by Joe Gutierrez (@phantomshred)
No musical act has inspired in me as much awe in recent years as the band Fievel is Glauque. Daring, adventurous, peculiar, and blissful are all words that come to mind when thinking about their music. The band consists of duo Zach Phillips and Ma Clément, along with a revolving door of prestigious collaborators. Fievel is Glauque recently released an astounding record called Aérodynes EP, a wild batch of expansive and groovy tracks that showcases the band’s melodic and compositional virtuosity. Luckily I was able to witness a transformative live performance in a Brattleboro, VT church one evening in April. I had to know more. I reached out to Phillips and Clément, chatted a bit, and conducted an email interview to explore their genesis, influences, process, and more. Enjoy.
How did you two meet and decide to start making music together?
Ma: We met by accident. In any sense the word accident could take: random luck, faith, physical injury, etc. But the intention of playing music was the trigger. Zach came to write music in Brussels and needed a singer. An hour before we met he hit his head on a street pole. I was working with our friend Eric Kinny who asked me if I was up for singing and if I could check Zach's physical condition since I went to nursing school. We agreed to rehearse the next day.We found both some magic, in our own ways, so we spent the entire month working on music. I guess it's more related to luck than to physical injury, or maybe not.
What does the name mean and how/why was it chosen?
Zach: Our first saxophonist, Eléonore Kenis, spoke the name in all sincerity in the volleyball court of Parc de Forest in 2018. We badly wanted to change it. Fievel is the mouse of cartoon fame (though neither of us have seen those movies) and "glauque" (rhymes with "oak") is a French word notable for describing both a pale, bluish green and meaning creepy/sleazy/sordid/sinister. My own post-hoc rationalized interpretation goes something like this: gentrification functionally targets run-down, destitute, "glauque" areas; Fievel is an off-brand, "social realist" Mickey Mouse; accordingly, the name means something like "gentrify Mickey Mouse." We deeply wish we had a different name but are committed to making this one retrospectively cool.
Where did you grow up? When you each think of your respective hometowns, what comes to mind? What is your relationship with those places and how does it influence your art?
Ma: I have no hometown. I don't say it to sound mystical. I actually grew up in many different places and don't feel particularly attached to a specific location. I'm very precise about the places I didn't like and don't want to go back to, but sometimes I'm more lucid about what I’m repulsed by than what I'm attracted to. But that doesn't mean these places don't influence the artistic paths I could take. The opposite is also true.
What was it like being back in Brattleboro? Ma, what was your impression of the place when you went there for the first time?
Zach: An honor and a pleasure. I hadn't played there in ten years… I moved to New York in 2013. That town is and will remain in my bones. Family and close friends came. We went up Mt. Wantastiquet the next morning and I felt the corners of my various lives touch peaceably.
Ma: It moved me a lot because it was meeting more of Zach, in a way. My impression of that town is hard to describe. It's more an internal movement, because we took the car and saw a lot of different landscapes on the way, and Zach was sharing a lot about his previous lives. So to me this town is connected to his biography and to a narration I have in my head telling how he is related to who he might have been. I really loved the mountain and feel very connected to this type of nature.
Were there any specific artists you remember really liking as a teenager? How did their work inform your own?
Ma: To be honest, I have such a weak memory... I remember being obsessed with this album Blue Bell Knoll by Cocteau Twins. And many different songs which I would listen in loops for days, then switch to another. It was very rambling (it still is in my mind if I think about that time) and I was mostly in contact with music played on the radio, not so much exposed to different types. I know I was fascinated by certain ways of singing, such as Whitney Houston or Björk, because my way to understand would be to reproduce the singing, but with theirs I couldn't.
