Memmaker - Destruction is imminent!

Based in Montreal (Canada), Memmaker has been set up by Guillaume Nadon. Later on Yan Faussurier of Iszoloscope joined in and the result of their common efforts can be now discovered on the official debut full length "How To Enlist A Robot Uprising". They bring a powerful form of dark, industrial electronics, which can be simply reduced to the definition of 'power noise'. But whatever the layer you want to put in Memmaker, this debut delivers an amazing potential! Guillaume and Yann here deliver some essential information about their project, influences and an interesting and detailed vision about the future of the music scene. Get ready for a funny interaction between both members. (By Stéphane Froidcoeur)

SL. Can you traditionally start by a presentation of your project?

M. I guess we could but then we'd make your job way to easy. So we'll just copy and paste what's in our MySpace profile: "Think of it as a sci-fi theme oriented electro-industrial project that flirts with a multitude of dance-floor electronic music styles with intensity and Orwellian robot politics in mind."

SL. Memmaker started as a solo-project so how did Yann Faussurier of Iszoloscope finally joined in and what did it eventually change to the sound and style of Memmaker?

G. Yann approached me while we were drunk out of our minds in a local club, saying he wanted to produce the album. I thought he was talking right out of his ass. But when he came back from Maschinenfest in 2006 he called me again asking when I'd like to start working on it. At first, I was a bit uncertain about how I felt with this. Having had lots of bad experiences in the past, finding someone to work with, as a musician, has always been a very tedious and deceiving task. When we first sat down to begin work on 'Death Comes', it became obvious right away that we were connecting on every level. As I am more of a composer than a producer/sound engineer, Yann was exactly what the project needed. This being his forte, he brought everything to the next level: Suddenly Memmaker's sound had bass and more depth than I could ever dream of. Composition wise, I already had most of the tracks done and ready for the album, we just had to clean/tweak/rebuild everything because we had the technology and it didn't cost us 6 million dollars.

Y. I wasn't THAT drunk!

SL. Memmaker and Iszoloscope are totally different in influences and styles so how is it working inside 2 opposite projects?

M. Funny you mention that. We pretty much have the same musical influences. It's almost uncanny. That being said, Memmaker is as much Guillaume's baby as Iszoloscope is Yann's. We just have a different approach in our creative output. It makes for great outside perspective from one another.

SL. How would you define the sound of Memmaker and what can you reveal about musical influences?

M. We're sick and tired of douche-bags telling us what EBM/Electro/Industrial/Techno or whatever should sound or shouldn't sound like. We'd say Memmaker was mainly influenced by what we felt we wanted to hear when we went clubbing but didn't. Regardless of styles or target audiences, we made a record that we would enjoy as electronic music lovers and club goers. There really is an insane amount of importance put on labeling sub-sub-genres that absolutely shouldn't have its place to start with. It's pretty much causing a riot of bickering and judgmental stances that create a status quo loop in this scene. When music becomes an accessory to fashion, it loses its entire purpose.

SL. It seems that there's a real concept behind this project about a so called 'robot invasion', right? What is it all about?

M. It's all about robots invading and explosions and then ninjas come out of helicopters and police cars and then there's more explosions and then the army comes and they have tanks and stuff and starts shooting ninjas out of their tanks and the ninjas shoot bees out of their mouths that look like Paul Stanley! But wait! All that time those ninjas were robots! Best plot twist ever!

SL. What do you mean with the title of the album "How To Enlist A Robot Uprising" and tell us a bit more about the titles and ideas behind the songs?

M. The title was inspired by the 2005 Daniel Wilson book: How To Survive A Robot Uprising. But then, we didn't just want to survive the uprising, we wanted to join in! Seriously, who wouldn't want rockets for feet? Upgrades, am I right?

SL. The info concerning your album speaks about a 'destruction is imminent'. I think you perfectly transpose that idea into your music, which sounds really heavy and hard! Tell us a bit more about the link between concept and music?

G. Let me tell you about something else that's very heavy and hard: My Yamaha DX-7, have you ever had to carry one of those?

Y. I think that what Guillaume is trying to tell us here is that, for us, theme and concept go hand in hand. That is one of the things that make working together so easy, we have an impressive approach in the selection of sounds we use to transcend a concept or context.

G. Being both very visual people, we usually imagine a setting or a situation and try to paint it with sound.

SL. What did you try to express by using French samplings and the samplings properly speaking?

M. Funny you mention that. You know, it never occurred to us, not even for a second, that using French was a statement by itself. Last we checked, unlike Klingon, it's an actual real language (like English, German and Japanese for instance).

SL. You only mentioned Fritz Lang in your 'thanks to', but I can't directly find the link between his work and your music concept. Tell us a bit more about it?

Y. Yes Guillaume, why don't you enlighten us a little?

G. Sure! For your information, Fritz Lang's 1929 movie "Frau im Mond" is considered as the first serious science fiction film. It introduced the countdown to zero before lift off that is still in use today. That movie is pretty much what started the whole space race. Did you know that German scientist Wernher Von Braun was so impressed by that movie that it inspired him to build the now legendary V-2 Rocket? It was the first man made object into space! They even had the movie logo on the first successfully launched rocket. And the rest, as we all know, is history.

