[Interview] Automatisme & Erinome
* Pour lire la version française de cette entrevue cliquez ICI!
The two names above are certainly familiar if you follow the site for quite some time. They are two artists with whom we have a very special relationship. The talent of these two musicians is matched only by their great generosity. They were among the first to show an interest in our project and to have trusted us to spread the word about their wonderful music.
This collaboration was eagerly awaited by our team and it deserve no less than an interview to learn all the details behind this first association between William Jourdain of Automatisme and Aaron Hansen of Erinome. Take a few minutes to discover the origins of this spontaneous relationship that resulted in the creation of Post-Landscape 1, a most fascinating release.
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First, I would like to know how did your relationship took shape? How did you discover the work of the other and what motivated you to start this collaborative project that gave life to the album Post-Landscape 1?
Aaron : I first discovered Williams work as Automatisme on Constellation Records’ website. I was excited to see they were taking on a small number of electronic artists, so I took notice very quickly. I had no initial plans of contact at first. I composed a DJ set for a local show that featured William’s track Simultanéité 4, but ended up not performing it live, instead turning the set into a guest mix for the podcast, Underground Heroes. Once the mix was out, I tagged all the artists I could and to my surprise, he took notice, commented, and we started a conversation, that never ended to this day. I encouraged him to submit material to Neologist Productions sometime if he was looking to release on tape and we also touched on collaborating when we both had the time. Once we had the opportunity, we started the project that became this album.
William : At the beginning of August 2017, my Facebook and Soundcloud pages were identified by a podcast from the United States. It’s a series of episodes where a sound artist is invited to make remixes. The artist collective and label Make Mistakes is behind this project. For episode 39, the musician Erinome remixed one of my song published on Constellation in 2016. I listened to the whole podcast of about an hour and I was instantly amazed by the quality and by the depth of his work. Also, I was delighted that one of my track was reworked in the same episode as other artists I admire like Aphex Twin and Jetone, an old Tim Hecker project. Immediately, Aaron and I started a virtual conversation, a friendship developed and since then we write to each other every day.
Our conversations are mainly about philosophy, our beliefs and music. All of this, of course, through learning what the other does in his everyday life. Our solo projects are constantly coming back in our discussions. We listen and comment on each other’s personal production. This is done with a constructive tone, which allows us, later, to focus or reduce certain elements in our music. The presence of someone who knows how to comment on my music by helping and without attacking is important and rare.
In our first discussions, the subject of our future projects came up and Aaron introduced me to the label of his cousin Zach Schiermann called Neologist Productions. We talked about the idea of collaborating and publishing a record on this label without setting a date. Two to three months later, in the early fall, he sent me an ambient drone jam called Inwant 2 that lasted over an hour telling me to do what I wanted with that. At my first listen, I immediately hooked and imagined my music paired with his themes. Like an abstract painting with several things that merge freely. I immediately had the idea of a music where drones and rhythms influence each other continuously. When I first listened to what Aaron sent me, I was in bed exhausted from my day. I put on my headphones and the tiredness dissipated because the listening was really captivating! In addition, during the last months, I accumulated several new sketches of songs entitled Entrepôt, which was divided into several chapters. So synchronism was perfect to make an album with him. These tracks came from the samples I had captured at a warehouse in Saint-Hyacinthe in a transit location. This place combined several types of sites, which reinforces its great sound richness. The sounds of an highway, a car dealership, an outdoor intercom, some shops and a vast forest were all captured at this warehouse. The other elements acting on them were new patches of modular digital instruments from my recent experiments. Everything was taking shape in multiple Ableton Live projects I was working on. Entrepôt represents experiments and compositions that were lined up to be Automatisme’s next solo album following the album entitled Transit, which I had just submitted to Constellation.
Transit 2 on Post-Landscape 1 came from my production sessions of this album and Aaron added his touch afterwards. The original samplings in the song Transport 4 and the images used for the cover of the album and the video are courtesy of my friends in Chile, the two brothers Juan David and Christian Lucio Sanchez working with their label G89 Records. These are sounds and images captured in Santiago in two subway stations under construction. This reminded me of the transport theme I used for the Momentform Accumulations album. Now, Aaron, Zach and I have made abstract sound and visual compositions out of all this for the Post-Landscape 1 album.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that you created this new release from a distance. Is this the first time you make an album this way and how did you experience it?
Aaron : Yes, we are pretty far apart. I’m in Omaha, Nebraska in the US, and William is in the Montreal area. I’ve remixed peoples work and have had my own tracks remixed in the past so I’m used to exchanging files back and forth. But this is the first complete album that I’ve completed over a long distance. It was a really easy and fun experience. Since we both use Ableton Live it was easy to know how the other would add their next layer. It felt a little like a game as you take your turn for adding material. Sometimes we’d discuss ideas before we’d execute them then have our expectations exceeded. It was a great time!
William : This is the first time I’m creating something this way. I am lonely by nature and I like to have a lot of time alone to create and think. But, I have some artist friends that I see or contact every week and my record shop and bookseller jobs allow me to constantly discuss art, which echoes in Automatisme. Usually, the other time I’m creating from a distance is when I make audiovisual shows where I make the sound creation and where an artist does the visual part. Like Myriam Boucher, Patrick Foisy or Jacob Gladu with whom I mainly collaborated. In all these cases, we create remotely, but we meet to discuss, compose and practice our performances.