Zach: Among many others, the music and ethoses of Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Royal Trux, Annette Peacock, MF Doom, and Daniel Johnston deeply rooted themselves in me. I found them to be allies in generalized suspicion of identification with this world's signifiers and stances of self-certainty, a suspicion that still animates the core of my life force and which I’ve since developed through studying and participating in psychoanalysis. Piano-wise, I particularly admired Mal Waldron and Carla Bley. Meanwhile, my close friend Quentin Moore (Big French) was way ahead of me as a writer and his music heavily catalyzed my interest in songwriting. He and Sarah Smith were my first musical copilots, I'd say. Then when I was about 20, the music of Kurt Weisman transmogrified my ear; loving Kurt led me to his brother Chris Weisman and to Ruth Garbus and to Ryan Power who, along with a large cohort of other area dreamers, cracked me open and demented me thoroughly. But I dislike pantheons and canons, which can ossify one as was Lot's wife. "Flee for your life! Do not look behind you, nor stop anywhere in the Plain."
Ma, what is your relationship with the English language, particularly in lyricism and your word choice?
Ma: Meaning is as important as the sound of the word itself. In fact, these properties are not dissociated. Each word is an assembly of all the dimensions it contains. It would be rude to try to dissect distinguished approaches to a word. It's an entity. In my French brain, it connects to the French meaning in a way, even though it has its own space and sphere of action. Probably a word invokes a very recent milieu of experiences, and at the same time activates all the images and references and poetry which are in relation to its French meaning… I’m not sure if that is a clear answer, but this is definitely a good question.
Do you draw influence from any other mediums of art? Books? Film? Any particular references for the Aérodynes EP?
Zach: Many of my close friends are painters or visual artists of some kind and speaking analogically to these other kinds of artists often opens more paths for me than do musician-to-musician relations. Some friends who come to mind: Christopher Forgues, Sarah Smith, Alexis Graman, Jake Tobin, Paula van Erven, and principally the anonymous artist whose paintings are reproduced on the balloons that adorn this EP… Reading-wise, as we were making the selections I felt kinship with the Art & Language group’s statement about the Red Crayola album Kangaroo?, especially this passage:
“The conjunction of one contradictory cipher with another in a single cultural object can be idle flânerie. It can also be done in such a way as to raise such problems of identification, of discovery in the margins of one cipher or the other, that the listener is thrown into the necessity of asking ‘How was this made?’. The listener must look for the world in which such apparent conjunctions are possible. The listener may be forced, to some extent, to engage in a second-order discourse if he seeks to reconstitute the mechanism of the production of the song.”
Other writers who have noticeably touched my approach to these things in different ways: Knut Hamsun, Marie Redonnet, Michel de M’Uzan & JB Pontalis, Marion Milner & Winnicott, Sonallah Ibrahim & Alexander Kluge, Hervé Guibert, Leo Perutz, Mary Ruefle, the Strugatskys, Walser, Lacan, Ponge, Steven Zultanski, Russell Edson, James Tate, Georges Simenon, Laura Riding, Georg Groddeck, the Book of Job, Erje Ayden… Coincidentally, I just published my first book of (old) poems. Movie-wise, someone I relate to is Hal Hartley. Anyway, I think Aérodynes straddles the line between being a unified work and being simply a collection of overdub recordings we decided to release together; the “EP” designation is meant to convey some level of ambivalent unseriousness.
What’s the story behind the EP cover art?
Ma: The only fact which I could be assertive about: it has something to do with floating objects and the work of a great painter we know. The rest remains in a zone of uncertainty we were trying to not doubt. The stillness of the balloons and the soap bubble is a lie. The jump of the animal might be a real fact for some of us. An oven on a sidewalk is sometimes a piece of luck.
What is your relationship with your voice or instrument like? Do you ever feel frustrated by its capabilities or your own motivation to utilize it?
Zach: Moving forward without frustration or resistance wouldn't be worthy of being called art. One has to hold fast to the frustration and learn to use it, I think. Those highly important dimensions of artmaking that could be termed "craft" notwithstanding, the central struggle in writing and its representation seems to be psychological, phenomenological: a constitutively accursed search for miracle. I like to take long celebratory breaks, suffer, then climb that mountain again with weak knees...
Ma: Frustration seems to be part of the deal. As Zach just said, it can be a tool, transformed in energy. But is staying in one’s comfort zone always comfortable? Not pushing limits could also be kind of frustrating, don't you think?
What does setting and location contribute to your performance or recording? Do you think the same song would come about differently in different locations?
