Angil And The Hiddentracks - Chamber hip-pop

The album was recorded in 18 days, and if we understood correctly, the songs didn't even exist yet at that point. How did you go about it? What was the role of the different members during the writing process?

The songs did exist, I'd sent acoustic versions to all the musicians a few months before the two weeks of recording. Along with them there were written arrangements, theoretical ideas about the album, and a compilation of various artists to give a better sense of the sound, the spirit of "Oulipo Saliva". The CD included, among others, The Instruments, Castanets, Edison Woods, Sun Ra, Booker Little, Trygve Seim, Why?...

I consider writing only half of composing: the other half is the moment of performance. Some Hiddentracks prefer to have parts written out to the letter (the strings, for instance), so their contribution lies in the interpretation they bring to my scores. Others (brass and woodwinds) are more creative: once they've grasped the idea, they improvise, bringing in personal touches and suggestions (which I accept... or not!).

How do you reconcile everyone's needs to bring the band on stage or on tour? What changes between the music on the record and the music played live?

Sometimes I play solo shows, but generally we have a fixed core of four musicians: drums, double bass, keyboard and cymbals, guitar and vocals. We invite one or two Hiddentracks depending on the city we're playing in. It's not too frustrating for the musicians not to see each other often, because they know that's how it works, and generally they also have other side projects.

For the live shows, we completely rethought the songs from "Oulipo Saliva". It was necessary: you can't do with 6 people what was recorded with 13! So we created tighter, more "stripped-down" versions, working on dynamics: sometimes very rock, sometimes bordering on silence. We always leave room for improvisation too, to put ourselves a bit "at risk" and keep some element of surprise.

Your Myspace page lists quite a varied range of influences. Some are fairly obvious, but others seem more hidden. John Coltrane, John Cage, Lisa Germano... How have they shaped your approach?

Artists like Lisa Germano, Stina Nordeстам or Kim Deal (or quite simply the Beatles) have shaped my taste in songwriting. Each of them has their own way of "messing around" with arrangements, of playing with surprise, but underneath there's always a real song.

With Cage or Coltrane (... or the Beatles!) what interests me is the importance they place on risk. In music I love the unexpected, and I'm always deeply impressed by bands that manage to combine the two: danger and composition; it's a bit like managing to put poetry into prose. Broadcast are a good example...

And... Raymond Queneau, Perec, OuLiPo? We heard about some little game with the letter "E"... Do you think these "constraints" had a positive effect on the album? Are you influenced by the movement's "structuralist" approach?

Writing under this constraint was, for me, a great liberation, after a first album ("Teaser For: Matter") where I felt like I'd already said a huge amount. Writing under constraint was so stimulating that I wrote the 10 lyrics for "Oulipo Saliva" in just a few weeks. I got to experience firsthand what Perec had written about his novel without the letter "E", "La disparition": "Freedom lies within constraints"...

Constraints interest me a lot, when they manage to bring something extra to the table. You have to be careful not to fall into something merely mechanical, but a limitation can truly be an engine, a source of inspiration (even if that might sound paradoxical). Generally speaking, I really love a playful approach to composition when it's used intelligently, the way Smog did on his latest albums. You can be serious about your relationship with music while still loving play...

You seem to have a real fascination with Scandinavian music: Trygve Seim, Stina Nordenstam, Hanne Hukkelberg... Could you tell us about these artists? Do you know/appreciate the acts associated with the Rune Grammofon label (very highly regarded on our webzine)?

Trygve Seim is a Norwegian saxophonist. He made an album I find incredible, "Different River". It's rare to be able to play so well with silence without becoming cloying. Mark Hollis knew how to do it brilliantly, and Trygve Seim is his worthy heir - in a way - thanks to this album. I really like this way of playing with breath, like Miles Davis on some of his records: that's where the word "Saliva" in the album title comes from.

Stina Nordenstam fascinates me. I don't know of songs that run deeper: every new listen reveals a detail I'd never noticed before. And then there's her voice... It's a bit like she's putting into practice what Arvo Pärt wrote about his "Spiegel im Spiegel": music is a diamond, but on its own it's completely colorless, it only shines when it passes through the "prism" of the listener.

