Name: ATOEM
Members: Gabriel Renault, Antoine Talon
Nationality: French
Current release: ATOEM's Entropy is out via Solar Production / Yotanka.

If you enjoyed this ATOEM interview and would like to stay up to date with the band and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud.

For a deeper look into ATOEM's self-built synths and their sound design, read a continuation of this conversation.



I think it's intriguing that you see your music as part of the psychedelic continuum. I guess there was always something hypnotic and otherwordly about both the 60s/70s and clubbing, but I'd love to hear more about where you see the connections between clubbing to techno and tripping to psychedelia.

In fact, we create our own link between the two currents. Coming from rock music (Antoine is a guitarist and Gabriel a drummer and percussionist), when we met we started making music in order to represent ourselves live. Our sound was very rock, and we wanted to play concerts. For musicians who rehearse in their garage, the goal was to play our songs live with all the codes of rock that we really appreciated.

So certainly over the years, our sound has become more and more electronic, with the addition of many synthesizers but also drum machines. But we always wanted to keep the organic elements of rock, namely vocals, guitar, percussion and acoustic drums.

We also like the idea that in psychedelic music there is a transcendental effect which cannot really be explained but which is felt. In the same way as electronic music sequences have an effect on the listener in a club sometimes after several minutes of rehearsal.

Atom Heart Mother is many Pink Floyd fans' favourite hate-object. What do you appreciate about it and how much ATOM is there in ATOEM?

We've always loved this album. For us it represents psychedelia and that the structures are complex but often fall back on the hovering side of the Floyds that we love so much (sudden change of intensity, strange Gilmour guitar riffs, etc).



We appreciate many things in this album, the way it begins in a phantasmagorical way worthy of an MGM film from another era, the symphonic and orchestral arrangements - Gabriel, one of us, followed a percussion class and had several experiences in orchestra.

In ATOEM there are two ATOMs that form a whole, because the atom (in the scientific sense of the term) is the only indivisible element. It is a strong symbolism that we appreciate as a duo.

I agreed with quite a few passages of the press release in terms of how much more effective techno can be if played at a more deliberate pace. Were there eye- and ear-opening moments in arriving at this conclusion for yourself?

It's true that we have always listened through headphones and in our bedrooms to a lot of slow and fast electronic music. We love downtempo, ambient. We also appreciate the speed, when we go out in a club. We had so many slow electronic music albums that inspired us.

To name a few:

Weval's debut EP Half Hage, an incredible Dutch duo ...



The Darkside concert at the Nuits Sonores in Lyon, with a daunting scenography, which will remain one of the most memorable of our lives ...



The Velocity of Love by Suzanne Ciani, an electronic music album with no rhythm, just beautiful synthesizer melodies and softness ...



Almost all of Vangelis' work.



[Read our Suzanne Ciani interview]

To me, Entropy is full of amazing songs. But the most impressive part is probably the sound design – it's a massive, breathtaking wall of sound that is still sensual and dynamic. Can you talk about the “unidentified musical object” you wanted to build at the beginning and the evolution of the sound you've gone through from your first EP up until Entropy?

Thank you for this, it makes us really happy to read! Since the first years, we have been interested in science, the cosmos and the notion of infinity to which it refers.

Let's say that at the start, we were tinkering with pieces with complex structures, sometimes several pieces in one. I think we've always been dreamers and we really liked doing long music sessions and recording songs in a very spontaneous and very instinctive way. Then we equipped ourselves in terms of audio processing and we learned a lot by working with outsiders.

We are as much technicians as musicians. Each time in the studio was very formative for us and we enjoyed spending more and more time on textures and mixing. On one of our previous EP Enter The World’s Symmetry, we worked for several weeks with Sébastien Peronnet, a sound engineer and arranger who taught us a lot about mixing techniques and dynamics.



For Entropy (a few years later), we worked with Maël Danion on the final mix of our album and the production. He is very talented and he allowed us to turn our raw ideas and demos into well-produced album tracks, where each element is noticeable, in its place, while maintaining a strong dynamic.

There are no reworked songs from your EPs on the album, and it'a a really deep journey.

We wanted an album that is as much in the musicality as in the intensity that we try to transcribe during our live gigs, while trying to encompass the notion of Entropy which is the theme of the album. That was the goal.

We had to come back to each track several times in order to give it a sufficiently satisfying color and structure to be able to imagine producing it definitively for the album. Each of us brings ideas, sometimes the ideas come together in jam sessions. Then we put together, we arrange, we deconstruct, we improve, we modify to obtain a demo.

For the recording, we really like to be free and in front of ourselves. We did several recording sessions. Many machines were recorded during a creative residency in Saintes. Then we both locked ourselves at the seaside to continue the recordings and the final construction of the pieces. The drums were recorded at the Miracle studio in Rennes. Vocals and a lot of keyboards here.

It's a long process (more than 3 years), but fascinating because we never do the same thing, we evolve, we exchange and we transform in a common sense that speaks to us in order to produce pieces that we simply love.

Playing techno by hand has been done before, but I still think it's an intriguing concept because so much of this music was based on the premise that machines are “playing” it. What changes if humans reclaim the performative aspects again?

It is a debate about who dominates the other. Is it the machine that can "play on its own" or is it that without the human the machine cannot express itself.

We like to believe that human intervention allows the operation of the machine and not the other way around. We are a fan of live music, and we would love to see more artistic projects going live.

Maybe with the democratisation of electronic machines we will see more electronic instruments on stage in the future, who knows?

Entropy is a fascinating album but your recent Live EP feels almost stronger which is saying a lot. In technical terms, what were important points for making things work on stage and pushing yourself forward?

The EP Live Frequencies is a compendium of songs that we had been playing live for 2 years when it was released. Each track comes from a previously released track, but completely reworked for the live situation.



In fact, it is often the same process. First we produce a studio track, then we rework the track at home in a live version (structure, arrangements, sound design, etc.). Then, we work on the track in concert condition (during rehearsal sessions) with our sound engineer in order to balance the levels, rework the sounds precisely. And then we train to be able to play it live.

But it's only after several concerts that you feel really comfortable to the point of wanting to record it to release it.

So much of electronic music has either been nostalgic or “innovative” - what does making music in the present mean to you?

Making music in the present is a form of strong artistic freedom. We forget precursors and influences and we do not try to anticipate the future.

We make music just in the moment, for ourselves and for others without setting a goal. It's quite philosophical.