Canblaster - Interview

I am Canblaster, one of the four members of Club Cheval. You are here in the Club Cheval's studio. This is where we store all the gear we buy: synths, equalizers, pedals. We plug them and see what happens. We have been here for about two years and a half, and in these studios maybe since last year. It was the former studio of Surkin and the room next door was Bobmo's studio but it's more like a warehouse now. We were before in the Jackson & His Computer Band's studio which is also just next door. There are a lot of artists working here like Cosmo Vitelli, The Birdy Nam Nam who are currently recording, and Sound Pellegrino, who share their offices with Marble. To start working on an EP or a mixtape or anything else, it's important to separate two things: the influence and the inspiration. For me, the influence is something constant, meaning that you always have recurrent themes in your music, kind of sounds you have an interest in and for me, I'd say it's a mix of broken beats from UK, synths from Detroit, Japanese melodies, and a little of French Touch. Around this, in your influences, you also have all the things you listen to less but which are important. For me it could be Rap, Outkast, stuff that are not part of my culture per se, but that I listen to often so indirectly, it affects the notes I play. But besides that, the trigger is the inspiration: the moment where you find your theme around what a number of your influences will meet to create something. When you work with Club Cheval, you need sometimes to make compromises because there are things you make that might be too weird or too extreme or the Club Cheval's project, especially in this project because we chose to come off a little bit by taking an external producer, DJ Kore to canalize ourselves. We go to the studio with sounds, but it's quite random, sometimes we come with almost finished tracks, and sometimes we just have a loop that might become the main melody of another track. Sometimes only two of us work, and the other two work on it later but there is no real method, especially for this album. It's like "I have an idea, I could make it with Myd, or Sam Tiba, or Pantheros." So I call him on the phone the day before and the next morning we go to the studio together and we start working on it. And sometimes we ask the other members to come in the afternoon. It's as simple as that. Nowadays, I think you need to be smart enough to make electronic music because there are people who have opened doors to incredible things just like the previous French Touch's wave back in 2007 where artists didn't care at all and started to mix rock and electronic music, add saturated or violent stuff and huge cut-ups. Now it's common to mix Rap and Techno for example but 15 years ago, if you read some interviews of Dave Clarke where he tried to play Rap at rave parties, people got pissed and even spat on him Now all of this is gone, everything can be mixed with everything, David Guetta is even working with Snoop Dogg! So I think this is the good side, anything can happen. I think the bad side is that there is too much information, it’s more due to how the music is distributed, stuff like MySpace, SoundCloud, Spotify, the music also becomes more free and everybody can make music easily with just a computer. This is a good thing, but the bad thing is you can be overwhelmed by sounds quickly and the music is somehow a little more dependent of fashion, especially electronic music, and with EDM, Trap music, Deep-House, it's easy to fall into big styles with which you must juggle because when you make electronic music, the music must be referenced to something that people will recognize. It can be a sound, the ghost of a melody. For example Durial, when he arrived there were like Usher's voices in his tracks, without the R&b or cheesy's touch, or the emotional's touch that may be present in a Usher's track, he was using them to do something different. I like people who have a "Live" aspect, something more than just a conventional DJ who mixes tracks by the rules. I like the Hip-Hop style, when there are accidents, rewinds, when there are tracks where the DJ just click on play and the track starts. I also like when the styles change a lot, I really like seeing old hip-hop guys like Afrika Bambaataa where the idea was just: we take 20 seconds of a track we like and maybe make a loop of it, or maybe just play these 20 seconds in the middle of the set and then put another vinyl, but it has to be very fast, from a break to another, rather than a house-music track that you let evolve. I like to feel the DJ behind the turntables. I like to see good examples of mix techniques, good mix of different techniques, and also simplicity so I really like for example Cashmere Cat, it's a kind of music i'm going to play at the SODASOUND Party I guess, or Jimmy Edgar, guys who managed to conciliate something very technique and at the same time something extremely melodic with J-Funk chords or even R&b chords. We are currently finishing the Club Cheval's album, we are working with several studios in parallel, and as soon as we finish this interview, I'm gonna make some keyboard sounds and send them to their studio so they can put the sounds in their session. Besides that, I met in New-York the guy who made the voices on "I Think About You" at the beginning. It's an artist who makes Indie-Rock music. I sampled his voice without telling him and he found my track via a blog. I remixed him and we started to exchange loops, we're gonna work together but it will be in a while I think. I was in studio with Rustie at the end of last year, we made some beats together, we don't know yet if we will release something but it was very interesting. Half of the time I am in the studio these days with Surkin, we are working on a big project. We have the Marble Season One Compilation which was just released, it's basically all the releases from this year: Surkin, Para One, Bobmo, Myd & I,what we made in clubs and others. "I Think About You" is on it too. We started working on the Season Two and we decided to make ***-Clubs in collaboration with each other since we defined our sound and the direction we want to take. I am preparing a ***-Club with Surkin. For the rest of the Year with Marble, I think it will be the same. undefined