Re: Interview to Eric Chenaux for OndaRock, August 2024
OR: Hi Eric,
Thank you for having granted this interview, it is a great pleasure for us at OndaRock!
I would like to start not from a moment in time, but from a moment in space. Which type of atmosphere do you need to practice and compose your music? Do you live downtown or out of town? Do you have a studio at home and/or you go to a rehearsal studio daily?
EC: Hello M Teresa, a pleasure.
Thank you for this and these questions.
I really do not know what kind of atmosphere that I need.
It does seem like the kind of information that one may really adore having for oneself.
Perhaps one day I will indeed know.
For the time being I can try and describe the atmosphere of where I do play.
I am not aware of any need for it but I am continually aware of my love for it:
It is a room just off of the kitchen.
It is approximately 70square meters.
It is part of farmhouse,
Where the pigs used to be.
Large stone walls, chestnut and oak wood floors.
There is a mezzanine.
So there are 2 floors.
2 woods.
There are 5 large window and 2 glass doors, one leading to the front courtyard.
The other leading to back garden and a large magnolia tree.
It is heated by wood in the fall, winter and early spring.
This sounds pretty nice does it not?
I have not done any soundproofing so the sound bounces a bit which is quite lovely for the human voice.
Sharper, tighter bassier sounds tend to bounce around.
I can spend a lot of time in this room and certainly have.
I do not spend too much time composing.
That is not exactly true.
I suppose we will get into that a little later.
You see, I have read through all of the questions before starting
and I apologize to the reader if this seems off-putting.
I do spend a lot of time listening to music and playing music.
I play a lot of music that I do not compose.
Music composed by others.
I do love to do this.
What a gift music can be.
And when I do play music that I believe myself to have written, well,
It feels kind of similar.
I suppose that it may be obvious at this point that I do not live downtown.
I live in a forested region of Correze which is located in south-central France.
I live here with Mariette, a wonderfully wild ceramicist, a dog named Blinky Palmermo and 3 horses: Gibelle Fanny and Mykhos.
Well, there are many more of us here, many spiders and such but for now let us leave the unnamed out of it.
Or this may never end.
I also use my studio to dry herbs, spices and hot peppers from the garden.
It is quite lovely to have part of the garden in the studio.
Do you think about your music mostly in terms of songwriting or in terms of performing? In your practice how does the improvisation inform both activities?
Again, I am not sure I can pin down the terms of how I think about my music.
This does not sound very generous as a way to start answering a question so I will try much harder than I have thus far.
When I am composing I suppose that I am thinking about a lot of things that pertain to songwriting.
I am sure it is the case for many but it often feels that I am dragging other concerns into songwriting.
Concerns that develop over time and from many different sources:
Cinema (right now I am thinking of Alice Rohrwacher and territory and public space)
Contemporary experimental music, a lot of chamber music.
Of course there are some writers, theoretical, fictional and otherwise who make many appearances in my concerns considering music and composition.
I listen to a lot of music that would not be considered song-writing music.
At least not yet.
And these musics offer my ways to think about duration, form, repetition, counter-point and contrast.
I must admit, although it feels quite wonderful to have finished writing something that I believe might be nice to play and might be welcoming to the ears,
well, it is not my favourite musical activity.
I do like playing guitar and singing.
I can not be alone there.
That is impossible to imagine.
My compositions try to have the least possible of compositionesses possible so that the details can emerge from improvisation.
I am a horrible arranger.
So I go about finding details in other ways.
All of them improvising.
It may be quite soothing to call all of this performance.
That even the act of composition being a performative act.
On OndaRock we regularly reviewed your work from “Dull Lights” (Constellation/Wide, 2006) In time, listening to your records, it seems like, metaphorically, the music constantly enacts a sort of “dance” between opposite elements, sounds and genres, which you are able to blend and unify. When you start to compose music for a new record, do you feel you are animate by different energies? Does your approach change each time? If anything changes, what does it change?
Of course I very much appreciate the generosity that OndaRock has expressed towards my music.
I am one of those that does read all reviews, interviews and such, so I am aware of the work of Ondarock.
It is a pleasure to talk about dancing.
