C'Mon Tigre - C Mon Tigre - L'Habitat tropicalista

by Maria Teresa Soldani and Matteo Contri

On a day of relentless rain, at the tables of a bar just outside the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, we met C'mon Tigre before their performance in the theatre recently dedicated to maestro Ennio Morricone. The duo behind the collective that brought a wave of cosmopolitanism and electro-jazz innovation to the Italian music scene had just wrapped up a long day of rehearsals ahead of the live debut of their third studio album, “Scenario” (Intersuoni, 2022), which arrived after their self-titled debut (Africantape, 2014) and the sophomore effort “Racines” (BDC / !K7, 2019). We had a chat with them about the new album, the return to live music, and these past, complicated years…

First “Racines”, now “Scenario” — the very word you chose as a title already opens up several avenues for the imagination. In French, for instance – a language you're familiar with – it can also mean “screenplay, script”… Can you break down the different ways in which “Scenario” manages to describe the new songs?

“Scenario” is a collective term we came up with to describe a multi-faceted work that follows several narrative threads in order to sketch out different scenarios. In writing it, we drew on the inspiration provided by the work of Paolo Pellegrin, a Magnum photographer who has spent years documenting things happening around the world, mostly the hardest-hitting things to look at, so we're often talking about tragedies, catastrophes, wars… We borrowed his eye during a period of total immobility for everyone; his work became a way of continuing to travel with us, and we rebuilt a series of scenarios ready to explode, which is what we built the record on. So for us “Scenario” is a reality, but it's also an act of imagination — it sits exactly in between. It fits perfectly.

So what role does the visual component play in your work? Do the images inspire the composition, or do they come afterwards?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. “Scenario” was a six-handed work, our four hands plus Paolo's two. The track “Migrants” was the one that set the tone for the whole record, and it actually draws on a 2015 reportage about migration from Libya to the island of Lesbos – we've been working on something specifically related to that which will see the light of day soon – after which we carried on with our music production, connecting to different moments in his body of work.

A dialogue between your work and his…

Yes, generally speaking, while our other records had an almost purely artistic imprint, and the visual imagery usually came as a consequence of the music, this time the difference was that it came first. The themes are also strong in relation to current events. This time it was Paolo's work that inspired us.

Looking at the visual side of things, which is fundamental, we noticed that Pellegrin often works in black and white, while you work a lot with colour – the visual component is strong, the tiger, for example – even though “No One You Know” is a black-and-white video where the colour is nonetheless intense…

It also depends on the hand of whoever is doing the work: the authorial voice of a photographer like Paolo, or that of an illustrator like Daniel, who tends to work in ink…

Speaking of your videos, since they're always engaging, powerful and beautiful, how did the collaborations with Danijel Žeželj and Donato Sansone come about?

It all comes from our own experience. We collaborated with Daniel in the past, we made a video for our first record and did several live shows with live painting performances. Also, he was there right at our baptism: our very first show, at the Tpo in Bologna – which is like a second home for us, they've always supported us and given us huge availability – so basically he's a great friend. We don't live close to each other, but he moved back from America to Croatia, so the distance isn't even that great any more. Same thing with Sansone: he's a friend we'd already wanted to work with on previous records, and this time it all came together because the track suited his madness perfectly. To sum it up, we tend to try to keep things within a kind of family circle and collaborate with people we already know or with whom we've built a bond, because the connection is definitely stronger, and that makes the whole creative process more enjoyable for us. Over the years we've also approached people we didn't know, and we've met them through this same approach. On our second record, “Racines”, which had ten collaborations, not all of them were with “neighbours” so to speak — some were with people whose work meant a great deal to us, almost as fans, and then there was an introduction, an exchange… Luckily our work travels on a frequency that gets recognised, so we've never had trouble asking someone to collaborate on a project; there's always been great enthusiasm on all sides, with a healthy, direct approach, without intermediaries. It's been easy, and it's given us incredibly strong results, beyond our expectations. Leaving a lot of room for other people's contributions is our foundation.

When it comes to the visual side, the work with Pellegrin obviously remains central, but we noticed that on this album there are also more “explicit” collaborations on the musical side: Xenia Rubinos, Colin Stetson, Mick Jenkins, who also appeared on the previous “Racines”. What was it like working with them? Rubinos put out a beautiful album last year.

