Party?

CR: We’re more and more rooted in our cumbiero groove, but our range of influences is even greater, more global. Our cumbia is very nomadic.

PAN M 360: This time, you decided to entrust the production to someone outside the orchestra, why?

CR: We are a fairly large collective and our vocation is above all artistic. To help us do our creative work well, we increasingly seek – it’s in our nature – to surround ourselves with collaborators.

So we were looking for someone with an outside point of view, but who can also teach us new things, allow us to meet new artists… and even manage time in the studio.

JSM: And then Christian [Castango] taught us that what we needed to do was to go even further and deeper in our approach. He believes very much in us and in his work, and he has been a great listener. He’s also a recording artist and he loved working at BreakGlass Studio with James Benjamin, the sound engineer. We’re very happy with the studio and producer choices we made.

We also invited two other outside collaborators to take care of the staging of the album, the directors Ricard Soler Mallol and Patrick Léonard from Les 7 Doigts de la Main.

CR: We must not forget either that all this was made possible thanks to the support of the various Canada Council for the Arts, of course, but also of FACTOR and all those who participated in ULULE’s socio-financing campaign, for which we are very grateful.

PAN M 360: And how did the recording sessions go?

JSM: It was memorable. The people at BreakGlass Studios were very welcoming, there was a real family spirit, a spirit of sharing. Everybody was happy to do something beautiful and real together.

As for Christian, he gave his 110 percent during the 10 days of recording sessions. He knew how to navigate the waters of GKO, and how to steer the boat well throughout the crossing.

PAN M 360: You also had a guest, can you tell us about him?

CR: Zilien [Biret] is a guest, but at the same time he’s part of the family. He left the ship a few months before the recording of the album. He decided to follow his creative instincts and his desire to work as a herbalist and move to the country. “Takamaka”, which he plays on the Colombian gaïta hembra [a flute made from a hollowed-out cactus stem], is a bit of a farewell gift to the GKO.

PAN M 360: Given that the new album is the music for a show with narrative and choreography, do you plan to preview it via Internet streaming, or will you wait until you can present it in front of an audience?

JSM: We will wait. In the meantime, we continue to explore stage possibilities.

PAN M 360: How do you use this period of confinement to recharge your batteries?

CR: Right now, we’re breathing, we’re trying to accompany each other as best we can, and as a group, we’re trying to listen to each other and respect each other’s way of living this very special moment.

PAN M 360: What music do you listen to?

JSM: The playlists we created on Spotify and YouTube. We invite you to listen to them too. You can discover some of our references and inspirations for the album.

CR: We hope that in these difficult times, for all of you, VelkomBak can be a breath of strength, hope and desire to continue to imagine the world and dance together.

Come and celebrate the launch of the new album with us in a Zoom event starting at 8 pm.

Photo credit: John Londono

Catherine Major, her husband Jean-François Moran, and their four children have been living in the Eastern Townships for about two years. In an era of disillusionment and global concerns, they have their own life strategy – a large family, a steady supply of songs, professional independence, a bucolic setting, a hint of autarchy.

“We were fed up with living on a third floor in Outremont,” says Major, reached at home. “I had our third child in town, so we thought we should move from there. We needed land, the countryside for our family, and that was the best move we made. And then I got pregnant by surprise, I had my fourth child in the country. I’m still breastfeeding Carmen! Well, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of work.”

Despite the pandemic and its dramatic impact on the cultural economy, life goes on and the Major-Moran couple intends to celebrate it.

“Things are going pretty well professionally, though less so now with COVID-19. I have a lot of projects, I’m in demand on a lot of projects. For example, I did Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Kent Nagano. In addition to writing and creating his songs, Jean-François is also a part-time artistic director at Ad Litteram, a record and publishing company.”

Catherine and her husband are very aware of the current economic situation, but they are not giving up and are staying the course.