A wild and psychedelic form of listening.
I love to dance.
And when I play music, and something starts to happen,
it feels like dancing to me.
The way that I listen feels like dancing
and when my playing resembles my listening
(which is what I mean when I say something starts happening)
the performance feels like dancing.
And if I may even stretch the analogy too far, it feels like I have a multiple of dancing partners, some of them being space and sound and some being human, the audience.
When the audience feels like a dancing partner, something is happening.
I hear what you are saying about the combination of different elements.
Like many folks I have sense of humor and it is probably best if I do not let it go to waste.
Well, there are a lot of ways to talk through or next to this subject.
I realize that the guitar and voice can have a juxtaposing relationship when listening to this music.
The song is a place where the voice and the guitar can hear and encounter melody, time, and rhythm differently.
They do not have to agree on everything.
Perhaps I enjoy thinking that they agree to share the space,
And enjoy sharing that space without having to agree even on what that space is.
This encounter with difference.
The music I love welcomes this and one can enjoy thinking that this welcoming extends to the listener to further multiply how the space of the song or the music is encountered.
If the music is not even quite sure what it is then the listener is not being told by the music how to encounter it.
There are many things in the world that do not narrate
or direct the way and quality with which one encounters them and music is one of them.
It is in good company wouldn’t you say?
My approach to composition is a lot less interesting than all of this.
Though, I do not go directly at it.
I do not directly try to compose a song.
Perhaps sometimes I have and perhaps will again.
But for the most part is a palimpsestic affair.
The nails do not get hit and driven in dead on.
Things often start with a melody, then extend towards harmony (perhaps!), then back to melody, then back to harmony, then to rhythm, then back to melody and then the lyrics start to emerge, which I write in collaboration with Ryan Driver.
A collaboration that I enjoy very much.
I hope and imagine that he does too.
We do not express ourselves.
Well, of course we do.
Curiousity is a form of expression and we express that.
A curiousity to how we can encounter language anew.
How language can form thoughts and sentiments that we did not know before.
I discover much more from the lyrics than they do from me.
I do not know why I think that I know that.
And things do change.
Are you influenced by other art forms? Such as cinema, visual arts, literature, theater…
I am not sure that I can discern exactly what influences me but if I were to give it a guess I would say that I am influenced by all forms of everything.
I say that not at all knowing what everything is.
What a shameless answer.
Even if true.
Of course, film, literature, theater, visual arts are forms that I am aware of that have all made my music with me.
There are through-lines running through forms.
Perhaps, just for now, let us call them the “why this matters” part of a concept, idea or problem.
We can find “why this matters” lines running through many diverse activities.
It is a lovely and wild thing to spend time reflecting upon.
And it can really change you.
One can become enamored by a sound or even a style.
I think this to be wonderful.
And that enamorment can have many affects.
It can produce an endless amount of things.
But running through all of that, under the current is the stuff that I love.
The “why this matters” allows us to talk through many different forms or thought and art.
And how we encounter them.
And how they invite and react to an encounter.
“Why this matters” is what it does, perhaps rather than what it is, or what it means.
“Why this matters” are the worlds of what happens.
“Delights of My Life” (Constellation, 2024) presents the trio form (with Ryan Driver, your long-time collaborator). How has this collaboration developed and why now the trio?
I will experiment with being quite direct in this answer.
I am not sure if I have been quite so thus far.
Let us change it up a bit.
I felt quite strongly that I wished to share the process of making music with others.
After many years of working, for the most part, alone, I felt quite ready to enter into a more social engagement, a practice that opened the door to let some others in.
I have been playing music with Ryan Driver (Wurlitzer) for over 25 years and he is one of my favourite musicians of all time.
I really mean that.
That is true.
His musical practice is full of wonder, surrealisms, and a wide open ensemble of ways to wonder and surreal.
It is time to make a verb out of that word no?
To surreal?
To surrealize?
I like both of them.
I first heard the music of Philippe Melanson (electronic percussion) in the band Bernice, which I love very much.
It was a video of Bernice playing live in Chicago.
His body and the sound that it made, moving and swaying made pierced me.
And Phil and Ryan are quite close, and both live in Toronto.