We discovered her at the very start of C'Mon Tigre – we listen to a huge amount of music – through her first record, which really struck us. We got to know her by chance, because we were actually interested in her husband – a drummer we wanted for our first record – and, whether by chance or bad timing, nothing came of that collaboration; but we were in New York, we called him, and he was at a party with Xenia. That was in 2014. She has a strange, distinctive voice that pairs well with ours, so there had just never been a real opportunity before now. It all came together fairly naturally. Our listening habits had also shifted a bit away from the African-music axis that used to be a reference point for us, and thinking through some of the tracks we already had, these were the names that came to mind, and they were both incredibly generous with their time. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, we weren't able to collaborate together in the studio, only remotely.

Speaking of vocals, since we mentioned Xenia's, we've always been curious about your choice to use filtered vocals, which crops up often on your records and has almost become a trademark. Why is that?

Because it's treated just like any other instrument. In the end, we never leave a guitar untouched, we never leave a saxophone untouched, we never leave the drums untouched, and we don't leave the voice untouched either. It's the track itself that decides whether the vocal ends up more or less filtered, more natural, more reverbed, more distorted. Actually, it also comes from a kind of modus operandi during recording, because the filtered vocal is nothing more than a harmonica mic used to jot down vocal lines, and those “notes” sometimes stay, sometimes get discarded, and when they stay, they end up shaping the character of the song. Often they become the final version, because in the mix the vocal usually tends to sit a bit above everything else: here, instead, it's treated as just one part of the whole. In C'Mon Tigre it's rare to hear any real imbalance, even on the instrumental side; you might hear it in certain solo parts, on dynamics we want to bring out, but generally we try to keep a coherent, cohesive flow, and the vocal fits into that same modus operandi.

On this record it felt like there was more attention paid to song form, a few more direct melodies…

It's true. One of the first reasons is that we worked on the record, produced it, and wrapped it up in an unusual timeframe for us — much shorter than usual. That led us to finish writing and find ourselves with tracks that had shorter running times than what we're used to. Actually, even the overall packaging was closer, with due differences, to the song format. Why it happened, beyond these reasons, is hard to explain because we really follow the flow of the track a lot. We start with an idea, but we often arrive at a final result we hadn't planned, so we probably worked on sketches, on drafts of songs that tended to take this shorter, more concise shape. Still, it's interesting that we ended up there.

Your music has always had the power to create "other" scenarios and catapult listeners into exotic, often cinematic realities, but in “Scenario” we felt you leaned more heavily on devices that brought you closer to more classically cinematic, soundtrack-like sounds, especially through the more prominent use of strings. Was there an actual move toward that territory?

We're definitely interested in it, and it's one of the driving forces behind this project. All the visual collaborations we develop stem from the fact that we strongly believe in the fusion of images and music, so we have a naturally cinematic approach. And we're certainly interested in developing this further, moving away from record production to work hand in hand with, say, film production. We've been talking about it for a while, and I think it's something that could happen quite naturally. In this case we had material that inspired us in that direction, so the path toward an involuntary soundtrack was a direct consequence of this collaboration.

A track like “Burning Down” really struck us — a danceable electronic flare-up that also nods to certain rave music. The danceable element has certainly never been absent from your tracks, but would a future turn further in that direction intrigue you?

Yes, it's a track that, just like fire, burns fast. The track featuring Colin Stetson also veers toward that genre. It could happen that in the future we push further in that direction — we don't want to set limits for ourselves. A track like “Burning Down” also makes sense in terms of the album's structure. We like to suggest provocations, and we do it through a play of contrasts — we always have. “Scenario” is an album that wants to follow a narrative flow, and any story worth its salt has plot twists: “Burning Down” is a plot twist, a breaking point. It serves to break the record at that moment and to change the language with which the next track, “Migrants”, begins. There's a reset that suggests a change.

It seems to act as a watershed between the two halves of the album: the first still tied to what you'd already done, the second increasingly exploratory…

Yes, that's true. The opening track, too, which is the album's antechamber, has the same sense, even if it plays a different role: it's a "welcome," a track that greets you, that prepares you for the listen. Then there's a breaking track in the middle, and the Colin Stetson track at the end, closing with another "provocation" — always in air quotes, there's nothing extreme about it — but it's something you maybe don't expect, something that can add a twist to how the record is absorbed. Usually we close with fairly sweet suites that accompany you to the end, but this time it's the complete opposite — it's something nervy that leaves you hanging. We also take some risks with pairings that strike us as interesting: when we were working on “Twist Into Any Shape”, the first single, we imagined this meeting between Caribou and Fela Kuti. The same goes for deciding to close the record with an instrumental track featuring Stetson's parts. We want to create synergies that, in our view, make sense within the record.