Y. Wow Guillaume, thanks to Wikipedia, you sure sound like you are quite the erudite!

G. Well, thank you dear colleague!

SL. Any favorite movies from Fritz Lang?

G. Who's Fritz Lang?

Y. The dude who made "Metropolis" and "Frau im Mond"

G. Oh yeah...

SL. I would expect you guys being fans of movies like the "Matrix"-series! Any reaction here?

M. Funny you mention that because we do think that the Matrix is a rehashed and convoluted pop-culture mish-mash of crap. It's like Michael Bay discovered Gibson's Neuromancer, read the back of the book and then discovered the internet while high on "Ecstasy", thus writing a quick fix on his action script in progress based on the miserable lives of system admins. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. We're more old-school 60s sci-fi buffs. Like: 'Let's-build-a-submarine-reduce-it-to-atomic-scale-and-inject-it-in-this-guy's-ass-because-we-can-and-then-swim-ourselves-to-womanizing-underwater-danger-and-drama-filled-circumstances' kind of thing. You know.

SL. I think your music can be easily (and logically) described as 'power noise', but I'm not used to hear this type of music being that elaborated! Tell us a bit more about the writing process of the album and the way you guys have been working together?

M. With all due respect, that's exactly what we were talking about earlier, when we said that there was an insane amount of importance put on labeling sub-sub-genres that doesn't have its place. Here, when you say: "easily (and logically) described as 'power noise'", what do you mean by 'power noise'? Do you logically mean power noise like Whitehouse, Merzbow, Con-Dom, Maurizio Bianchi? Or more like Sonar, Converter, Asche, and Synapscape? Or maybe even like that VNV Nation's remix of Wumpscut's Deadmaker, the United States of Mind album by Covenant? Or probably This Morn' Omina, Suicide Commando, Virtual Embrace, Feindflug, etc? Or even maybe like Speedy J along with other house music producers that like to put distortion pretty much on everything? That being said, what do you mean exactly by "elaborated"? Because by saying that, you're basically saying that because an artist makes 'power noise' music, he / she logically can't make anything really elaborated? Because if that's the case, then we probably don't know what the same words mean. Hell, some friends of ours' even commented that Memmaker's sound was euro dance.

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G. As for the writing process, the album was inspired by my growing up in the 80's Reagan cold war and its legacy. I was totally hooked on American propaganda action movies. Ever seen Firefox with Clint Eastwood or Red Dawn? That's exactly what I mean and loved when I was a kid. I didn't care much who the bad guys were portrayed as back then, I just thought they always had the best suits and rockets. I was too young for it to have any political meaning. To me it was just pure juvenile awesomeness! As for the robots and sci-fi in general, I never really grew out of it. Thus defining the aesthetics of Memmaker.

Y. We have usual roles in the creation process but they are not set in stone. As we mentioned earlier, this project is Guillaume's baby and he steers its artistic direction. Themes, melodies and structures are his department and I'm on the tech side of the production like harmonic spacing, effects and mixing. We've changed roles every now and then when the situation called for it without ever stepping on each other's toes. With our experience (or bad experiences rather), we're both over the whole ego trampling game and are respectfully aware of each and other's strengths and limits.

SL. One of the high lights of the album is for sure "Robot Buzz", which is a cover version of Shocking Blue! How did you come to cover this band and how was it working on this version?

G. I woke up one morning and iTunes shuffled it's magic all the way to the Nirvana version, I just thought it'd be hilarious with robotic vocals and that's how it came to be. Working on it was hard: the nagging naked ghost of Kurt Cobain constantly distracted us!

SL. I've been really impressed by most of your bass lines revealing deep bass sounds! Did you particularly take care of this element and or others?

M. Thank you, we put a lot of care into our work. There is no element that is less important than any other for us when it comes to producing music. We believe that a well-done track is to be appreciated as a whole. Like in visual arts, where it's usually more obvious to most, everything in a piece serves its purpose. Neglecting any element in the creation process transcends throughout the quality of the body of work.

SL. Tell us a bit more about the artwork of the album, which seems to be a direct link to the concept?

G. Davyd Pittman of Hive Records created the artwork.

Y. We were looking for someone that we knew would grasp the aesthetics we were going for. He designed a flyer for a show he and his crew put together while I was touring with Tarmvred as Iszoloscope in 2004 and it left an impression on me that I remembered to this day. I knew he was our man as soon as we started thinking about the artwork.

G. We provided him with basic ideas and logos. He pretty much went by himself from there. We think he did an outstanding job with it.

SL. How did you guys came in touch with Hive Records and how did you finally get signed on it?