“We try not to be too insecure. We have a big house, we have to pay the bills and Jean-François does all the work, renovates everything… We just spent eight weeks with our four children, 10 years, six years, three years, and nine months. I’m a demanding person, I want to do it all and leave nothing half-done. Our relationship has changed a lot, it’s better than it ever was. We have our peculiarities like everyone else, but we move fast, we move forward well. We’re not perfect, we have to compromise, we can hit walls… sometimes we’re out of breath. We’re meant to be together, we might as well work together!”

Carte mère describes the situation well: Catherine Major is the undisputed mother of her record project.

“I began by opening up to the idea of working alone,” she says. “I bought a computer, I learned to master production software, I started to play around with it. Before that, I was always at the mercy of others who manipulated technology for me. I had my piano, my pencil, my paper, my instructions, I would come to the musicians with a tune and tell them what I wanted. And then I got tired of it. I had to start somewhere, to be master of my productions.”

For the first time, therefore, Catherine Major produced an album of her own songs.

“I wanted to start from that, and in the end it was too much of a machine for my taste, except for Martin Lavallée’s drums on some songs, with keyboards but without piano… I had to get back to an organic aspect. That’s when I came up with the idea of a symphony orchestra, an idea that could hardly be more organic, like a punctuation mark to the electronic environment.

“So Antoine Gratton and I wrote orchestrations for several weeks. We recorded this on December 15 via Skype, with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra. It was the sweetest thing! The original arrangements [without orchestra] already dictated lines to be respected, the album was already built, the order was determined so that things would fit together, so that the songs would blend into each other. Claude Champagne mixed the whole thing in accordance with my wishes.”

Major composed the music, created the arrangements and orchestrations. With few exceptions, she entrusted the lyrics to her husband, a high-profile lyricist.

“J-F’s a great writer, and he knows what I’m going through. He’s able to write things as if I’m the one who’s been through it. It’s been that way all along. With great precision, he wrote everything over melodies that were already rhythmic, he respected the onomatopoeia by replacing them with words and made it sound, so that the lyrics groove. Jeff is my boyfriend, he’s so close to me!”

“He’s able to put his finger on the things that concern me deeply. We’ve gone on wanderings. I thought it would be fun to have him writing the lyrics all the way through, except for one song which is a heartfelt cry for a friend who died of cancer – ‘Tableau glacé’. I write less than I compose, I feel more seasoned in music than in literature, but at the same time, I’m happy with what I read when I write.”

Carte mère‘s texts are inspired by everyday life, the societal issues of our time, and the reflections that existence provokes.

“Motherhood is at the centre of my life and that’s why the album opens with the surprise of Carmen, my newest baby, who arrived in the middle of all that – the emotion and the fear of a new pregnancy, the belly, the love. The rest of the album is a journey through themes about family, love, brotherhood, friendship, dependencies, tolerance of religious displays, aggression against women and men, human stupidity in general, love for my little sister, the death of a friend. These themes are at the same time very personal and universal; they resonate with people. We are all the same, after all!”

When the concerts become socially acceptable again, Major will, of course, perform her new repertoire. In symphonic mode?

“The album lends itself well to that,” she replies, “especially since I’ve been doing symphonic projects. In May 2019, the Orchestre symphonique de Québec, under the direction of Fabien Gabel, accompanied me. We did some of the new songs, and many from my familiar repertoire. So the symphonic experience could be repeated, it’s in the plans. In the meantime, we have to start with a virtual launch, live from my home. To access it, you pay $10 and you get the album at the same time. Yeah, it’s not expensive. It’s not expensive at all. You have to stop thinking that culture is free. If you can buy a bottle of wine, you can certainly buy an album.”

We’re hoping we can play Montreal at some point because it’s been way too long.

Ich bin ein Berliner

Multiple tongues

It’s in the bag

“There are no good or bad sounds. All sounds are okay, it’s the context that’s important.”

We’re hoping we can play Montreal at some point
because it’s been way too long.

“There are no good or bad sounds. All sounds are okay,
it’s the context that’s important.”