The only exceptions are the long strolls I’m doing with the visual artist Patrick Foisy to capture sounds and images which are happening more often. It’s a different story for my collaboration with Erinome, because we live in two different countries, we never met physically and our only conversations were on the internet. As mentioned above, the chemistry is great between us two, so the creation is entirely spontaneous. The experience of creating with him was a revelation and a blessing. It allowed an elevation of our creativity. We were never stuck in the process of composition and production. On the contrary, we always had ideas and things to improve.
What are the elements present in each other’s music that take you out of your comfort zone? Could you describe your respective creative processes for a better understanding of your roles in this collaboration?
Aaron : I’ve never been very skilled in the art of beat making. My immediate attraction to working with William was the dense mechanical aesthetic of his work. It’s almost purely rhythmic compositions of electrical current. When we began Post-Landscape 1, I gave William a long, unfinished drone piece, giving him total creative freedom. I wanted to let the element of surprise play itself out as much as possible. My area of expertise is in all things drone and melody. The glue in the cracks if you will. For much of my writing, I processed guitar through a chain of pedals onto tap then from tape into Ableton Live for final processing. Then i’d send them off to William for the next phase.
William : Aaron is taking me out of my comfort zone because he doesn’t use any tempo and he always improvises his music. More specifically, after recording long jams on his guitar and machines, he edits them with Ableton Live without considering the tempo, but only by following his skills and his intuition. Thus, in my opinion, he creates a timeless music that goes beyond linear time and blurs the perception of duration. For my part, I have to modulate and automate more the tempo of my pieces to fool time. In Automatisme, the tempo is an instrument too. The integration of these two different concepts in a single track took us by surprise, in a good way!
Our creative process is to make a first version where we create new layout of pieces and instrument patches each from our side, then, we put these two worlds in common. The second step is that I make the production of the album in my own studio. Every time there is a change in the production of a song, I export the composition and send it to him, then, we discuss what we want to add or remove. This is how we build our music. Aaron was often sending me audio clips to fill some missing things we had previously discussed. Finally, I have several dozen audio files of each of our tracks that cover the entire evolution of the production of the album. Also, the layouts of all my Entrepôt songs had lengths of tempos, measures and loops already fixed before our collaboration. After analyzing and dividing Aaron’s long recording, I integrated them into my already existing structures. The meeting of our two worlds was a game of composition which gave birth to a fluid and complex result while using, or not, the consideration of the tempo. To finish, it’s me who mixed and did the mastering of the album.
Is there a composition that is more significant or more personal to you? One that has been more intense in terms of creative approach or that means something special for you.
Aaron : Transport 4 is probably most important to me. It was originally recorded with my iPhone via a condenser mic adapter pointed at my guitar amp. I was testing a new guitar pedal, and as you can see, it was successful. More successful then I originally thought it would be! Williams treatment was perfect and truly made the track everything I could have hoped for. I’m a huge tremolo fan, it added to the momentum and gave some power to the emotion it already has.
William : The most important and personal composition to me is Inwant 2 Entrepôt 1, the B side of the album, because it’s the most complex and varied song I’ve created so far. All our themes are in it ; semi-generative music, improvisation, post-landscaping and ambient. While producing the album, we discovered that we were doing a music that was in constant change, because the semi-generative portion uses probabilities and improvisation is also present. So, each time I export one of our songs, the software calculates the sound generation probabilities differently in a way that I have set beforehand and this always generates a different result.
This is how the theme of post-landscaping came, because we present our music as a form of landscape that combines contemplation and chance. It’s made of dub, IDM and semi-generative glitch forming rhythms in the foreground in addition to continuous field recordings and drones in the background. The best for us would be to make a sound installation where our songs would be generated continuously and where we add real time improvisations of sound manipulations.
Finally, have you considered making this music alive physically with a performance? What can we expect from the future of this collaboration, is there a following release of Post-Landscape to anticipate or will you be focusing on your solo projects for a while?
Aaron : We don’t have official plans in the works yet, but I can definitely see Post-Landscape performances happening at some point. Right now, we both will have the stems for the tracks and essentially remix them in our own way for our solo sets. I think this is a perfect way to keep the tracks fresh for us while making an eventual performance even more anticipated. While we wrote this album, we had solo work happening at the same time. We very much enjoyed working together and are looking forward to our next collaborative effort together.
William : There are a few solo shows for Automatisme planned. Also, we wish to play a collaborative set one day, but it’s not planned yet. We would like to do it as part of a festival like the Mutek for example. It would be nice if an event like that would send us an invitation for a duo performance. Write us if you are interested! The future between me and Aaron will be to continue our numerous discussions on the internet and also other musical collaborations. My next two shows on May 12 and 13 in Montreal and Saint-Hyacinthe will be the logical continuation of the album. I will be using similar semi-generative and semi-improvised methods for these two nights.
Finally, for the solo part of Automatisme, I am currently working on two new releases. One that will be released on the Chilean label G89 Records scheduled for the end of 2018. The first single will appear in June via their Minds On Future compilation. Also, there is another collaborative album planned with thisquietarmy, a drone music legend with whom I had the opportunity to play several years ago. Of course, there is the album Transit that I made in 2017 and that will be released by Constellation on August 24, 2018.
Thanks for your time!
- Translation of the Automatisme’s text by William.