Names: Almeeva, Toucan
Members: Gregory Hoepffner (Almeeva), Alexandre Berenguer, Clément Cathala, Jérémie Ruiz, Luc Ferré, Mael Pretet (Toucan)
Nationality: French (Toucan), Swedish (Greg)
Current release: Almeeva and Toucan team up for their collaborative album Parallèles, out via BLWBCK.
Recommendations: Alex/Toucan: Ela Minus – Acts of Rebellion and Don Glori – Don't forget to have fun.
Greg / Almeeva: I’ll first give a shoutout to another past collaborator, Worriedaboutsatan, who released an LP called If Not Now, When recently. Give a spin to the track «More Meat To The Grinder» if you can, it’s a 10 minute electronica / krautrock epic.
I’m reading Girl In a Band by Kim Gordon at the moment, and so far it’s interesting to see how much making music isn’t really about music knowledge in the end, but more about how you view the world.

[Read our Ela Minus interview]
[Read our Worriedaboutsatan interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with Almeeva and Toucan and would like to stay up to date with their music, visit Toucan on Facebook.  Almeeva has a personal website and is on Instagram.
 


What were some of your earliest collaborations? How do you look back on them with hindsight?

Greg / Almeeva: My early collaborations were mostly as a singer on other people’s music.

In hindsight, I think I understand now the need to have a balance between «selling the song» and «selling your story» with your performance. When you’re young, you’re just spilling your guts without much though behind it.

There are many potential models for collaboration, from live performances and jamming/producing in the same room together up to file sharing. Which of these do you prefer – and why?  

Greg / Almeeva: In an ideal world I prefer jamming in the same room, I think it produces more surprises and «happy accidents», which is what I look for in a collaboration.

But file sharing is good to have perspective on things, and see what really sticks in the end.

How did this particular collaboration come about?

Alex/Toucan: We've known Greg for a long time now, our first bands toured together and our paths crossed a lot! When he started producing electronic music with his project Almeeva we knew we had to do something creative with him. So he appeared on a few tracks on our albums.

A few years ago we realized we had some quite good electronic sounding tracks, but they didn't really fit into our musical world. So we immediately asked Greg to write and remodel this music with us!

Greg / Almeeva: The guys had a hunger for more «club-oriented» release and thought I could help them achieve that vision. I’m pretty seasoned with the remixing process, so I applied that experience to this project.

What did you know about each other before working together? Describe your creative partner in a few words, please.

Greg / Almeeva: We’ve all known each other for more than a decade, through previous bands, and for some of us by touring together. Both Toucan & Almeeva started around the same time, and were always bound by a similar taste in sound.

Before this EP, we collaborated on 2 tracks, «Autopista» from their first LP …



«De Nuit», and «Neon Knight» on Destinations, an album that I also mixed.



I would describe Toucan as the most colourful Synth-Rock / Post-Rock band. They’re not afraid to have fun with genres and crank up the ideas to 11.

Tell me a bit about your current instruments and tools, please. In which way do they support creative exchange and collaborations with others?  

Greg / Almeeva: Gear-wise I mostly use analog synths and guitars/bass, through various pedals (reverb, harmonizer, chorus, distortion). I think my biggest contribution to this collab is my production process, which is mostly done in the box.

I work on a wide variety of music genres, so I’d say my strength is how I can look at a demo from different angles, and pull a narrative thread that we can all follow. When the universe of a track is clear, I feel the ideas come more easily, and it’s more fun to try out things.


Almeeva & Toucan Interview Image (c) the artists

Before you started making music together, did you in any form exchange concrete ideas, goals, or strategies? Generally speaking, what are your preferences when it comes to planning vs spontaneity in a collaboration?

Greg / Almeeva: If I remember well, you just wanted to be more electronic and dancefloor sound with these songs, so it was pretty free for me to mess around. But later the was iteration going from both sides, it wasn’t one-sided like a remix can be. It was more like a «cadavre exquis».

Personally, I prefer when there’s total freedom to destroy and rebuild. But I know it can be taxing when you get used to something, and then the other person tears it down. There were a few moments like that hahaha  

Describe the process of working together, please. What was different from your expectations and what did the other add to the music?

Alex/Toucan: We come from a more rock/  synth / ambient oriented world, but we really wanted to add a strong club vibe to these tracks. That's why we asked Greg, because he's a very talented club/dance producer and he could bring something to the table we simply couldn't ...

Some tracks on the EP like “Ibiza” would have been impossible to make without him bringing this huge, dreamy club vibe.



Is there a piece which shows the different aspects you each contributed to the process particularly clearly?

Alex/Toucan: I think that the track “Roma” is a perfect 50/50 track.



It exactly sums up our big synthwave influence with the clubing vibe Greg can bring. You can feel the “walking with confidence to the club in a huge metropole” vibe!

What tend to be the best collaborations in your opinion – those with artists you have a lot in common with or those where you have more differences? What happens when another musician take you outside of your comfort zone?

Alex/Toucan: Actually, being taken outside of our comfort zone is the only good reason to make an artistically interesting collaboration. Otherwise it's kind of meaningless in my opinion. Interesting things come from the confrontation of multiple universes.

Greg / Almeeva: Good question, I’d say the most memorable ones are those who take you out of your comfort zone, because they make you grow as a person and as an artist. But they’re not necessarily the ones that give the best results in the end, at least from my experience.

As long as the element of surprise is there, it’s all good.


Almeeva & Toucan Interview Image (c) the artists

Decisions between creatives often work without words. How did this process work in this case?

Alex/Toucan: A strong tool we used to collaborate was using visual images, like “being in a city at night while drunk,” “being on a beach while the sun sets,” “being in a huge museum and walking around” ...

This is a powerful tool to communicate our intentions and the vibes we're looking for in the shaping of the tracks and the sounds. This is something we also use a lot within Toucan for our albums.

What are your thoughts on the need for compromise vs standing by one's convictions? How did you resolve potential disagreements in this collaboration?

Greg / Almeeva: Often times disagreements are caused by prejudice or emotional attachment to certain things. If I’m in the «producer chair», it’s my role to try and debunk those issues, which are outside of the music itself.

If I feel that the compromise doesn’t work artistically, I prefer to just go back from scratch and come back with something radically different.

Was/Is this collaboration fun – does it need to be?

Greg / Almeeva: It was super fun, I love destroying other people’s tracks hahaha!

In the end, for the listener it doesn’t need to be fun, some amazing album have been made in miserable mental health (In Rainbows by Radiohead comes to mind).



But as one of the participants, it needs to be. It’s not like we have a big audience waiting for us, we’re mostly making this for ourselves. So the shared memories of the process is equally important to the final result for me.

Do you find that thanks to this collaboration, you changed certain parts of your process or your outlook on certain creative aspects?

Alex/Toucan: This collaboration was really fun and easy, as we've known Greg for a long time now.

But something we've learned is that we can work while being really far from each others. We don't even live in the same country, but still everything was easy and effective. So that's good to know for the future!

Collaborating with one's heroes can be a thrill or a cause for panic. Do you have any practical experience with this and what was it like?

Greg / Almeeva: I did experience it on another project recently, and it was mostly a thrill, with tiny bits of panic.

A thrill because all the new ideas where waaaaaaaay beyond everything I had imagined, and a bit of panic because of how overwhelming the changes were. Amazing experience in the end.