In an era where genre descriptions often read like Mad-libs, it’s still hard to wrap the tongue around the most apt definition of Fievel Is Glauque: “Lo-fi-jazz-micro-pop.”
But, of course, that’s overly pedantic. The Brussels based group searched for luck and improvisation and found it in spades for their debut album God's Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess with 20 songs that are basically just hooks on hooks on hooks. Compositional wizard Zach Phillips crafted the sketches of these songs to be as direct and catchy as possible. It’s a deliriously delightful collection, with three ensembles adding fiery saxophone, seductive rhythm and intoxicating keys to Ma Clément’s captivating singing. “Decoy” slinks like a lost ‘60s pop hit, “the Dream Team” has a sensual stutter and “Unfinding” erupts into a full on progressive-rock epic in micro-dose format.
God's Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess is the first great album of 2021, and we were delighted to chat with Ma and Zach over email.
You’ve been very open about the recording process of this album, and the exact equipment being used. In an industry that often obscures the specifics of recording for the listener, was it important for you to be transparent?
Zach: My efforts to control the interpretation of my music apparently represent folly instead of sin: foiled again! I’m told it was Jeremy Bentham who coined this sense of “transparency”: his terrifying involvement’s a generous clue as to fussy Western cerebration’s itinerary. Proselytization runs on power and strives for univocality but my heuristics serve polyvalence and run on shadows I definitionally can’t find. Writing’s scene is always elsewhere. I would love to join with the impossible industry that would centralize that obscurity.
When writing lyrics, did you place yourself in the shoes of a character, or was it sheer subconscious?
Ma: To be sincere, I didn't think about this possibility, I don't like "acting.” Writing lyrics feels like it is doing it by itself, same active process as meeting someone by accident on the street. You go somewhere, and on the way you see opportunities. The choice lives in the will to avoid or welcome what is on this sidewalk you are taking. The words come, I meet them and if it feels right, I write them down on the paper. It is a similar construction to write together with Zach, on different paths. So I guess yes, it has something to do with subconscious mind as you said.
Zach: The distinction to be drawn between unterbewusste (subconscious) and unbewusste (unconscious) is in a way the only measure I impose. When the former acts as amanuensis, its language reeks of the “prison-house” where one’s weighty armor bullies for explication and God’s name is fractured into rationalistic quanta. Out of optimist compulsion, greedy for reward, and refractory periods notwithstanding, I repeat and repeat, hoping to draw from the deeper well of the latter term despite a constant length of arm. What the bucket finds engenders the risk of every méconnaissance, so I only try to sense vernal life there on its rim, staving off identification and interpretation with the help of my friends inattention, speed, rhyme and syllabic bind. Hamsun was obsessed with clarifying that his books didn’t contain characters. I’m more with Ryokan: “after you know that my poems are not poems, then we can begin to discuss poetry!”
Take “Go Down Softly,” which fulfills my every wish so economically it can only have escaped my lips: “endlessly reported was a shot in the air // played over and over, and I don’t understand what it signified // and I don’t wanna be that way, but I don’t wanna go down softly…” Following this trajectory from an initial (audial) image rendered in passive voice to a gloriously infantile contest of introjected/projected appearances and prenarrativized ambitions, we’re led to a fuller harmonic bloom, and flower tunnels lead on to a valedictory scene Sylvain [Haenen, guitarist on 3 out of 5 sessions] presides over as hero. Veridiction, by contrast, has no place here. Like Charly García said, “you can only say goodbye.”
You sent over the chord sheet for “Decoy,” did having reductive charts give more freedom to the groups you worked with?
Zach: I didn’t go to music school or formally study harmony. Ryan Power [mastering + NY Fievel guitar] insisted I start making acceptable charts in 2018 so I copied the form of some Ben Reed had sent me. They’re getting better, although I still insist b10 makes more sense than #9, among other personal embarrassments. Charts are maps, and the chain of representations that led to these recordings milks every mediation for all its mana. The post-Trashmen charting situation is mutating because my changes are getting more tonally ambiguous. But yeah, it’s been exciting to see how more technically proficient musicians will interpret non-dominant b9 chords et cetera.
I would single out Shoko Igarashi, Thom Gill, Davin Givhan, Billy McShane, Raphaël Desmarets, Jay Israelson and Ryan as some of the Fievels whose extreme musical literacy led them to extrapolate the chart-rendered material into new harmonic directions. Others, like Sylvain Haenen, Logan Hone, Quentin Moore, Faustine Hollander, Stephe Cooper, and Fabien Portejoie tended to literalize the boundaries of the charted terms. Harmonic concepts are really economic representations of melodic lines, so these charts are just models, meant to melt away in the mouth like chocolate wrapping-paper. Eléonore Kenis (who wrote her own solfège charts), Eric Kinny (duophonic lap steel tablature), Marta Tiesenga and Hendrike Scharmann (staff notation & ear), and Valentin Noiret (reading just for tonal center & ear) spiced up the proceedings with gravity leading away from a textual basis.
