Amaury Cambuzat - The desire to be yourself

The release of the solo work “The Sorcerer“, a live score for Murnau's film “Tabu”, was the occasion to put a few questions by email to the French artist, best known as the leader of Ulan Bator. His answers clearly show how important it is for Cambuzat not to fall in line with any existing musical trend, but instead to listen only and exclusively to his own inspiration and express his own personality.

After so many years spent in projects that still involved the contribution of other musicians, this album comes out under your name alone: how does that feel?

I've had the urge to work on a solo album since 2000, after recording “Ego: Echo” with Michael Gira (Swans). Then, having total artistic freedom with Ulan Bator, I never really understood what I could express differently as a solo artist. Every time I started working on something, it always ended up sounding like “Ulan Bator”, so I always let it go.

It was only after a cine-concert experience with Faust that the "spark" was lit. On that occasion, for the first time, I felt like repeating that kind of experience on my own. Scoring a film, I think, is something very personal, so I chose Murnau's “Tabu”, which suited my cinematic tastes very well.

Your previous "departure" from Ulan Bator, namely Chaos Physique, has a sound that's decidedly more homogeneous and electricity-driven compared to this soundtrack. What pushed you to seek greater versatility here — the need to give the film adequate musical support, or an artistic need of your own?

I wanted to make something that would also serve the images, not something egocentric built around my own music. In the end, more than a solo work, it could be seen as a duet between musician and director.

Another difference between the two projects is the presence of vocals in Chaos Physique and their absence here. Is there a specific reason for this difference in choice? Perhaps the greater richness and the very nature of the arrangements in this case wouldn't have paired well with the sound of a human voice? Or maybe it has to do with the kind of images in the film?

They're two very different works. Chaos Physique is the result of improvisations with two other musicians (Pier Mecca and Diego Vinciarelli). I don't see it as a solo project at all. In fact, in my opinion Chaos Physique is less structured as a solo project than Ulan Bator, which in the past was often and gladly a long-distance work. With Chaos we're a completely different band in every respect, even if our activity isn't always constant because of how little time we have available. To answer your question more precisely, vocals just didn't suit this record. I already write a lot with my other projects, so this time I also wanted the freedom to choose how to relate to the images. The most important thing is that the “Sorcerer” project was born out of the cine-concerts I mentioned earlier. It made no sense to sing over images that already carry their own very strong meaning and weight.

Still on the subject of the relationship between the music and the images it's meant to support, was each track conceived in a specific way, with full knowledge of the images it had to match, or did you work simply knowing the overall spirit of the film?

I worked on sequences. I divided the film into about twenty distinct parts and then worked on each one in loop. Obviously, I found the overall atmosphere by watching the whole film through at the start. It was a long process, but also a fluid one. I wrote my music, which at the time seemed like the only music I wanted to hear over those images. I never wanted to listen to other music composed for this film before finishing my own work. I didn't want to be influenced by what had already been done before.

When people talk about "ambient" or "atmospheric" music, they always think of something delicate and soft-toned, yet you - both here and with Chaos Physique - move through other territory, and still I think it can be called atmospheric music all the same. Do you agree?

I'm decidedly and deliberately "dirty". I prefer analogue sound, so even when I work with a computer, I always try to get a warm sound, even if I'm using exclusively electronic instruments. I don't belong to any "musical church", so I can do whatever I want. I don't care whether it's within the rules of the craft or not. The ambient records I love are the early ones by Brian Eno, by Popol Vuh, or Terry Riley... recorded in analogue, with a sonic texture that's often deliberately raw. And that's the sound I like.

It seems to me that the main intent of this work is to make the listener experience certain moments of apparent calm in which, instead, there's a tension that stays under the skin but is palpable, and more than once seems on the verge of clearly breaking to the surface.

Maybe so, I couldn't say for sure - the intention was to express through my music the emotions that "Tabù" conveyed to me. The images in the film are very subjective too; it's not a "horror" film the way "Nosferatu" was. Either way, whatever comes through is entirely thanks to Murnau.

2010 also saw the release of a new Ulan Bator album. In our review we explicitly say not to fixate too much on your post-rock side when talking about you. Do you agree?

Thanks for the question. We've never been a post-rock band in the sense the press generally means it. For me, post-rock starts after Elvis. He was "rock" incarnate. After him, everything is post-rock. At the start they slapped that label on us, but I did everything I could to shake it off. I think today we've pretty much managed it. I want Ulan Bator to be Ulan Bator. Unique, ugly, beautiful, useful, useless, liked, disliked - I don't care, I just want it to be Ulan Bator.

Many Italians discovered Ulan Bator when you opened for CSI on the "Tabula Rasa Elettrificata" tour (also mentioned in the review). How did you get in touch with CSI? What memories do you have of that tour? It must have been exciting to play in front of so many people in such big venues.

Yes, it was. We were based in Paris, and a French friend we had in common told us CSI were looking for a band to open for their tour. Maroccolo had liked our second album, "2°", and from there we packed up and set off almost immediately to play at the Palaeur in Rome in front of 10,000 people. After that, since people liked us, we went on opening their shows for an entire season. I have wonderful memories of that time - it was fun playing our music, which was pretty "strange", in front of so many people.

Over Ulan Bator's many years of activity, your repertoire has periodically gone through changes. But are there, in your view, elements that have never left your musical style?

Spontaneity, both live and in the way we write songs. They're all born out of improvisations that then get heavily reworked during recording. The French language might be the second constant element in the band. Then there's me, the only veteran who's been leading the band since 1993.

You're French, but you've never lacked contact with the Italian alternative scene. How much do you think it's changed over the last fifteen years? Are there any bands you know of that have some degree of recognition in France?

These past years have changed as much as we've all changed, as much as the capitalist world we live in has changed... I think that, across Europe in general, alternative music has lost a bit of its freshness. There's no new breath left. Everything repeats itself, I don't hear much that's genuinely revolutionary out there. Sure, I repeat myself too. I see the future of music lying beyond our European borders. I'm starting to take an interest in bands from Russia, North Africa, China, who make music that's contaminated by the West but in their own way. I've grown a bit tired of the marketing logic that's killing us creatively in Europe. I hear too many bands trying to follow in the footsteps of others who've had some commercial success. Pointless paths, if you ask me... I want something new. Italian bands with any recognition in France? Zu, but still within a very alternative scene.

On your Myspace you can find a list of the musicians you've collaborated with over the course of your career, and they're often artists with a style very different from yours - much more direct and immediate, I'd say. Did engaging with such important figures give you something?

I've collaborated with people who interested me or whom I liked on a human level. Music isn't everything. If people are awful, I 'run away'. Besides, these were encounters that life brought about - I've never forced a meeting; some collaborations happened even with people whose music I didn't necessarily like, but as human beings we saw things in a similar way. Collaborating with "important people" often gives you confidence. It's certainly rewarding, but what always matters is the outcome of the encounter, the "why"...

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