Ma: The effect of the physical condition of the space makes the experience of playing unique. I'm not good at math, but when even performing the same song twice in the same location in the same configuration on the same day feels different, one could imagine every modified factor in the equation has a notable impact on the result. Space affects people. To give a precise example: for that last show we did in Brattleboro, I had to slightly move the angle of my position to find a link between me and Zach after a couple of songs, just to feel like a part of the team.
Zach: Comfort is key. The songs seem to swallow context and digest it into unforeseeable condition. For some perverted reason, I do notice I tend to prefer takes where everyone’s exhausted and would prefer to move on.
Who are some bands/artists making music right now who you feel particularly inspired or moved by?
Zach: I would love for everyone who takes an interest in Fievel to read the fine print and investigate the music of each person who's touched our songs. Algorithms replace context with content; we have to win some of the former back for ourselves in whatever ways we can.
What has been revealed over the course of this project that you weren’t quite aware of or expected when it began?
Zach: The only thing that comes to mind is my continuous shock that such incredible musicians think my and our writing is worth studying and practicing.
Ma: The rest is also shocking. We have been able to meet several times to work with very good musicians even though we live on different continents, and every time some magic happens, this sensation to form a band, to be part of this group appears. The repetitive opportunities of meeting great people who care and seem to enjoy what's happening always make me feel outrageously lucky and plainly grateful.
Can you each tell me one thing you like or appreciate about the other as artists?
Zach: As both singer and writer, Ma's voice is like one of those wispy reflections of sunlight off some unknown gleaming surface that surprise you midday. I enjoy not understanding her densely accurate style of miracle.
Ma: Zach has an infinite quantity of energy and ideas. Consequently, he opens an infinite quantity of doors in my head, doors I never thought might be existing somewhere. I entirely trust him, eyes blinded.
How much input do each of you have into what everyone else adds to the songs? To what extent is there direction or a proposed arrangement?
Ma: This is more Zach's talent. He's very skilled at indicating paths to the musicians we work with, and at the same time giving a lot of space for them to make the music their own. Somehow he's able to do this trick where every person involved has his attention and a place to start from, to serve at the end the coherence of the music so everything can make sense in a specific way.
Zach: It varies song to song... Some arrangements are pre-composed, but in general I like to provide whatever sort of charts and supervisory arrangements work for the enlisted musicians so that they can compose their own parts. If this music is "for" anyone, it's "for" the people who play it, so it's paramount that each person involved learns to relate to the material in a sui generis, personal way. And when I cull souls for a band, I always think of something my friend Tori Kudo once said: "the ability of a chef to make a full-course meal out of a mixture of ingredients depends on his culinary skills and his wisdom... It is possible that a chef could understand the feelings of his ingredients and still become a chef, but what does he mean by treating people as ingredients?" The goal of our collective work isn't a well-crafted, delicious product but to represent accidents of frisson that visit living forms. These frissons are social as much as musical.
Is there any particular skill or technique that you learned from collaborating with others?
Ma: I'm in a continuous process of learning. It's my first time with pretty much everything since we started the band. It's extremely joyful.
Zach: In many ways, this music and how to think about it have been taught to me by everyone who's touched it. Writing with Ma has consummated, concerted and rendered legible diverse ways of pathfinding I've accessed over the years but which were formerly incommunicable and randomly enforced. Whether these now-more-fully-established techniques can still be useful to us remains an open question..
What are some of your personal favorite albums? Whether they’ve influenced you and your craft immensely or broaden your understanding of what music can do.
Zach: I found “An Electric Storm” by White Noise in the crawlspace of my parents’ basement when 15-year-old-me was cleaning it out: life-changing. “Out of the Blue” by Blue “Gene” Tyranny and “Return Visit to Rock Mass” by Maher Shalal Hash Baz were also paramount. I’ve probably heard “Liquid Swords” about 10,000 times (fond memories of GZA soundtracking my food delivery jobs in NH & MA and farmwork in Ecuador), though our next album “Flaming Swords” isn’t referencing that but the Book of Genesis. More recently, Eduardo Mateo, Mariana Ingold and Twinkie Clark completely bent my frame: respectively, I'd recommend "Mateo Solo Bien Se Lame," "Todo Depende," Mattie Moss Clark's "Make Me That Building Not Made By Hand," and the Clark Sisters' "Is My Living In Vain." Here's a massive compilation I made of some Uruguayan music I love.