Speaking of narrative, your album covers – where something recurs and something changes – seem like chapters of one big book. Is there a common thread running through the three records?

Not intentional, but there's definitely one. Nothing we do in C'Mon Tigre is rationalized from the start. To give an example, when we set out to work on “Scenario”, we wanted to engage with something new, with photographic material that was dense with content and political, an area we'd never ventured into before. So politics entered the record through Paolo's work — a politics we might call natural, almost spontaneous, human: it's a record about the human condition. We'd approached Pellegrin's work in a completely opposite way to what we ended up with; we'd told ourselves, "with this material, the thing that will surely come naturally to us is to make a seated, dark, reflective record," so we'd already made some choices, we could already picture it. Then when we started working, something else came out: four-on-the-floor, rave… We reprocessed the content in our heads and unintentionally went somewhere else, which just goes to show there's no premeditation involved. Or if there is premeditation, we don't embrace it. It depends on the collaboration underway, on what happens once you start. You form an idea and then it changes and becomes integrated with the other person's contribution. Even the starting idea we had about Paolo's material is beautiful because it reflects his vision, which isn't about simply stopping to photograph the tragedy unfolding, but about trying to offer a deeper vision, different from the one suggested by what's happening.

It's a different level. The interesting thing is that when you add a passage you create a second narrative level, so the plot becomes more complex and more gripping, if you like — the message becomes more complicated but also more powerful, and film music tends to underline things, it's used in that sense. But there's another kind of music, the intradiegetic kind, which perhaps belongs to the scene and has a meaning that's fairly contrasting, different, because it can afford to be: it doesn't have to accompany, it can burst in, even change how you think and how that particular scene is processed. Fundamentally, we like contrast.

This is the reason why we ended up playing with contrast on Paolo's work, unintentionally. “Scenario” isn't a work built on Paolo Pellegrin's shots — it's influenced by them to a large extent, but not entirely. We weren't working with his photos in front of us, so we let ourselves be influenced and started a process that then became entirely personal. We set out to make things and things arrive — this capitulation, maybe, also happens because deep down we don't want to lose the roots of what we've done, and we tend toward an evolution made of nuances, because within the works themselves, and in how they're conceived, there are already breaking points that seem sufficiently jarring to us to act as a watershed for the next relaunch. But the next record won't be a rave record — there might be a dominant element, but it will lead somewhere else.

You're about to perform “Scenario” live here at the Auditorium Parco della Musica — how do you feel about that? How did you experience the pandemic period as artists?

For us the break was relatively short because we played our last show here in Rome last October – we've been here quite often in recent months – and amid the misfortune of the pandemic we were also lucky, because we didn't have a record coming out, so we didn't suffer such a sharp stoppage. We hope we can finally put a full stop to a period that's been complicated. It's also hard to put into words everything that happened in between, because it really was a bit like those second levels — a particularly difficult moment that stirred up other things inside everyone.

Your take on the proposals and measures put forward to support the world of culture and entertainment?

We undoubtedly don't live in a country that's especially attentive to the arts sector, which is paradoxical for Italy, at least historically speaking. Personally, we haven't been mistreated, and we don't really want to say the government handled things clumsily, because it was a situation never seen before, with protocols to implement, probably involving a series of decisions that would upset some and please others. We don't feel like pointing fingers just because "it could have been done better." Sure, it could have been done better, there's no doubt about that, but I don't think that counts as a real failing in this case. The important thing, looking ahead, is that what happened marks a year zero in how we deal with unexpected situations differently — various difficulties emerged regarding the conditions of many workers. If anything, it was an opportunity to bring certain issues that affect us closely out into the open, because culture in Italy has been somewhat mistreated over the last few decades, so at this point, with all the cards on the table, everyone got to see it clearly.

One last question, since you'll be on stage very soon: how do you translate one of your albums into a live setting? It's a very complex record with lots of layers…

We'd like to thank the guys we play with, because they often end up doing a lot more than they're used to doing, or more than we ever imagined they could do, so a big part of managing to bring the album back to life depends on them and their talent. It's not easy — we try to capture the soul of the tracks and carry it onto the stage. If you manage to grasp that, it works, so without even noticing you don't miss the things that are gone, they become secondary. So far we've managed it, luckily!

(30/03/2022)