When experimental musicians use pop elements in their music, it most often sounds melancholic, retro or, even worse, cynical.  Èl G, a French experimental musician living in Brussels, does not fall for that and so makes smart, relevant, authentic contemporary pop music.  Mil Pluton, his new album, is proof of this.
How´s Brussels for a Frenchman?
Paris is like a precious city-museum where every corner is conceptualized, cleaned and sublimated. Brussels is more like a grey scale mess: all the architectures are mixed together. You can find a lot of abandoned buildings, urban absurdities and amazing retro-futuristic metro stations.
I used to live in a building in Schaerbeek in a district full of different communities and languages. The view from my window was huge: you could see all these red brick houses, the offices buildings of la Gare du Nord, the planes taking off from a very nearby airport, flying very low above my head. You could also see the Atomium and the Japanese tower of the Laeken garden. I’m sure all these visuals and sonic aspects had some effect on the music while I was mixing the record behind my window.
Why did you move from Paris to Brussels in the first place?
I used to come to Brussels for about ten years before I lived there because my brother Mim, who also plays on the record and sometimes does the mixing on other records, lived there for a while. We had really nice friends there. At a certain point I was in Brussels more than in Paris so I decided to move to Brussels. I’ve never regretted that move.
What is funny is that since I live in Belgium, I discovered a lot of the French countryside… really beautiful landscapes in Aveyron, Haute-Loire and Morvan, inspiring and refreshing places. Belgian areas like Hautes-Fagnes are impressive too, looking like a Corbucci western on the moon.
Maybe I´m asking you this because I know you live in Brussels, but was Front 242 an influence on Mil Pluton?
I remember friends playing me some Front 242 tracks one or two times these past few years. It was nice but I don’t know anything about Front 242. I have never bought or played any of their records, so logically I’ve never thought about their music during the long process of this album: Mil Pluton started from improvisations recorded on multi track. Then I re-worked and overdubbed these recordings.
I know that you and I would be very good at the game of unlimited name dropping but I’m not sure if this would be interesting.
What I can say for now is that I felt I had to dig deeper, or at least continue the adventure, into psychedelic music through more-oriented electronic sounds and rhythm circles by using tools I could really improvise with, meaning: using the possibility of playing with several different sources at the same time. Besides that, I was also interested in using my voice as a more flexible and impersonal material.
So you see what you do as psychedelic music. What makes your music psychedelic?
I use the term psychedelic for any music that can be peeled and sliced and eaten like any complex fruit. The fig is psychedelic, the banana is pop. The more you go into this tunnel, the more you discover gentle or creepy sub-landscapes.
I also love figs in bananas, by the way.
This album is indeed creepy at times, and confusing.
I don’t really see the confusion because for me, it has its logic. But I like contrasts between different ingredients, like using soft and hard. If you add pepper on the fig and cat pee on the banana, it creates a reaction into the mouth of the eater.
You say that you felt you had to dig deeper into music through electronic sounds.
The first band I played in was a band called TUN in the early 00′s. We were three fellas and we used to play mostly electronic instruments. After years of solo music mixing up electric, electronic and acoustic sounds, I had a love/hate relationship with the guitar and felt the need to go back to keyboards first and then to a cocktail of electronic devices and dive into a more fun and more enjoyable control of sound.
Music changes as life changes. I know I will include acoustic instruments in future recordings again. Working with a small choir would be really exciting too. And there´s the desire to do ÈL G as a band too.
I’ve also been inspired by a DJ friend in Brussels who played me other kind of electronic music I didn’t know well besides Kosmische and IDM, like minimal acid techno, which can be supremely psychedelic .
I also want to be able to play the kind of music on stage that I improvise at home and do smaller and more spontaneous releases as I did before Mil Pluton.
Mil Pluton sounds like a big trip. This is what you call ‘psychedelic,’ I guess.
The whole process was very empirical: I started each track with basic improvisations, just playing solo. From these improvisations on I continued editing and mixing. Like this, I discovered other things that made me want to improvise in a new way; that made me want to edit and mix and then improvise again until I slowly entered in a sonic sphere that was brighter and that was developing a world in itself. Then I had a more precise idea of the global trip. Then I asked friends and my bro to play on two tracks, it brought very fresh propositions that helped to complete the compositions. Thinking about the Pluto planet was helpful at one point too.
Mil Pluton is, as you said, one big trip but it also includes songs, let’s say songs from Pluto.
Is this what the title refers to?
Pluton means Pluto in French, this faraway cold planet that is not part of the solar system anymore. As a kid, I was fascinated by this mysterious planet. I guess I also associated it with things like flying or time travelling. Mil means some kind of big cereals, but I didn’t want to make any specific signification with this title.
Not even as a joke on Mille Plateaux?
Not even as a joke on Mille Plateaux.
The song titles are a mix of invented phonetic words from different languages. Maybe you can recognize Italian, Greek, Spanish, Turkish, French, Arabian or English sounds, but it’s all constructed language. It gave me more possibilities while singing. And to be honest; I was not interested in singing any words with sense.
At the very beginning of these recordings, I was obsessed by creating certain color trough percussion and electronics sounds. I actually play a lot of percussion on this record. I play the cuica, the African log drum, the rototom, etc.
I also had, somewhere in my mind, this idea of unknown people from an unknown culture, delivering a coded message to the listener, which is sweet and naïve, isn’t it?
The cover art reminds me of Throbbing Gristle’s Part Two The Endless Not. A coincidence?
I guess you should ask this question to Simone from Hundebiss who did the whole crazy artwork. Strange you talk about Throbbing Gristle though because people already told me that some parts of what I play live sounds like Throbbing Gristle. But I have to admit I don’t know much about them, only the cover of 20 Jazz Funk Greats, some scattered tracks and some videos. Nevertheless I really like Coil.
In about two weeks time, you will play at a PAN label night in Brussels. Does this mean that your next LP will be released on PAN?
I really don’t know what the future will bring.
I’m writing you all this while being in Bretagne. A friend just taught me how to fish at sea. I would love to spend most of my lifetime doing this.
Èl G’s official site
Hundebiss
