For a brief moment during the pandemic, Ben Shemie, the singer-songwriter and frontman of experimental rock band SUUNS, thought he’d do like some of his friends and change careers. “Maybe I should go into teaching? I said to myself. It was hard to see people around me giving up on music. For many of us, there seemed to be no other options; we earn little money as musicians. It’s in times like these that you really measure your value in the eyes of society, your place on the fringes of it. »
A bad thought, fortunately temporary. In truth, Shemie admits to having worked ceaselessly since the publication of her first album, A Skeleton, in February 2019, and during the lockdowns. Film music, collaborations with Montreal choreographer Danièle Desnoyers, two mini-albums with SUUNS (a new album is even in production), then this fresh solo album, his third in three years, released last Friday, Desideratawhich the musician approached “with the idea of making a story out of it, imagining the soundtrack of someone leaving”, he sums up mysteriously.
Beautiful and ordinary
Let’s start at the end of Desiderata, if you really want it. The penultimate song is called The Past Continuous. We first hear the motionless violins of the Molinari Quartet before the voice of a lady on the phone emerges leaving a message for a loved one: “We want to know how you are organizing tomorrow, she says. Dominic and I, we’re going out, we won’t be there before 11:30 a.m.-midnight, so if you want to leave a message on the answering machine to say when we’re meeting…” Further on, it’s the voice of an insurance company rep pops up, while Shemie’s sings about how hard it is to see someone in the dark of space.
The result, like the rest of the album (whose cover was designed by the manga designer Haruhisa Nakata), between avant-garde song and contemporary chamber music, is beautiful and destabilizing, the messages left on these old answering machines unearthed at Renaissance tangling in the voice of Ben Shemie. “What’s beautiful is that it’s really people talking to each other, for real. It’s normal. Respondent. And beautiful — banal, and beautiful. »
The exercise recalls the masterpiece of composer René Lussier, The treasure of language, released in 1989, which revealed the “Quebec dialect” in all its musicality. “It really influenced me, this album”, confirms Shemie. During his studies in composition, “I wrote scores from vocals, I even did a project at MUTEK a few years ago based on this idea. I love Lussier’s work,” adding that he feared the idea didn’t belong on his new album. “It’s still a bit weirdI wasn’t sure it would work…”
On the spot
Each Ben Shemie album is the product of an uncalculated risk — quite the opposite of the approach that underlies the creation of SUUNS albums, where each sonic detail “is very controlled, rehearsed, precise. When you get to the studio, you know what you want to do — it’s really album production, literally, whereas in my solo work I value the idea of recording without too many ulterior motives. The majority of songs were thus recorded live, without editing, to keep the element of the unexpected intact, as if Shemie was taking a snapshot of a moment of music.
“My solo work is a bit like a meditation,” says Shemie. There is something divine in the feedback of my instruments that I do not control and which is super beautiful. I love it because the result changes with each performance, it’s never the same. […] There are things that happen in the studio that I know I will never be able to do again the same way, and at the same time less good things that could have been done better, but that I accept as they are. »
So, the composition of the work becomes more important than its execution, explains Ben Shemie, who did a master’s degree in mixed composition (acoustic and electronic) at the University of Montreal, notably with the great composer of contemporary opera Ana Sokolovic. “Musical composition is hard, it’s a job in itself, but having ideas is even more difficult,” says the musician. I spend a lot of time listening, trying things out until the idea comes up. Then the composition comes quite quickly. »
And where exactly does the character in your musical story, Ben, go? “Our hero leaves Earth in his ship and goes as far as possible in space, and deep inside, until total darkness, where he finds himself. It’s kind of the same story as 2001. A Space Odyssey, an encounter with oneself. It’s not an action story, it’s just a journey. »