During his nearly two decades as part of avant-garde punk trio We Are Wolves, Alex Ortiz always cobbled together pop songs, “but I always ended up sabotaging them myself, like I couldn’t come to terms with it.” was pop,” he admits. To throw Fluxus Pop, his very first solo album — sung in French and English under the stage name Rip Pop Mutant — is in a way a liberation, he says, adding that his vision of pop “is closer to contemporary art , plastic art”, which he studied at university while carrying out his musical projects. “In my songs, there are hooks, beautiful melodies, but they are not formatted like what we hear everywhere. »
On that, he is not wrong. This is the great merit of this disc: the references are obvious, those of the new wave arriving at the top, but never presented in a nostalgic or honorific way, and this is where Ortiz’s taste for risk does its work. . Fans of We Are Wolves (whose members are discussing the creation of a new double album, reassures us Alex) will recognize themselves in the sound of this album, unpredictable, sometimes rough, noisy tendency, all that serves to dress strange costumes of the songs that evoke the great synthetic pop of the 1980s.
The song Occasionally, like, at the beginning of the album. Big nod to Joy Division and New Order which, through its treatment of sound ingredients (Tricky Woo’s friend Adrian Popovich, produces the album), transcends nostalgia. “I was born in 1975; I understand that the bands who built, formed my conception of pop music, it’s all these groups that I heard in the 1980s, New Order, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, who, without my realizing it, affecting. In my head, when I think of pop music, it is summed up by the sound of these bands, a little darka bit romantic. Fluxus Popit’s very much the exploration” of these musical references.
And more. The title of Rip Pop Mutant’s album already hints at the musician’s affiliation with the world of contemporary art. Fluxus, as in the interdisciplinary artistic movement that appeared in the 1960s and which claimed (among others) the multidisciplinary artist George Maciunas, the poet Emmett Williams, the writer Ken Friedman and the musicians Yoko Ono and La Monte Young. “It’s a movement that has always influenced me, that influences me in everything I do since my studies at Concordia University. These artists touched me because they sought to join art to society, because they approached it with a bit of derision and exaggeration. I liked their idea of community, of mixing the two worlds, society and art, without falling into elitism. Art is everywhere around us — that’s a lot too, Fluxus Pop. There is pop in everything. »
” In the void “
Some of the instrumental tracks on the album were recorded over 10 years ago, “stuff I had written alongside We Are Wolves projects, but I found those songs too slow, too soft, too emotional , too strange, in the end, it didn’t correspond to what we were doing with “the Wolves”. I accumulated that by telling myself that one day, I would make it exist differently, in a solo project”.
Three or four songs on the album turn out to be mockups from 10 years ago, like Rain on Us, on which her daughter Paloma sings: “I had asked Brigitte Fontaine, one of my great idols, to sing on it, but hey, it was complicated, so I asked my daughter” to do it, on these old tracks. “We only added synths, Adrian tweaked some sounds, but the song is as it was 10 years ago. I even preserved the original text. I confess that I do not remember exactly what he means, but I wanted to protect him. Ortiz had composed a song for his daughter on the We Are Wolves album titled Unseen Violence (2009). He is now offering one to his twins, Miro and Milan, who we hear singing on the piece. Everything was improvised, Ortiz on guitar, the guys on instruments lying around, they didn’t even know dad was recording them.
“If several songs began to exist 10 years ago, it was thanks to the pandemic that they came to fruition”, underlines Ortiz. Between these very different eras, “the feeling of the songs, the emotion, is almost of the same order. The only thing the pandemic has done is heighten these emotions, both heavy and epic. A bit like those old films from the 1970s by Werner Herzog: the great quest, the actor ready to cross sea and world… This disc is for me like a crusade, a fight, necessary. That’s why I was able to make an album that was a little more emotional, a little more epic, experimental, but with the intention of making pop music”.
We have lost nothing by waiting, because Fluxus Pop is an ingenious, visceral and exciting disc, his first solo album in 20 years of service on the Quebec underground scene. “I try not to think about it too much because… I don’t know what to think,” the We Are Wolves founding member candidly says. “I throw myself into the void, not knowing what that entails, but there is something liberating in it. It’s as if I freed myself from a weight. I feel like I’ve finally accomplished something, after all these years. I feel like I’m finally assuming that maybe I’m a musician. »