Présentation de l'album, par Florence Hamon de Hejko
J’ENTENDS LE BRUIT
Le post punk d’Empereur est de retour et frappe fort. Timbre puissant et voix envoutante, sonorités intenses tendant aussi bien vers le psyché, le shoegaze et les résonances orientales, la musique des quatre punk belges est loin d’être chétive. Ce n’est pas un canular, « Everyday’s death & Resurrection show » est sorti sur le Turc mécanique le 17 mars. Deux ans après leur super premier EP « She Was / While Puritans » , notre patience est récompensée avec ces quatre morceaux ardents, qui font de cet EP un talent de plus chez le label français de Charles Crost.
Résurrection auditive
Les premières secondes sont frénétiques, les dernières sont athlétiques. Les deux premiers morceaux de l’Ep sont des shot post punk teintés d’un chant qui pourrait être un fin mélange entre celui de Alan Vega , Fad Gadget et Morrissey. Avec No Shelter puis Mandalas, on ne redescend toujours pas en passant à des sonorités un peu plus psyché et garage. C’est court (peut-etre) mais intense, techniquement comme musicalement.
Leur énergie va te faire craquer, te déhancher et surement te décoiffer (même si t’as la boule à zéro).
Interview de Big/Brave, par Ralph Elawani de Noisey
Noisey: You guys are the first band from Montreal to sign to Southern Lord, a record label synonymous with doom and black metal. You don’t seem to fit any of those genres. How did it happen? Louis-Alexandre Beauregard: We had a few labels in mind and we ended up sending the album to Greg and he got back to us. It was basically ready to be released. The mastering was done and everything. During your live shows, there’s never really a sense that all three of you are filling in one single position like a regular rock band does. Where did you pick that up? Ball: Sometimes we’ll simply step back and Louis’s drum becomes the central element of a song. Sometimes Robin will just play one chord or one sound and we’ll expand on that. I think the question we ask ourselves is: what can we do with much less. We don’t really play chords, so we move and play with the feedback we create. Robin Wattie: We play chords but there’s never any chord progression or patterns...We try to push ourselves and see what we can do. What kinds of sounds we can create, how we can structure a piece of music that does not fit the verse-chorus-verse pattern.
You’ve escaped certain musical patterns but you are tied to the performance of your gear. Ball: Yes, and in some ways it’s stressful… we need feedback to play. There’d be very little fun in hearing us strum one sound on an acoustic guitar. Wattie: And it’s funny, we’re not even a “gear-oriented” band. Ball: The effects we use are basic. It’s just reverb and overdrive. They’re necessary, but basic. We work a lot more with the sound itself. Your songs are based on a lot of repetition and reverberation. How do you deal with the physicality of the venues where you play? Beauregard: Our live shows are always loosely planned out, but I’d say that apart from the room itself, we sometimes use the crowd. Ball: We work a lot with silence. We’ll let room for Louis and sometimes, he’ll become the main instrument and then we’ll pause and see what’s going on. And that’s actually what is kind of hard to do when you play at punk houses and venues where people are there to party. That’s what’s great about playing with noise outfits and drone bands. Nobody’s there to party or dance; people listen to what’s going on. I mean – and this is perhaps where we differ from some bands – we do not really see ourselves as members of a band, as much as three individuals playing music at the same time in the same project. Continued below... You recently opened for Kim Gordon’s Body/Head and Godspeed You! Black Emperor at Sled Island. How did the crowd respond?Beauregard: The Body/Head concert was a good one. The Godspeed show was by far the best. Wattie: There were something like 800 people packed in a church. You could literally hear them breathing between songs. It was frightening. But looking back at it, if we’d been told “this is your last performance ever, as a musician,” I don’t think we could hope for a better show Has your record deal with Southern Lord affected people’s response?Ball: People now reply to our emails. I mean, people who did not want to take the time to do so now think they have a valid reason to do it… someone in a certain position has put his “seal of approval” on the band, so it’s OK to give us some attention… which is a pretty sad thing to do. Beauregard: On the other hand, we’ve been offered shows in Europe and elsewhere. People have manifested themselves. We work with a booking agency now. We’re leaving in October for a few shows [with Goatsnake] and we’ll be touring Europe in November.