M. We looked intensively for a decent home for Memmaker but we pretty much got turned away everywhere. We were told we sounded too much like this or that. Again it was always a matter of labeling that was based on nothing. We wanted someone who would be as excited as we were about the project itself as opposed to the fate of the whole industrial music universe through a single release. We kind of got fed up after a while and decided to ask Davyd since he was already working on the artwork. The reason we didn't ask him to start with was because we weren't sure it was Hive material. Especially since everyone was obsessing about pigeon holing us somewhere that didn't make any sense. That's when we discovered that he was probably even more excited than we were about it. He always assumed that we were releasing it somewhere else, hence why he never asked. Best plot twist ever! We agreed on the same terms and decided to do this as a joint venture with our own production company: "Embodiment". He did an amazing and exceptionally professional job. We couldn't have asked for more.

SL. Everyone agreed to admit that this music scene is going really bad; labels and distributors are closing doors! How do you feel about that and especially when releasing a debut-cd?

M. Funny you mention that, because we do not agree. We love what we do and we do it because we want to. At the end of the day, we are happy because we are passionate about it and most likely, so are you. We even dare to think that it's a great era for underground artists. The comfortable points of references our generations had until the late nineties are fading. There is that part of tragedy to it, indeed. But we believe that this narrow vision of it is what's really giving the masses the impression that it's destroying itself from within. The changes seem to be running deeper then most like to think. We believe that we are at a turning point in music history nonetheless and that like in any other turning point, you either adapt or die.

The way we see it, before the arrival of the phonogram, music was democratic in that it belonged to everyone who could perform and listen to it. Suddenly, came the phonogram and all the way to the compact disk, companies owned the media where music became a controlled product that was packaged and manufactured. With the arrival of the MP3 format and of high bandwidth Internet connections, the tables have turned and the music's media doesn't belong to the companies anymore, it belongs to whoever can download and decode the MP3. This whole process is neither good nor bad by itself but has to be handled like a double-edged sword. Changes come in pain; there is a bigger picture here then the fate of contemporary record labels and the sales of albums. Especially since it never was, in the first place, the most important aspect of music.

In that optic, we're tired of hearing about the usual suspects and the relentless whining about why no one can sell 5000 CDs anymore. You're right: It sucks... We know it all too well. But again, complaining and lashing out won't change anything aside from alienating your fans, new listeners and new curious music lovers. It might come to you as a shock, but if your album is not selling as much as you thought nor getting the attention you think it deserves, it might very well be because of the fact that (here we go again) "there really is an insane amount of importance put on labeling sub-sub-genres that absolutely shouldn't have it's place to start with. It's pretty much causing a riot of bickering and judgmental stances that create a status quo loop in this scene. When music becomes an accessory to fashion, it loses its entire purpose". In this small scene, when someone puts out a great record, you can be sure people will hear whining about it. About how it sucks because it's either too 'power noise', 'EBM or 'future pop' and mostly losing focus on what's actually on the album. Most of the time without even having heard the said record. Especially since it seems everyone's definition of every sub-sub-genre entirely depends on where they live or post on the Internet.

Ultimately, what is nowhere to be found within this hiatus are solutions. We think that this bickering and judgmental stance is what's hurting the most this music scene. Tastes in music are completely subjective. There is no science of a good or a bad song; it entirely is in the ear of the beholder.

SL. So what do you expect about this debut-album and in which way will the sales be important for you?

M. Taking into consideration the answer to the last question, the initial reaction is pretty much exceeding anything we had imagined. We've had very good sales for a debut album and that in a very short period of time too. Now, defining "good sales" between now and maybe say... 8 years ago would be just silly. But incidentally, every sale and positive comment has that much more meaning.

SL. Live performances are probably one of the best ways to promote your music and album. Any plans about coming live shows and how does Memmaker on stage looks like?

M. We totally agree. We're mainly focusing on the Kinetik Festival for May. As of this moment, we are preparing a new live show, so it's still a work in progress. I guess for the new kicks, you'll just have to be there.

SL. I noticed that Memmaker already did numerous live performances so what have been the experiences for so far and are there some nice memories you want to share with us?

Y. It's always been very positive, I'd even say explosive! 'Robotive' actually, if it were a real word!

G. I'm always amazed at how much crowds get into it! There's so much energy live. In New-York City, we even had a clichéd scream "Slayer" in between each songs (thus making the experience automatically awesome)! If we can't get that guy in the far back of the venue to dance his ass off, we'll hire some robots to pile drive him!

Y. Unless he's in a wheel chair. Then we will use our forklift!

SL. I noticed you are based in Montreal! How is the underground scene doing over there?

G. If by that you mean the sewers then yes, they're pretty much blooming at this time of the year.

Y. I think that what Guillaume means is that it's soaring exceptionally well thanks to the Kinetik Festival and prior to that, the C.O.M.A. festivals.

G. Wow Yann, It's just like if I thought it but then you said it.

SL. What brings the future for Memmaker and any other plans in the pipeline?

M. Robots, obviously! But we'd rather say these plans are in our solid-state hard drives instead of a pipeline. We also have new merch and a remix album in the works. So far we've gathered amazingly talented collaborators such as Cenotype, Cervello Elletronico, Grendel, Liar's Rosebush, Rotersand, Stendeck, Terrorfakt, and more. There's also the Kinetik Festival in May, you'd be crazy to miss out on that one. So stay tuned!

Band: www.myspace.com/memmaker
Label: www.hiverecords.com