Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please. Do you have a fixed schedule? How do music and other aspects of your life feed back into each other - do you separate them or instead try to make them blend seamlessly?

Music is clearly a super important part of my life. I think there hasn't been a day in my life where I haven't sat behind the piano, since I'm 6 so it's clearly my morning routine. I also made a very strong choice a few years back. Musically I always wanted to do only my thing, which means to me I never had a lot of fun playing other's tracks, or jamming. I always spent my time working on ideas, trying to bring them as far as I could. It also means I decided to take a day job to be artistically free to work only on my project with no restrictions.

Which means, my day is starting very early with my son's preparation to school, bringing him there, which implies a morning walk (which totally inspires me), coming back home, exercising a bit, working a few hours, and finding spots to sit at the piano and work on new stuff.

As my time is super tight due to family life, work et c... I have to be super efficient while making music which sounds kind of weird, but somehow I think it worked pretty well, especially in the last 2 years. Having deadlines, being straight on the stuff you do, helps to reach a professional level. But I could also say that I collaborate a lot with my wife and son as I'm working on my music from home so I often ask them for feedback or ideas on the artistic direction. They have both an incredible taste and always bring interesting ideas to the game.

Can you talk about a breakthrough work, event or performance in your career? Why does it feel special to you? When, why and how did you start working on it, what were some of the motivations and ideas behind it?

I would say that the first EP of Le Commandant Couche-tôt released on BMM Records in October 2020 is my breakthrough. After years of hard work and experimentation I managed to get proper media coverage and digger attention and the EP became really soon a reference in terms of reminiscent of the French rare groove scene.

I started working on this project right after I decided to put an end to my electro funk band as I wanted to focus more on my own material without any restrictions. I had collected a lot of piano sketches through the years. My initial idea was to produce a piano solo album with all those nice themes and harmonies but in 2019 I met guitarist and arranger Paul Audoynaud. We had a few jams together and as he found the material very interesting he decided to help produce this EP. I already had the whole concept of this kind of naive sailor, I also had prepared some visuals, had names for the songs, sketches of songs, a storyline. We just needed to get the stuff recorded.

Paul worked on the arrangement between october 2019 and january 2020 and we recorded everything in March. Paul also introduced me to Charis Karantzas, a sound engineer also based in Berlin, Neukölln and who works a lot with jazz master Kurt Rosenwinkel among others. At the end of March everything was recorded, at the end of April the whole record was mixed and I had to put on my PR hat to look for a label. I knew Emile Sornin from Forever Pavot a bit and asked him if he had suggestions for labels in France as I was a bit out of the game since I moved to Berlin.

He told me about BMM Records, a fantastic indie label from Nancy. I then sent the EP to Louis from the NCY Milky Band who was also co-leading the label with Joseph Petitpain and the magic happened.

[Read our NCY Milky Band interview]

The EP got released in October 2020 and started to get a lot of very qualitative reviews mainly in France and Germany, the highlight being an article from Radio Nova comparing the EP to Melody Nelson from Serge Gainsbourg.

There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind for being creative. What is it like for you? What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions? Are there strategies to enter into this state more easily?

Everything inspires me, people I see in the streets, nature, a movie, a story from my son, the news, so I don't have any problem getting in this state. I also noticed that walking gives me a lot of ideas, so I try to go for a walk at least twice a day.

But I also get inspiration in other spots. For example, yesterday while bringing my son to bed and falling asleep at his side, I started to hear a song in my head, it sounds super cliché, but this happens quite a lot to me, so the challenge is to find a way to catch it. I then ran to my phone and sang what I could to record it, then went to the Nord and tried to find chords, groove and melody to it.

Music and sounds can heal, but they can also hurt. Do you personally have experiences with either or both of these? Where do you personally see the biggest need and potential for music as a tool for healing?

That's a very interesting question and I would say music can clearly do both. But I would focus a bit more on the process of music creation which can definitely both heal and hurt a lot. Or maybe our inner pain generates this need to create that can then heal us while finished. I don't know. But this whole process is always very painful. Not having an idea but bringing this idea to life, finishing it. That hurts most of the time.

All the doubts you have to face, the energy you have to put without knowing if you will ever manage to finish anything. This is also the exciting part of the whole process of course.

There is a fine line between cultural exchange and appropriation. What are your thoughts on the limits of copying, using cultural signs and symbols and the cultural/social/gender specificity of art?

I personally naively think that signs and symbols don't belong to no one and that everyone should be able to borrow or pay tribute to a group of people. This is clear that the question has to be asked if someone is getting too far in borrowing symbols from another culture, but I think we should take a little bit of distance here as our society became extremely radical.

On the one hand, I totally appreciate and support that we are tending to be in a world where everyone not matter the gender, the color, the ideas can express himself and feel accomplished as unique as he:she is but there's a also a big wave of political correctness that would like people to avoid to "touch this" or "say that", it definitely disturbs me a bit. It somehow gives me the feeling that I'm free to say whatever I think but without being really able to say or do what I think being scared to offend anyone, like borrowing cultural signs or symbols for example.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections to other senses. From your experience, what are some of the most inspiring overlaps between different senses - and what do they tell us about the way our senses work?

The first thing that comes to my mind while thinking of the overlaps of senses or maybe a simultaneous activation of all of them would be sex. This might be the only moment where we as humans fully enjoy the full potential of all our senses at once, without trying to dissociate or define the limits of each of them.

Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed back into everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to more engagement. Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?

I would say that I see myself both as an artist but also as a craftsman always trying to get better at my art, working obsessively on it and always re-inventing myself.

On the social political side, as I started the project I was really obsessed by environmental questions, and I am still today. That's why I wanted to always put a little note on this side on the project without needing to go too deep and become a very engaged musician. In fact, in the bio of Le Commandant it says:

"Le Commandant Couche-Tôt explores tirelessly the oceans but always ends up covered in plastic pollution."

This is my way of saying, we have to wake up and do something. That's why I totally support projects like the Ocean Cleanup for example who try to create innovative solutions to solve a bit of this gigantic problem. The condition of the oceans totally obsesses me but also the destruction of the Amazon forest, the intensive use of super developed robots or drones for monitoring purposes.

That's what I tried to talk about on the cover of the new EP. We see a Commandant riding a hovercraft, in the background the amazon forest is burning and he's pursued by butterdrones (kind of technology driven butterfly look alikes). I am really scared by these Boston Dynamics videos that demonstrate the power of complex dog-like robots or stuff like that.

What can music express about life and death which words alone may not?

The only relation I would find between music or art in general and life and death is the fact that your art has a possibility to survive you. That's a pretty powerful thing.

As human beings we have a very limited time on earth, but what we produce has the power to last way longer and touch a lot of generations you will never be in contact with. That's something I find pretty interesting. Art can give you a kind of immortality human beings are dreaming of. I am definitely happy to be mortal.

Music can also express life in the way it captures an instant of it, but I don't see music different from other forms of art here. Words have the same power to me.