Interview | VioleTT Pi is not a “phoney baloney”

“The goal is to surprise”, explains, without surprise, the man with the red beard responding to the pseudonym VioleTT Pi. Somewhere between Limp Bizkit and Gilles Deleuze, interview with a singer for whom I is another.

“If you don’t understand me, you tell me, because I often leave,” warns Karl Gagnon, a salutary warning as his thought, nourished by music and philosophy, flutters in all directions, like his songs all in sinuosities and in ambushes, which an electrocardiogram would confuse with an attack of tachycardia.

The classic interview during which a scribe asks a songwriter to comment on the intimate events camouflaged by his words? It is not with the wildflower sitting before us that it will take place.

“I is another”, Karl explains about his work, taking up Rimbaud’s maxim. The precision is reassuring, so often does the idea of ​​ending it arise on this third album, baloney suicidethe same title as his collection of poetry with a furiously woozy syntax published in 2019 by La Mèche.

It is therefore not with despair in his heart, but rather with the fascination of someone who loves vast questions, that the musician measures himself here against that of death. “Deleuze said that what is interesting with questions is not to give them answers, but the way in which we get out of them”, he underlines, paraphrasing the French philosopher, Gilles of his first name, whose work carries a reputation for unfathomable abstraction.

philosophical joke

Who are the protagonists who express themselves in the songs of VioleTT Pi, these beleaguered boys and girls who use shocking formulas such as “Act as if you love your body” or “I’m so ugly that I want to die”?

“I have no idea,” Karl replies, his eyes widening, as if the question were completely absurd. Rare exception to this bias for fiction: Butanethe most surprisingly touching letter from a father to his daughter, to whom he repeats to do everything to protect her flame, her essence, “run, Kiwi/because you’ll be the only one/to save your soul/run away from the stupidity/before it happens”.

A small mischievous smile cuts the face of the 35-year-old dad. “It’s a song about gasoline and I called it Butane. » He laughs like others would laugh at a fart joke. “It’s my best philosophical joke! »

Phoney baloney?

In The cigar at the edge of the lipsa certain Carl-Camille (the first name of Karl in the romantic universe of his brother Akim¹) attends with purely ecstatic joy a show by Limp Bizkit, the flagship group of his adolescence in Granby. A scene that your journalist remembers having received as the confirmation of an intuition, the music of VioleTT Pi having always refused to erase its seemingly less noble influences, not to say less cool. The hints of nu metal heard in ev (2016) and Manifesto against fear (2016)? It wasn’t just in our ears.

It is thus logical that baloney suicide is once again contaminated by a maelstrom of heterogeneous references, from the very FM languor of the one who waitsto the shrill cries of Thrown into the world like a trophyup to the very Nintendo frenzy of the verses of Butane.

“It’s like in The matrixwhen the camera makes a 360 around the characters”, sums up the one who says he wanted to “appear in full”, from all angles, throughout the entire album.

“Chu just a phoney anyway”, he sings in the title track of baloney suicidean admission that should not be taken literally, Karl Gagnon being the type to say one thing to express another, to subvert received ideas by greedily embracing them.

This enemy of the false hierarchies between low and high culture remembers as if it were yesterday the disdainful gaze of the record store when he procured the vinyl reissue of Significant OtherLimp Bizkit’s masterpiece.

“He had totally judged me and I had found it so funny, because who cares, right? Do you think you’re cooler than me? OK. »

Wisdom may be knowing that we are all someone else’s baloney.

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