by Stephan Bauer

Both for Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux, recording tracks together over the internet was a new way of working. Both had not only done solo recordings before,but also collaborative efforts, Greg Davis for example with Keith Fullerton Whitman and Steven Hess. “For other collaborations, it´s more important for me to work in person and get a personal vibe flowing between two people and really jam out on that, but I enjoy working in both ways”, he elaborates, “they are just different ways of creating music and both can be very satisfying.” Despite their collaborative recordings, both Davis and Roux are known mostly for their solo recordings. But when asked what they like about non-solo recordings, they get very excited. “I feel like through collaborating with other people you discover new things all the time. For me it´s very important not only to work by myself, but also with other people. When I do my own music, there´s sometimes a lack of feedback. I know very few people who I could ask ‘Would you rather do it like this or like that?’, but when I team up with someone else and I´m not really sure about certain aspects of a track I can always send it to the other person who looks at it more distantly and gives an honest answer”, Sébastien Roux tells and Davis adds: “Another thing about collaborating that I like is that it´s a more casual situation. The pressure is not just on yourself as the single responsible person for the music. In that way, it gets more relaxed, you have fun with it and you start doing things you wouldn´t normally do when recording alone. For me that´s a very special thing and I try to collaborate with all sorts of different musicians, improvisers, people who make electronic music or pop music. That helps you to extend your ideas as a musician. It´s very helpful and creates a feedback cycle that keeps you inspired.”

With the “Paquet” element in the album title cleared, the question remains about the “Surprise” factor. In fact, the album sounds surprising at all times. There are short and long tracks, some with vocals, some without. Mostly untreated sounding acoustic instruments interchange with more electronic passages. Lovely melodies get destroyed by white noise and come back in new shapes and colours. Talking to Davis and Roux, it becomes clear why the album sounds like that. “In a way, we wanted to do something with the sounds that the other wouldn´t really expect”, Davis explains, “we often tried to juxtapose different elements and mix them together in a way that still works. The idea was to push it and go forward. Both of us were deeply trusting in what the other was doing. I would embrace what Seb would send me and go with it. We hardly had any situation where we didn´t like at all what the other was sending. I was trusting that Sébastien would work very hard on what I send him and he would do the same. It was all very exciting.” Roux sees yet another aspect of the “surprise” factor: “I guess more than our respective solo work, we knew each other´s musical taste. There are quite a few artists and records that we both really like and the surprise was to come up with something that would normally not fit together with what we had received from the other. So we both tried to create a more abstract part after a poppy sequence or a melodious sequence after a musique concrète bit.”

Following a US tour as a duo, Sébastien Roux and Greg Davis toured Europe in the spring of 2006. For their gig in Hamburg´s Astra Stube, located underneath the Sternbrücke, notorious for allegedly being the loudest intersection in Hamburg, only a few people find their way into the venue. What they´re missing are not just the fragile compositions of Semuin and Sinebag, both of whom joined Roux and Davis for the German part of the tour, but also a long and varying laptop show of Roux and Davis. Laptop shows can be quite boring at times, but knowing “Paquet Surprise”, it´s exciting to see what the two make out of the source material. “We don´t link our computers together”, Roux explains, “but both of us have most bits of ‘Paquet Surprise’ on our laptops, which we treat and combine in a different way than on the album whilst also improvising a lot.” “If we just played back the album, it would be too boring for the people”, Davis adds, “so we try to create something new out of it. Every live show is different. Sometimes it gets really abstract and noisy and sometimes it´s more mellow and harmonic. We do use a few recognizable elements of the album though, so that the audience is not left alone and gets an idea of where we´re going.”

Despite Roux and Davis being very happy about the creation process of “Paquet Surprise”, the two don´t have concrete plans for a sequel as Davis tells: “I think there will be another album, but it´s all a matter of when the time is right. We´re both very busy with our own music and projects. Down the road though, when we think we´re ready, we´ll probably record together again.” In terms of solo work, there surely is a lot in the works for both Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux. Early 2006 saw the release of Roux´s second solo album, entitled “Songs” on Taylor Deupree´s 12K label. “It was kind of a joke to call the album ‘Songs’” Roux clarifies, “the French word ‘piece’ means both ‘piece’ and ‘song’ in English, but the meaning of the two words is very different. The word ‘piece’ is rather used in classical music whereas the word ‘song’ refers mostly to pop music. That double meaning finds itself in the album title. In a way, the album is very abstract and uses the methods of musique concrète, but some parts are also clearly based in pop music. The individual song titles all name the instruments played, e.g. ‘The Tuba And Cello Song’. Most people would probably expect a piece of classical music using tuba and cello, so I tried to do something else and call it a song. The song titles and the album title actually represent the balance between my musical interests: pop and avantgarde music.”

Greg Davis also has several releases in the works. He is currently recording another solo album for Kranky, following the 2005 release of “Somnia”. “Those recordings are going really well”, he tells, “I already have several songs done and more in the works. It´ll be quite different from my other albums. I see my three albums, including the one with Sébastien, for Carpark as a progression, a continuous line. But my new album for Kranky will be very different from them, maybe somewhere in between.” Two more collaborative albums are also in the pipeline for Davis as he reveals: “At the moment, I´m working on an album with my friend Jeph Jerman from Arizona. That one will be a very abstract and sound-oriented record, using lots of natural materials and improvised stuff. I´m taking a bunch of field recordings I did for that, but there won´t be much computer processing. Then, there will also be an album with Ben Vida from Chicago. We recorded a lot of material last year and are currently mixing it and shaping it into songs. I´m always working on different projects at the same time and even though they might sound very different from each other, there´s definitely a certain thread going through all of them. I don´t think about a certain style. I just create and try to get it out there and see how people react to it.”

Photos by Sebastian Mader