Interview de Algiers, par Claire Lobenfeld de FACT
I really want to start with the title of the album. Where did the phrase “the underside of power” come from? Franklin James Fisher: The initial recording sessions we did for this record were with Adrian Utley from Portishead and his production partner Ali Chant. We did it at Real World Studios, which is Peter Gabriel’s fancy studio out in the countryside in west England. In the evenings, there was this private French chef named Jerome and he made these extravagant meals for us. [We would eat in] this dining room and we would just sit there and talk. Often times we would talk about what was happening with current events because the beginning of these recording sessions when things [with Brexit] were starting to come undone. Ryan would talk about his job – he monitors human trafficking and they help refugees get settled in. He deals with the worst of human nature on a daily basis. All these conversations kind of led me to find a narrative from the perspectives of all these people who are under the heel of the powerful and really can’t do anything about it.
The band is coming from both Brexit and the Trump presidency. FACT is a British magazine, but half of the editorial staff is American, so there has been a communal experience watching the fracturing of our ideals and futures, a thing that didn’t seem possible last year. I was curious about how you guys were able to balance a perspective about what’s going on in the world right now and how you wanted to present that on the record? Fisher: From my perspective, it was very much a whirlwind, this recording process, and so fragmented. We worked with six or seven different engineers and in all these different studios, from Bristol to London to New York. In the midst of doing all of this, it was just kind of absorbing everything that was happening, for me, without really having the a specific opinion or diagnosis about what was happening, other than I knew what it was rooted in. We kind of knew it was fucked. It was only kind of recently that I’m going back to listen to the record again that it’s starting to become elucidated to me. It was really just about absorbing and reflecting everything that was happening, which is kind of what we’ve always been about. Tong: I think the whole point of Algiers is to illustrate the myriad things wrong with the way our various systems are set up. We’ve had this wave of public outcry that’s flared up against them, but it’s just a part of a number of similar processes that have happened over the last couple of centuries where fear of the other is exploited for political gain. This isn’t new to us, but I think the important thing to underline right now. Algiers is, hopefully, a long-term project and that [project] is to kind of constantly remind people that these same problems have always existed in various forms. Fisher: What did Gore Vidal call it? “The United States of Amnesia”? I mean, obviously this is happening: this kind of right wing resurgence of fascist populism in Europe, as well, and in the UK, but the United States is particularly good at erasing or revising history. And the people are particularly good at not learning it or unlearning it. I think there’s a certain indignation underlying what it is that we do as it pertains to this idea that, “Wow, people are fucking idiots and how are they letting this happen again?”
These forces have always been just beneath the surface of the culture and of the politics. That it’s kind of reaching a kind of unprecedented prosperity, for lack of a better word, it’s really angering and frustrating… I lost any sort of faith in the American people after they re-elected George W. Bush back in 2004. But with this election, the Democrats took [Hillary Clinton], this cardboard cutout product of the standardized political electoral machine just resting on her laurels, without any sort of critical self-examination or real zeal going against obvious fascists. Everybody was so self-confident, so self-assured that it was a foregone conclusion that she was going to win. That says more to me about the state of the Democrats than it does about the Republicans.
You guys have a very stacked deck of collaborators: Adrian Utley from Portishead, Ben Greenberg from The Men, Randall Dunn, who has produced for Sunn O))). How did you guys build this team? Tong: A lot of it was good fortune. At various points, it felt like we didn’t have enough time in the initial sessions with Adrian and [his production partner] Ali [Chant]. It felt like we probably could have done with a bit more time, but our schedule and finances made it difficult to be able to get everything down in that time. Fisher: With the rare exception of a couple of really bright moments, spending some time at Real World and meeting Adrian and ultimately Ben, for me, personally, recording this album was an utter nightmare. Tong: It was tricky. It was a real problem child. Fisher: It was so amazing working with Ben Greenberg because he got it immediately and it’s the not the easiest world for somebody on the outside to kind of step into and understand what we’re trying to do. Our music’s quite weird and the way we go about making it is quite convoluted, but he got it. That was the missing piece of the puzzle we needed. Later on, Ryan, Matt and Lee, at different intervals, went out to Seattle to mix the record with Randall, who is also really brilliant. He did these finishing touches that made it really nice. Tong: His pedigree speaks for itself. We were very lucky that he wanted to come aboard. He took what was quite messy, giving that we had recorded in different places. He just brought everything into the same world.