Ma: I have also an infinite love for this album "An Electric Storm" which Zach made me discover a couple years ago. I listen over and over to "Greener Postures" by Snakefinger, "Gallop" by Léna Plátonos, and more recently "Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides" by Sophie. I also was deeply moved by this album "Music As A Second Language" by Paul DeMarinis.
What are you both looking for when recruiting collaborators for this project?
Zach: Because of the harmonic difficulty and swiftness of the changes that characterize most of our music, it's best suited for advanced jazz musicians and motivated beginners evacuated of all dogma. But the real answer is temperament and kismet.
Ma: I would also say that after clicking with a person, scheduling influences the potentiality of making a partnership haha. From a pragmatic eye, this music requires a lot of commitment, space and time in daily life for the time of the residency and even preparation before we meet.
Do you ever feel discouraged or lost when making music? If so, how do you combat that feeling?
Zach: I like to set goals and parameters and try to finish the job. Discouragement is registered by the complaint department and given to the general mill as more glitzy grist. Writing anything that feels fresh is a miracle, love is a miracle, being able to work with someone else is a miracle, a harmonious representation of writing is a miracle, etc… One should bear in mind that it takes “being there” and “holding the space” to court surprise.
Ma: Sharing doubts and hopeless feeling is a catharsis. When I remember it's part of every human being's condition thanks to relatives, I'm capable to take distance and put these feeling aside. Being involved in a band with someone else is also a benediction, we count on each other so I can't be selfish too much and have to pass beyond the blurry period of time to keep moving.
There are two cover songs on the EP. How did you decide on these songs and what was your relationship to them prior to and during learning/performing/recording the songs?
Zach: Technically, there are three: "the River" (2010) is by Blanche Blanche Blanche, my thing with Sarah Smith. I've wanted to do a textual version of "Arrow Through Me" since at least 2009 and "Assured Energy" since 2016. I love these songs and just wanted to live inside them for the few hours it took to study and record them.
Ma, is there ever a time you wish you could sing over a part but don’t? How do you communicate with bandmates when voice arrives and departs?
Ma: Yes, it has happened. It's very rare, though. It recently happened with one of the songs we wrote together. Maybe that's related to this new dimension having to do with the space a song takes inside me, its incarnation. But I would communicate about it with Zach while we write, and we would make the decision together about what feels best. When we practice with the band, there are a lot of questions about everything, but the structures of the songs are already established as the frame to start from. It doesn't feel like the right time to question them. The demos we send to the members of the band before our first practice make the parts where the singing has to appear clear and expected.
The title track “Aérodynes” feels, to me, much more solemn and melancholic than the rest of the EP. Perhaps I’m wrong about that mood, but it is the song that conjures up the most visceral sensation in me. What was the genesis of that piece? Ma, how did it feel to create something on your own for inclusion in this project and how do you feel it relates to the rest of the tracks?
Ma: This song was part of a personal process of making steps to move on. Past could have been very present somehow and qualified as an invader. So maybe it was a statement about what was the present at that time, or a protective gesture like riding with a helmet. You know it's still dangerous to ride a bike in the city — maybe more so with a helmet, depending on the type of accident — but you'd feel safer for a time wearing it. This is an old song, so maybe that's the reason why it has a different flavor from the rest of the team, but it feels it has joined the right team.
What’s next for Fievel is Glauque? (I know we already discussed the new record, but feel free to add any other plans or intentions for the future.)
Zach: Our first 'proper' full-length studio record Flaming Swords is in mixing and should be out some time in the next nine months, depending on whether we self-release as usual or begin working with a label. We have a painful mixing backlog of over 80 studio-recorded songs. 2022 and 2023 sessions are in planning and at least two other records should be finished by next year. In the meantime, the amazing UK label Kit Records is doing a vinyl repress of God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess which is already well on its way to being sold out and which you can find here. Thank you, Joe!