Mathieu Arsenault’s first solo album, EX PO, is already a revelation in itself, a virtually unheard-of fusion in Quebec of French-language song and experimental electronic music, but here are two more about its making. First, the majority of the sounds, tampered with, hatched, stretched, wavy, are those of his own voice, passed through this modular synthesizer that he took years to assemble. Then, Arsenault had fun hiding tiny samples of FM radio station callsigns through the eight songs.
“My thinking is similar to the one we had with Technical Kidman”, the avant-garde rock / electro group he co-founded and with which he released two albums until its dissolution in 2018. “We sampled then advertisements; the idea is to recover something that is imposed on us. Because that’s what mass popular culture is: you don’t choose it, you endure it, like when you walk into a pharmacy and the radio is playing. Me, I take it, I make it my own, I transform into something else to give it a new meaning. Those jingles radio entered me without my having accepted it, so now it’s up to me to enter into a dialogue with it and do something with it. “
And in this dialogue, to define oneself, continues Arsenault, who places the quest for identity at the center of his album. The first need to “find your own way,” he says, “in this world where we are bombarded by things that can have an influence on us. Finding a balance between our need to shape the world around me, while recognizing the influence it has on who we are. “
This is not the only gesture of artistic commitment that Arsenault makes on his debut album to be released under the stage name ONLY: for the first time, the songwriter writes and sings in French. “I didn’t like writing song lyrics before,” he admits. Strangely, since I made the conscious effort to write in French, I have really taken a liking to it. I also find it easier to write texts that speak to me. “
Who are talking about what, exactly? It’s blurry, even for him. “My inspiration comes from sound, that is to say that I will improvise, little by little digging up a melody, until it comes. I improvise by singing phonemes, and a text emerges. So for me writing is often not understanding what the song is about until it is well advanced. But there are still lyrics and songs on this album, ”certainly detached from the verse / chorus constraints (we are light years away from Brassens and Vigneault), but they are undeniably songs.
Finding the right balance
As he began working on his album, the singer-songwriter sought to merge two elements that are dear to him: song and experimental electronic music. The result is nothing short of astounding. We think of Björk, Laurie Anderson, more recently Jenny Hval, Arca or the Colombian composer Lucrecia Dalt, all creators admired by Mathieu Arsenault.
But have we ever heard in Quebec such a unique blend of French-language song and experimental electronic music? We could go back to Péloquin-Sauvageau and the album Let us kiss you where you hurt (1972), but where the poet Claude Péloquin recited and played characters, Mathieu Arsenault sings, at the top of his lungs, in a melodic voice softened by studio effects that contrast with minimalist orchestrations. He especially sings with intensity, as if he had just split his veins, as if he wanted the whole world to hear him before taking his last breath.
“I was often dissatisfied with what I heard in electronic songs,” continues Arsenault. Often times we used electronic instruments much the same way we would use a guitar or a piano, and ended up with a writing that ended up not being much different. [Sur EX PO], I use codes, sounds and gestures linked to this experimental electronic music that I have loved for years, but looking for the right balance with the song. “
Thus, the codes, forms and sounds of avant-garde electronic music had a direct influence on the way songs were composed “insofar as, for me, this music is written from sounds, not not from chords or notes. It’s all about timbre and dynamics at the base ”, those of his voice processed by the synthesizer.
“What I like about the voice [comme matériau de base]is that it is imperfect. A synthesizer oscillator, it does exactly what is expected of it, perfectly. The voice, it staggers, it cracks. Often, I will layer tracks of my voice before entering them in my synth. The voice, the sounds move a little, as if they had a life of their own. The processing of this sound in the synth gives a more mechanical, systematic result. I find that the correspondence of these two gestures, the singing and the synthetic treatment, makes the sound more sinuous and interesting. “