“We wanted to start from scratch in our way of composing an album,” says Élie Raymond about this double album that Totalement Sublime is about to unveil, the ambient pop project that he started four years ago with Marc- Antoine Barbier. Make a clean slate to include songs without themes and melodic ideas at the start. Rhythm all the same, for variety. By letting himself be guided by intuition, above all: from the recordings of four improvised musical sessions in front of an audience, Totalement Sublime assembled pieces of music on which Raymond sang the verses of the poet Dominique Rivard in the studio. Bright and comforting, the fruit of this experience sounds like nothing else in the Quebec musical landscape.
From a duo, Totalement Sublime became a trio with the arrival of keyboardist Thomas Bruneau Faubert, who formerly followed singer, drummer and keyboardist Élie in his former Anglo indie-pop group Foreign Diplomats, now Frais Dispo (his album Tint was released in April 2023). The invitation to join the project was extended to him at the Gaspésie festival BleuBleu, where Totalement Sublime and Choses Sauvages were performing, a group which also includes multi-instrumentalist Marc-Antoine Barbier. “We then gave improvised performances, just with our synths, varying the initial instructions: this one will be more danceable, the other more ambient,” says Barbier. At one point, in Gaspésie, we knelt down in front of Thomas and asked him. »
The image makes Thomas smile, the most discreet of the three, sitting comfortably in his chair. The trio arranged to meet us in their new studio called Le Vieux Poné, hidden in the basement of an industrial building located in the far east of Plateau-Mont-Royal. The smell of freshly applied paint mixes with that of the hot coffee offered to us while a selection of game music released for the Nintendo 64 console plays softly in the background. Zelda, video game music is an influence” on our sound, says Thomas Bruneau Faubert. “It’s also what makes our compositions jovial. »
Atmospheric flights
What else? There are Talking Heads in the grooves more percussive, “the one-note bass lines”, notes Marc-Antoine, as in the first half of the song Slate Coatthe second half of which leaves plenty of room for swirls of synths which dissipate into gentle harmonies, for almost five minutes.
This ambient side, already apparent on the first album released in 2020, is now magnified, confirms Marc-Antoine. “We wanted to integrate that more into our songs, which often begin and end with long atmospheric flights, with beautiful synthesizer textures. » In particular the famous Yamaha DX7, emblematic instrument of new wave pop from the 1980s, renowned for being particularly complex to program – moreover, the pope of ambient music, Brian Eno, is considered one of the rare ones to having been able to exploit its full sonic potential. “The worst part was we almost didn’t bring it with us to our recording sessions — it didn’t fit in the car. We had to rent a second one! » blurted Marc-Antoine. Fortunately they did it, replies Élie, “since in the end, this album was essentially made with a bass fretless and the DX7”.
There is also in this album, recognizes Marc-Antoine, a bit of the spirit of the late German composer and guitarist Manuel Göttsching, leader of the kosmische group Ash Ra Tempel and author of a vast solo work including the visionary album E2-E4 (checked in live in his studio in 1981), which announces the multiple variations of house and techno that would follow in the 1990s. Above all, the spirit of the album Crush (2019) by British composer Floating Points. “Floating Points opened for The xx concerts by offering improvised performances,” explains Élie Raymond. I’m not sure if he kept any recordings of this tour, but Crush, it’s the fruit of experience, and we really like this album. » Album which gave the guys the idea of creating one based on improvisations.
This will be deployed in two stages: Albedo arrives today and its sequel, Parhelia, will arrive on April 19, with a performance in the dome of the Society of Technological Arts (SAT), where the raw material for what could be described as an environmentalist electronic poem was born, thanks to the collaboration of the multidisciplinary artist Dominique Rivard , friend of Marc-Antoine.
“I really like his collection. Storm notebook [Éditions Omri, 2017]. I shared it with Élie and Thomas, he explains. The themes she addresses interested us, but she spoke about them in a much more elaborate language, so we asked her to compose the texts of our songs, taking inspiration from the raw sound material recorded during the sessions. “We segmented the texts she sent us, but we edited almost nothing. We just placed the right words on our melodies — we liked the idea of a song without a chorus, without rhymes placed on the tempo. »
“Our first album also had something impressionistic,” adds Élie Raymond. No story, the “self” is never identified in the texts, so we loved Dominique’s writing, his way of describing the river, the ice. » Totally Sublime sings, but by accident, we want to say. “We wanted to be surprised in the process,” says Élie. Working by improvising means constantly causing small accidents, clicks, glitches, the unexpected. And by allowing ourselves to be surprised, the three of us together, I noticed that, from one session to the next, we became better at listening to each other play. Always responding to the surprise that someone else gives us while playing, that’s really the fun. »