Hanne Hukkelberg is the kind of discovery that makes me particularly happy: here's an artist who speaks to me directly. I feel like I understand her music, like I grasp exactly what she had in mind. Her first album "Little Things" is full of gems - she's truly an artist who makes me happy.

I don't know Rune Grammofon very well, I'll look into it as soon as I can!

Are you well versed in the Anticon scene? What are your favorite albums?

Why?'s albums top everything else for me. He's a genuine genius. I'm not very objective, but I think he's revolutionizing pop...

Sole's "Selling Live Water" is impressive, it's a foundation on new ground... Generally, I also really like Doseone's work - he knows how to put his technique at the service of something very poetic. In my opinion his masterpiece is on "Drawbridge", a song by Aesop Rock (released on Mush...).

How much do you consider yourself "hip-hop"? What do you think about the current state of the genre and of music in general?

I love the rhythmic approach that hip-hop forces me to take in delivery and even in writing lyrics. What I write becomes more and more "assertive" as the years go by: hip-hop is a pretty fitting language for that kind of thing. My lyrics are often full of quotes, allusions, reactions: I try to create movement-images, as Gilles Deleuze put it. If he were still alive, I'm sure Deleuze would be a huge fan of Programme.

Rap is a symptom of our era: we've entered musical postmodernism, starting from the early 2000s. Music is no longer made in reaction to the previous decade (at least the music that interests me). It's a pretty new phenomenon: a band like Broadcast couldn't have existed before - they draw from every decade and turn it into something original, something current. When I discover people like them, or K-the-i???, Darkleaf, Labwaste etc., I tell myself we're really lucky and that this era is quite rich.

And what about the French experimental hip-hop scene? We know a few names that strike us as very interesting: Diabologum/Éxpérience/Programme (if we can call them "hip-hop"), Spade&Archer... What's the situation like?

In my opinion, no one writes as well in France today as Arnaud Michniak (Programme, Diabologum), who has just released a fine album under his own name (available on www.cd1d.com, same as mine!).

The underground is overflowing with incredible artists, who often work with collage and are pretty iconoclastic when it comes to traditional rap: Gravité Zéro, Olympe Mountain... People like Rocé, Abd Al Malik or Fuzati have managed to bring this new style of writing to a fairly wide audience. That's a good sign, even if France's main hip-hop radio station still prefers to play a load of crap instead of them...

There's an album I go back to often: Kery James's "Si c'était à refaire". Really accomplished writing, a sound that ages well: it's truly an important album for French hip-hop.

How was "Oulipo Saliva" received in France?

The specialist press liked it, and today it shows up on quite a few year-end lists (on Listen To Europe, for instance). So we're very pleased with the response it's gotten. I sent the album to a few artists who I felt had been influential, and I got pretty lucky: they all wrote back (Myspace makes things easier, it must be said!) and they liked it too. Françoiz Breut, Why?, Radar Bros., Edison Woods...

Sales reflect the current situation pretty well: we'll be around 700, which is decent by the standards of my French distributor (Baleine), and unfortunately even more than other releases this year from my label (We Are Unique Records) have managed, since some really great stuff is coming out.

One last question… Why use English?

What I enjoy about writing songs is playing with pop's pre-established codes, exactly as they were created (and simultaneously deconstructed) with "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver": verse-chorus structure, song length, singing in English, etc. I don't see the point of following all of them to the letter, but it's good to preserve some of them, otherwise it stops being pop. So I set myself this constraint: whatever happens, use English.

Besides, English is something I think about every day: I'm a translator and a translation teacher. I'm fascinated by the evocative power of English, as well as by the sheer number of insane constraints it carries with it. A lot of artists think it's enough to sing with an "erw" sound to give themselves some Anglo-Saxon credibility, but they end up getting stuck: it's an extremely demanding language, packed with stress accents, stock phrases, possible or impossible neologisms… Again, it's a matter of constraints, and that's fascinating.

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