Name: Gilles Deles-Velins
Nationality: Franco-Latvian
Occupation: Producer, sound artist, composer
Current release: A Veil for Unfrozen Lust by Lunt is out via Basement Corner Emissions.
Recommendations: Brothers Quaye Institute: Benjamenta; The Tunnel by William Gass.

If you enjoyed this Gilles Deles-Velins interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on bandcamp, and Soundcloud.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I had a long passion for sound even as an infant according to what my family used to say. My passion was more for classical music when I was a teenager and then Nirvana was a big gap in music. They brought with them the underground I didn’t know - like Sonic Youth, then people like Jim O’Rourke who opened me to experimentation.

[Read our Jim O'Rourke interview]

I started to play the guitar but quickly the pedalboard was more important than the guitar itself and I realised  few people would understand how to record the music I wanted to create. So, growing musically as a sound engineer was logical.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

It's funny you ask about my body because I don't like the pain it causes. I am quite disabled even if it has to be considered relatively to many other type of diseases. So for a long time I had to count on my inner mental world to find meaning and examine the world like a physicist to give a shape to things.

There are colours and shapes, yes it's true, and I think in synaesthetic terms when I mix. But I like when the sound becomes physical and not only because of bass frequencies.

Imagine a planet where the density of the air would be different. What kind of music would they produce ?

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I am absolutely not good at promoting myself and I would need a producer that does that for me. I don’t have any career plan. I feel relieved of quitting weareuniquerecords and I allowed myself to be a musician at last.

The main problem for an artist today is if to be a full time artist and we fight to have our pieces played. A sincere thank you for this interview.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

My identity is the one of a man without qualities like Robert Musil defined it, something that can be read between the lines. I like to challenge mean values of statistics, and regression to the mean is the worst, and most unethical thing we have to witness in the world.

Right now I am a white male heterosexual who eats meat and reads Descartes. It seems I am the imaginary enemy of so many people who need labels to think and who need to paint the world only with their own colors. It's amusing. I comes from the deepest proletarian abyss there is and social classes remain a relevant way to consider the world even if I live in an ex USSR country. Nothing good will come out of thinking models which deny complexity.

COVID showed us the fallacy and incompetence of our so-called «leaders». The modern vision of identity is curious because it only finds identity in claiming differences while the concept shares a part of his etymology with «identical».

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Experimenting and fighting against the cheese of my own experimentations, enjoying the creative process, disgust of gatekeepers, not being trapped in one style, not forgetting the overall poetry needed for such a task, not focusing too much on these questions because the essential is surely elsewhere.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

That's an interesting topic. The weak spot of the kind of musician I am is that we write and create music at the same time as we record music. But do we leave some place to future reinterpretation? The more we have access to mémorisation processes, the less we open a place for recollection.

In fact this problem can be compared to the critique Socrate performed in the myth of Teut. What matters is the way we take advantage of visiting ancient music again and again finding meaning in it. Bach can speak to us. But there's another illusion in Baroque music: modern interpretation that tries to find the «true» interpretation like it was in the old times.

Mozart never heard his symphonies as beautiful and powerful as we hear them because of technical differences arising from technical issues. We don't have to mystify the past (the authentic roots) nor the future (the necessary progress).

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

Guitar was my primary instrument and it will remain so. I focus a lot on sound capture and building sound materials from field recordings. I try to reach a level where they are not pristine but authentic and sounds are full or comprehensive by themselves.

Right now, there’s a big fashion for modular synthesis and I deeply respect that. But I won’t go in this area as the energy it would take is taxing, and time consuming. There are some software instruments which remain very interesting in the DAW and which do a more than decent job.

Recently, Iann Troalen told me he felt my music has something symphonic about it and this is right. I would like to come in more contemporary classical music area maybe in the future.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

Sleeping well is the first important step because creating is daydreaming and dreaming enables sleep. The freshness of the awakening combined with coffee enables a very accurate listening and focusing on details of the mix you did the day before. A day is not necessarily the relevant unit of time for creation because psychic duration doesn't match with the objective notion of chronical time.

The thing I try to avoid is the noise of sound in the public shops that is destroying my inner mental melodies or ideas. It took persons with autistic syndrome for us to understand this simple truth which shows, if needed, how stupid the world has become.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

These last years there’s a process that suits me quite well which I used on Remember we were waiting for the snow, and A veil of unfrozen lust or the forthcoming split album with my friends of Road to Saturn.



I improvise a first line with loopers (or not) and I try to take advantage of the freshness and spontaneous creativity of this raw material. Then additional ideas come to my mind, and I add layers.

There are many concepts contained in me like some second nature that are included in my musical thinking but it would be too long to describe here. I have more conceptual pieces of music coming as well.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I am mainly solitary in some discoveries even if I enjoy going to classical music concerts and sharing point of views. Music is dialectic even if some hate their audience.

About collaboration: I like splits and we are currently working with Road to Saturn on a common album. To build my side of the future tape I took inspiration from them and added voices. But the result this yielded is quite different. That's the magic of these imaginary dialogues: being «inspired by» doesn't mean "sounding like"

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Art is useless. This is why it is so necessary. I am not sure it opens consciousness.

The political thing we have to stress constantly is that it is a field of production also which requires money and gear. Now artists have been scammed over and over again by streaming and we have to end this.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

My primary job is as a psychoanalyst, and music is not my primary tool to understand these questions.

But if I try to relate music to existential meaning : I was thinking yesterday what is exactly the mood and background of Debussy’s music? It’s the poetry showing us the mix between the joy of contemplation and the melancholy that comes from the acknowledgment that almost everything is transient and in becoming state.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Originally I was meant to be a physicist. So I use some basics of physics of sound to record without denying the importance of intuition and how we use it to connect empirical data and artistic goals.

What worries me is the new-age interpretation of some very serious scientific fields like quantum physics. According to these ideas,  "Our consciousness would be the thing that creates the universe as it is". These views are foolish, they are an incorrect and contrary interpretation of what Quantum Mechanics are. They are a new way to manipulate people. This sounds so old school in fact because anyone who read Schopenhauer knows his thesis of the world as a representation.

To answer more accurately to your question I think we overestimate creativity as something free when it depends on sound technique. Rock depends on amp overdrive and amplification which itself depends on the existence of tubes and transistors. Now computers have influenced our ways to compose music.

The link between these fields is that we are the people of our time and we deal with its ups and downs.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Difficult question in a field where I feel many things are not addressed properly when we come to this topic. I don’t agree with the fact that «art is life». This argument has been used to encourage a massive complacency where anything equals anything and we eventually lose the aim of processes involved in creation. On the other hand, we should value much more the creativity of workers, employees instead of our common state of meaninglessness.

The middle ages were much more evolved than we are in a sense because each craftsperson had their moment of glory in a little piece of a cathedral (and if you know Roland Barthes you know he tries to compare the fabric of the Citroen cars to this). Now I am not sure in how far someone working in a call center feels as though they belong to something greater than themselves. All of this to say that we should not use the existential argument of art in its reverse to value things in a fraudulent perception like the startup ideology does in most cases.

In my case, I just know that I watched the abyss inside of me to transform the poison and the void into something different. I am not sure how I could do it with making coffee except when I take care of my wife and bring her some coffee.

I think art is a way to transmit daydreaming experiences without any certainty on how it will be received.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

Like love it is a fundamental brick of our existence, and being able to find an «explanation» would destroy the very essence of it. I am not sure why I should find an explanation for something that I simply have to acknowledge as being already there.

I like this idea in Tolkien mythology: there was a song made by Illuvatar and his children which creates the world. Let’s keep this poetry and enjoy it.