Reading the annotations for the record, or even just being told a list of influences, it is a little bit inscrutable, but when you hear the album, all of those references, whether it’s Kraftwerk or Suicide or gospel, all make sense. How do you guys fit those puzzle pieces together? Fisher: The way that we write as a band changes almost perpetually from one song to the next. A year ago this time, we had just taken a break after the first tour cycle. Everyone went away for a couple months and came back with different sketches and various demos and we kinda sat down and figured out what out of that bunch we would work on. I think a lot of the songs on this record came from Ryan, from his initial sketches. For songs like ‘Death March’, we were looking to incorporate Matt, who is obviously an amazing drummer, and we were trying to do it in a way that was organic. There was some trial and error there, but we were finally able to bring his style into [our] cadence and to have his drum sound that are produced without any kind of weird flashiness or “Look everybody, we got Matt Tong!” You do whatever you need to do to serve the song, but you have to put the craftsmanship first. Tong: Everyone is really patient to accommodate everyone’s ideas. In my experience, it’s important to be able to do that, but equally as important is to be able to be mindful about when the song could potentially getting away from you. By that I mean, the producer or engineer or whoever it is you’re working with, who is there to help you realize that idea, you have to make sure that they kind of understand what you’re trying to do, as well. You’ve gotten be careful that you don’t go too far to accommodate them that you can’t come back and you have to start again. It’s very tricky.
Another thing that stuck out to me in album details was that the track ‘Walk Like a Panther’ is referred to as a love letter to A$AP Rocky, Drake and other pop star rappers, but the rest of your notes do not make it sound like you have much esteem for them or their music. Fisher: It comes from my work. My best friend runs a club on the Lower East Side, and he gets me work there checking coats just so I can make some cash when we’re not on the road. I’m really grateful to him for doing it, but at the same time, it completely sucks your soul dry. The music that the clientele wants to listen to is nothing but Drake and Nicki Minaj and bling era hip-hop. It’s a mostly white audience and it’s a white DJ that’s spinning this stuff. It starts to grate on you when you’re in this subservient position and you’re listening to this music. It’s total blaxploitation. It really plays into this narrative that I have been fighting against my whole life which is what is expected of you in the eyes of, not just the mainstream American culture and in the eyes of other black people. Authentic black representation is this bullshit that you hear on Top 40 radio and that you see in fucking movies, which is all fucking manufactured and perpetuated by white-owned corporations and it’s completely fucking destructive to black identity.
Listening to songs like ‘Fucking Problems’ with 2 Chainz and A$AP Rocky with that one line, I can’t get over it: “They say the money makes a nigga act niggerish / But at least a nigga’s nigga-rich.” It’s a room full of drunk white people singing along to the fucking lyrics and, in the meantime, I’m waiting on them. That’s fucked up. And I got sick of it. When Ryan and I were demoing ‘Walk Like a Panther’, he laid out the beat and everything, and he was like, “Just improvise”. I did something, I don’t really remember. He cut it up and re-arranged it and presented it back to me. I wasn’t singing any words or anything. I heard it and I immediately had this image of a modern day Reign of Terror, post-French Revolution, and the black aristocracy, so to speak. The people, the real people, went and rounded up all these motherfuckers for selling them out and they were gonna bring them to the gallows and execute them for their crimes except for at the last minute, they don’t get executed. You realize, ultimately, they’re just playing into the hands of The Man, and if you love somebody, if you love something, then you discipline them. So that’s where it comes from. It’s a weariness and an anger with this entire culture which has gone on uninterrupted since the early ‘90s. This is the pervasive image of what it’s like to be a black person in our culture and, therefore, the rest of the world. It’s bullshit and I’m sick of it.
Do you think there’s any possibility popular culture will change, specifically the portrayals of non-white people? Fisher: The only real way that you can instigate any sort of change is to give credence to the idea of difference within the people themselves. Dylan called these kinds of songs “finger-pointing songs”. I’m talking to other black people. The irony is other black people don’t listen to our music. But I’m not the most optimistic person in terms of social change, but I know the difference between right and wrong and it’s a moral obligation, once you do know what’s right, [to work toward change]. I think that’s the basis of any sort of social change and the drive to enact change, even if you don’t think you’re gonna see it or you don’t think it’s achievable, at least not in your lifetime. You still must be compelled to do it if you understand the situation and the basis of things. I think that may be a theme of our record.
Line Up :
Franklin James Fisher Ryan Mahan Lee Tesche Matt Tong
Label :
Matador
Tracklist :
01 – Walk Like a Panther 02 – Cry of the Martyrs 03 – The Underside of Power 04 – Death March 05 – A Murmur. A Sign. 06 – Mme Rieux 07 – Cleveland 08 – Animals 09 – Plague Years 10 – Hymn for an Average Man 11 – Bury Me Standing 12 – The CycleThe Spiral Time to Go Down Slowly