“Decoy” is also different due to the French lyrics. What inspired the shift in language and, as someone who can’t speak a lick of French, what’s the story being told?
Ma: To me, the words are more about feelings than telling a story, but I will try to express some ideas: this thing is badly wrapped, received in the wrong way. Due to abruptness of a lost heart, someone is accused of receipt without choice to avoid or not avoid the situation. But "don't worry about a thing" as [Christopher] Forgues says, now there is only a necessity to go off course. I wrote these lyrics a year ago during Christmas holidays. It happened very quickly, like on Tinder: Zach asked me to write lyrics for this song he sent to me, I had those French words in my notebook, and they seemed to be made for each other. It took 15 minutes to write the lyrics, no questions asked. Perfect match. So maybe it has nothing to do with Tinder's modern romanticism, but is more related to the old-fashioned "love at first sight" I used to believe in, the kind of mystical connection between things or people you can see in the movie Sleepless at Seattle.
What pushed you to make the majority of these songs bite-sized?
Ma: I would like to answer but I don't understand these words and Google translate doesn't help. Maybe I should take English lessons or work as an au pair in the UK to improve my speaking and writing. I thought that somehow misunderstandings created through using a foreign language would help me escape from language's boundaries (for example calling someone a "stealer" instead of a "thief"). But here it's only an opaque filter.
Zach: In Blanche Blanche Blanche we let Marcus Aurelius answer this one: “Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away.” We call raspberries ‘berries’ but they’re really aggregates of seeded ovaries. What matters most in food isn’t nomenclature or dimensionality but how it’s grown, how it lives, its destination as nutriment. Nutritional value in this metaphor corresponds to the topological qualities of these pieces of writing we honor by refusing to decide whether they’re subjects here or objects there — that the taste of “I know not what” in the internal relationships they enclose enchants (incantare, ’to sing into’) is plenty enough. Why are your songs so bite-sized, grandma? The better to feed you with, my dear… Terre Roche says practice without hope of fruition, but I’m into fruiting with no hope of practice.
Since these sketches and song ideas came out in such short bursts, were their touchstones of genres or eras that you channeled? Both in the production sound and instrumentation, there seems to be some influence from 60s/70s French pop music.
Zach: Not just ideas or sketches but the songs whole-cloth come in 30-45, though I crave more longevity: dealing with the 60s/70s would be nice! Lately I’ve been toying with the possible inversion of “composition” and “improvisation.” Improvisus seems to be what I do in writing: an ‘untimely’ (temporally non-linear) performance without aim, careering toward the ‘unprovided.’ Etymologically I think the idea of discrete (‘foreseen’) elements pre-existing improvisation is foreclosed: what is ‘provided’ can only be interpreted after the fact of the experience. It is componere, then, that does this work, predicated as it is on separate parts being ‘put together’ — corresponding formally to André Green’s conceptual expansion of the “work of the negative,” i.e. positive processes of representation (including sheer subjectivity) that are premised on extant absences, lacks, et cetera (see also Bion’s “no-thing”). In my view, a strong negative capability doesn’t just entail turning one’s back on rationalism but requires representational tactics that leave in peace the ’incommunicado element’ Winnicott says is at the core of the (indeterminate, ‘indispensably hypothetical’ as the unconscious itself) ‘true self’.
This is all to be counterposed to what I call the gentrification of the void, this enterprising autocolonialism that frames the unconscious as a collection of emergent play-objects for the ego: a painful project doomed to success as the horizon of the invisible unavoidably recedes ever further into visibility. Think of those “leave no traces” hiking signs: following that injunction, one can still go have an experience in what’s left of wilderness and wind up with a twig in the pocket. Surprise! A nice feeling, but the representation of that twig is one fraught trail, barred by the Forest Service’s defenses and peopled by trapdoors into repetition. As for the Frenchness factor, that’s probably an artifact of the francopotency of the Fievel majority. I can feel well the gravitational pull of this lalangue where ‘solfège’ means ‘music theory’ and the floral eccentricity of jazz songwriting is pre-technicolored before it ever touches a Demy…
What were the conversations like with these musicians as you outlined what the goal of these sessions were? Did they make you rethink or reshape some of the outlines you made?
