Tell you what – we love hearing from artists when things go right. We equally love hearing from artists when things go dreadfully wrong. A song that was a piece of piss, written in 20 minutes? Or years in the making and a bastard to write?
Whether it’s a song that came together through great duress or one that was smashed out in a short amount of time, we’re getting the lowdown from some of our favourites on the one song that they can’t stop thinking about – in their own words.
Off the back of releasing new album ‘Volume II’ (out now via Costume Records and RVNG Intl.), composer and musician Mathieu David Gagnon a.k.a. Flore Laurentienne talks us through the track ‘Fleuve V‘. Take it away, Mathieu…
“I wrote Fleuve V at the very beginning of the pandemic. This piece came all at once, in the same morning, with the evidence that it was part of the Fleuve series.
When we left Montreal for our house in the country, not knowing when the authorities would let me come back, we left with the essentials, i.e., cats and synthesizers. Usually I always travel with a minimoog Model D, the instrument that is found on almost all the pieces of my production. Except that on this trip, the car was so full that I had to trade the Moog for a smaller synthesizer, the Korg MS-10. I finally spent 6 months with the Korg, a fake Elka harpsichord, a Yamaha CS-50 and a Farfisa combo-compact as my playground. These are the instruments we hear on Fleuve V.
Another interesting fact is that the string orchestra we hear on this piece is the same as on the other pieces on the album, except that we treated it differently. We doubled the tempo of the string arrangement on the recording and then played it at half speed on the original backing track. The result is: the orchestra sounds like a big polyphonic synthesizer and the vibratos become slow and very expressive (movements that the 4 voices of the Korg Ms-10 imitate in the bridge).
And another interesting fact, the piece “Promenade“, the next one on the album, has the same chords as Fleuve V, but the order is reversed.“
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