And they play a lot of music together.
So, in terms of thinking about a trio, this seemed like a perfect collection of angles.
We really had a wonderful time rehearsing and recording this music.
Ryan, Philippe and I spent two wonderful weeks here at Le Pouget, eating, talking, listening and making music.
Which musicians are you listening to recently? Which new records?
I love lists.
I will look at my streaming channel and my bandcamp page and list the latest things.
I wish to tell the truth.
Some of these may be new at the moment.
Caetano Veloso
Gal Costa
Sizzla
Gholamhossein Banan
Georgia Anne Muldrow
David Behrman
Jon Hassell
Barry Lipman
Sun Ra
Mouse On Mars
King Tubby
Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
Rafael Torel
Chico Mello
Richard Teitelbaum
Leoni Leoni
Jurg Frey
Bourrasque
You played on Marisa Terzi’s album “Canzoni perdute” (Frittflacc, 2017), how did that collaboration come about and how was it playing for her? What relationship do you have with the Italian song of the past? Is there any record or even just a song that you are particularly connected to?
The collaboration came about via, a friend of everyone’s,
Jacopo Leone who lives inbetween Catania, Sicily and Paris.
Mostly in Paris I believe, but I do not know.
I am not sure if I remember the story correctly or not but,
Well, we have all become quite careful to believe everything we read in the press these days,
so I see no harm in giving the story a good go.
Jacopo was studying architecture in Milan.
This was decades ago.
And he was waitering at, what I imagine now, to be quite a nice restaurant.
One night a large group of artist/musicians came into the restaurant,
including Marisa Terzi and her husband (I forget his name but he was a well known composer).
I am not sure if Jacopo was serving the table or not but he was certainly present for an encounter that would very much alter his imagination (and his life included).
As I remember hearing it, Marisa’s husband asked her to sing a little song for the restaurant, or for the table.
And she did.
There are details to this story that I now feel less comfortable sharing.
But let us say that the atmosphere was complicated.
By all accounts (and I do only have one account but it is a good one, so let us make it plural)
It was a stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking encounter with song and public space.
Jacopo said to himself that he would one day make something with or for her.
A man of his word Mr. Leone.
Flash forward some decades and we made a record, all musicians chosen by Jacopo.
And now another restaurant.
And I do know that it was a nice one, because I was there and it was one of my favourite restaurants in Paris.
We celebrated the end of the recording at Le Boulangerie, near Menilmontant,
I believe it to have been in the 20eme arrondisement.
This night, no one asked Marisa to sing.
But she did get up to thank all of the musicians and Jacopo and when she got to me,
I was seated directly in front of her,
she pointed at me, and said “and you” and then went on to mimick the sound of my guitar and it was quite an amazingly accurate and hilarious imitation of the general sound of my guitar.
It is possible that she was making fun of it.
You know, light dinner time ridicule.
But my guitar playing if certainly worthy of ridicule.
If anything is.
I think it went a little like this, “waon, woan, wah-waon”.
Well, it sounded like she was imitating something stupidly bending and melting at the same time.
As things tend to do.
I think of Marisa Terzi often.
Extraordinary lady.
Can’t wait to listen to you playing in the morning twice at Piedicavallo Festival 2024. Are you thinking about anything special for the two sets?
Oh. You will be there.
How wonderful.
I feel great about this festival already.
I have performed many concerts in Italy that have been, let’s say,
Lunar or solar specific.
Or both!
Either at sunrise or sunset.
So, I feel like an old pro at this.
And by old pro I do mean that I comfortable not really knowing anything.
I will not be able to really think through this music until I am in the environment and get a feeling for the potential atmosphere.
To think through playing this music for others to be waking up to is a wonderful opportunity to think about many lovely things.
What would one of them be?
Well, perhaps, when you have awoken and have seemingly decided to lay there, perhaps driftng back to sleep, perhaps not, but not getting up and out of bed.
We can encounter many things during this exceptional time zone.
I do hope that I do not hinder any joy that one may feel during such a state.
Thank you again Teresa, and looking forward to meeting you in person.
-Eric Chenaux, 7th of August, Condat-sur-Ganaveix