Zach: Ma is the arbiter of what songs we approach, and each of the five group sessions involved 12-14 songs, so there were a lot that didn’t pan out on the Marantz for varying reasons (i.e. tunes that initially felt right but began to take on aspects of “psychic enemy” or “false idol”). In general the exigencies of joking around tended to monopolize the little time that might have been more conceptually goal-oriented, and the chips continue to fall where they may. But in particular, Billy McShane has long been the prime extrinsic mover for my changing relation to music and his involvement in the second session really opened things up for me and Ma in an ongoing way. Billy moves everything into parallaxis: you’re never just talking ‘about’ a subject, you’re inside of it looking at the frame that makes it possible and punning on every imaginary difference between the two. I am sinning by representing this here, check out his playing though.
Were there any songs that produced difficult moments to conduct or record? I’m thinking of the sudden shifts in “Simple Affairs” or the stop-start opening of “the Ancient Cause.”
Ma: Every each song is a challenge. From my perspective, first there is my individual performance, and when that seems to be resolved and I get it, here comes the sum of individual performances. There's quite a lot to deal with when it comes to the addition of every singularity: souls, interpretations, mistakes, egos, presences, sensibilities, eyes, breath, smells etc. We were lucky enough to work with very talented musicians. Also, Zach is very good at seeing the big picture and usually offers to practice with each person involved one by one, just the two of us. The connection happened even with the lack of time for the groups to practice together. There has always been a point when I said to myself "we can count on each other.”
You’d mentioned that there were some frustrating moments, with certain takes being marred by recording and technical issues. Are there any specific moments you wish hadn’t been lost?
Zach: It’s all lost! Like Blue Gene [Tyranny] said, we are not attached or separate in space. Simply so nice that luck’s lights beamed into a few concords. Sprinting mid-session to the White Night for enough D batteries to squeeze in a few more takes before noise curfew, getting Ma tea at Dunkin or Billy a stash of Red Bull so they’d continue, exhausting the emotionally-depleted Tournefeuille crew into our 1am session after driving all the way from Lyon, eschewing a necessary break in Chris Cohen’s garage studio just to cadge another “Softly”: it’s all a living, and the album documents what was lost in it.
Alongside the lo-fi recording, the music videos and shows you’ve uploaded on your channel also look like they’re from old camcorders. Was that a conscious choice to also make the visual aspect grainy?
Zach: It’s commonly thought that people use “lo-fi” equipment to swaddle themselves in representational ambiguity which ostensibly proffers “forgiveness” for their technical naiveties, et cetera. Maybe this is true for plug-ins! I just use these tools because they’re cheap (or used to be) and they whisk me away from computer-world’s epistemological cages. Whether with camcorder, cassette or reel-to-reel, the part I do that corresponds to work only aims for specificity. Donations of superior, hypermodern gear are absolutely welcome!
“Stormy Weather” is an outlier even through the rest of these songs, as it sounds like it’s coming through a wall. Was that a quirk of that take or an active choice?
Zach: I was ashamed by the paper-like flatness of this busy harmony too neatly grounding the unmoderated ostentation of the verses. Everything was done too up, too well, the feel too garish, so I applied dark EQ & selective reverb/delay in Audacity. I wanted Ryan to redo the FX better but he said they felt hip-hop.
Though these songs have hooks based around Ma’s voice and saxophone, the rhythmic back bone is precise throughout. What were the sort of instructions or things you played with when working with the percussion and bass players?
Zach: Yeah, loud flavor between the different rhythm sections, and most had played together before: Cohen/Givhan and Rouquier/Portejoie came with preformed interpsychic integrity. I bow and bow to chef Gaspard Sicx’s slice and to Raphaël’s ecstatic freedom. Stephe shocked me with his newfound Pedro Aznar-esque feel and Derek Baron has this weird capacity for defamiliarizing grid enforcement. I’m an uneasy bandleader. I try not to tell people what to do but how and when to decide for themselves. If everyone doesn’t make the song their own, we can’t ‘play together’ in its virtuality, we’re just ‘playing it’. These undertakings play on the easy double meaning of the surrealist idea of “objective hazard.”
“Unfinding” nearly borders on prog-rock with the speed and the fiery solo. Was that more of a difficult song to pin down, or was it a thrill?
Ma: As I said, every single song is challenging. But to talk especially about this one, I think the intention of this song is very clear. And Zach was limpid about what he meant. So we all knew where to go, how to do it. But the key point that makes it strong: it was so much fun to play. Pleasure is my favorite leader.