Interview mit Gautier Serre von Igorrr

How are you doing in times of the Corona crisis – is everything good with you?
Knowing that touring was the essential plan of 2020, I cannot say that everything is good with me as until now, every single concert has been either cancelled or postponed.

How do you deal with the situation, how does the crisis affect your life ?
This situation pretty much puts me down in a very intensive emotional state, which I use to write music, pretty dark and extreme music. Plus, we still haven’t play any note of „Spirituality And Distortion“ on stage yet and that’s very frustrating. It’s increasing the weigh of the mood, and after months or even a year of not touring when we were supposed to, the concerts will be even crazier than before.

So your tour has been cancelled and the album will hence be released without any direct promotion. Are you afraid that this will affect the album’s success?
We were afraid that the album would not be released or that the album would arrive with a reduced impact, but instead the situation has been so crazy that people seemed to have found the perfect soundtrack to their lockdown. The response has been beyond amazing.

Your new songs are much more „metal“, the electro part is reduced. What has led to this development?
Year after year, I’ve been following a natural development which leads me to write the music I feel, depending on how it is like to be a human on earth during these periods of times. Some tracks are more electronic crazy, some tracks are more metal heavy. Having tracks like „Very Noise“ or the intro of „Paranoid Bulldozer Italiano“ between many others on „Spirituality and Distortion“, I have the feeling that the electronic part has a great place on the album. However, I did not use any triggers and Midi instruments on the album to fake acoustic sounds, so I would indeed say that the sound is more organic and alive.

The songs are not so crazy anymore, but seem more coherent and catchy. Would you agree?
I feel this album to be more coherent, but I have no distance to it yet, so I can’t say I’m objective. However, from here I have two opposite versions of feedback about how crazy this album is: some journalists told me it’s the craziest IGORRR album to date, some others told me they think it’s less crazy than the other albums. So what I can see is that „crazy“ is something really subjective, and it really depends on every person’s sensibility, as it can be understood in many different manners. According to my sensibility, „Spirituality And Distortion“ is crazier than my previous albums, but this time in a different way, it’s more subtle and much deeper.

Is it because IGORRR is no longer just a project but a band and you want to play the material live?
IGORRR is a project that I created to express the music which makes sense 100% to me, and without any limitation. This is still the case today and there has been no compromise about this since the beginning, even the slightest. I do not pay attention at all to the practicality of the music on stage when I write music, the live stage is something very secondary in IGORRR. We have a lot of fun touring together, but the essence of IGORRR is the music itself, the music is written without any compromise, and not a single note has ever been censured in IGORRR for practical reasons.

Has anything changed in IGORRR’s structures and working methods? What influence do the other musicians have?
I still write all the music, and my friends, who are awesome musicians, accompany me on stage to deliver this music live. Basically, I do everything in IGORRR, from writing the music and mixing to working on the clips, the album covers, so basically everything artistic, but once the music is done, we check what’s possible to play live and what’s not. Sometimes we even have to adapt because when I’m writing music I don’t ask myself whether it’s playable live or not. I’m afraid it would impact the quality of the music, so I focus 100% on the music itself and how it sounds. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by incredible musicians like Laure Le Prunenec or Sylvain Bouvier who are able to express this music on stage like nobody else is able to do. IGORRR is not a band, but it is not a solo project either.

Did that also have an influence on the way the songs were created?
No, IGORRR makes sense only if the music is completely pure, the writing of the music is the essential thing in IGORRR, everything else is coming as a second layer.

The video for „Parpaing“ suggests that you recorded the album live. Is that true or is the impression deceptive?
The video of „Parpaing“ is funny, I picked up the footage of George Fisher, Sylvain (drummer), Martyn (guitarist) and myself playing some electronics to have that live feeling but no, this album hasn’t been recorded live.

In general, how do you write such music? What do you start with – when do you stop tweaking it – or how much is improvised?
Yes.

Your music unites different styles at the highest level. What has shaped your musical career – when and with which genre did you find your way to music?
Yes.

Dare to make a prognosis: Is the completely crazy electro project IGORRR history and in the future there will only be the avantgarde metal band IGORRR, or was that also just a phase or an experiment?
I have no idea how IGORRR will sound in a couple of years. Maybe IGORRR will not exist any longer in a few years. We cannot be sure of anything, the only thing I know is that if the music doesn’t reach the quality I want, if I don’t find it better than what I created before, I won’t release it.

Not only IGORRR’s music is very special, but also your videos. How did this surreal, absurd video for „Very Noise“ and its plot come about?
The video of „Very Noise“ was really cool to make. We wanted to do the most absurd and nonsense video we could for this track, and that makes me think about your earlier question concerning the music being less electronic and less crazy in your opinion. I think here we have a great example of the opposite. The video of „Very Noise“ started with using computer programming fails to make that 3D character dance like it’s not human. Then we added many elements step by step that created a kind of story with it, but the aesthetics were the main point here, having something crazy and well-synchronized with the music.

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The video for „ieuD“ almost has black metal aesthetics, „Downgrade Desert“ is shot in a desert, „Parpaing“ features video game sequences. Who comes up with the ideas – and is it not complicated and expensive to do that many videos?
Ideas come naturally like the music. At some point, you know your tracks so well after working on them for months and years that the visuals seem like an evidence, and yes, sometimes you ruin yourself to make a video, some of them are very very expensive like „Downgrade Desert“, and some of them are made with almost zero expenses, like the video of „Parpaing“. I like being able to propose many aspects of approaching a track with visuals, the overproduced videos of „Downgrade Desert“ or „Opus Brain“ show a very polished, beautiful aspect of the project while homemade videos like „Parpaing“ or „Cheval“ show the opposite, a more human feeling of the project. It’s important to me to be able to propose a wild panel of approaches which makes the music and the point of view on the project more complete in my opinion.

Are you planning to make even more more videos?
Let’s see what the future will bring.

Thank you for the interview! Please let us do a short brainstorming in the end of this interview. What comes in your mind first reading the following terms:
Video-Games: Crash Bandicoot
Your favorite instrument or sound-tool: Chicken
Movie-Soundtracks: Interstellar
Black Metal: Mayhem
Your favorite band: Bach
IGORRR in 10 years: Grumpy and wrinkled

Once again thanks for your time. The last words are yours – is there anything left you want to tell our readers?
Bratwurst.

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Publiziert am 3. Juni 2020 von Moritz Grütz