Celluloide is a French synth-pop formation set up in 2000. Their work has been released…
Celluloide is a French synth-pop formation set up in 2000. Their work has been released by hometown label BOREDOMproduct. They a few months ago released their eight full length album “Futur Antérieur”, which I experienced as their most intimate work to date. The sound remains driven by electro-minimalistic pop structures and typical bleeping sequences. Darkleti, Member u-0176 and Patryck Holdwem kindly answered a few questions about their newest sonic creation.
Q: I noticed Celluloide this year celebrates its 20th
anniversary! That’s for sure a milestone in your career. What does all these
years of involvement evoke to you? Are you planning something special and how
do you see the future?
Celluloide: Well, our first album “Naive Heart”
was released in 2002, so we’re officially only 18… but we released our very
first demo in 2000, so you are right it seems. It’s quite difficult to believe
that so much time has passed, though this is a fear that we’ve expressed many
time in our lyrics, nothing we can say or do will ever stop the time.
No, we didn’t think of a special thing to do,
and didn’t plan anything… but now that you mention it, we’d love to see our
first albums re-released as 12″ LP… that would be really a great gift
for our 20’s.
Q: Let’s talk about the new album “
Futur Antérieur”. The title has something intriguing
while sound-wise it seems you tried to compose the songs with a different
approach. What is it all about and where do you place this work in the band’s
discography?
Celluloide: Yes, this title is
quite intriguing, and that’s why we like it. There’s probably one way to
interpret what we really mean here… And well with such a name, the final
position would be perfect in the discography.
We thought that our previous album “Art
Plastique” was experimenting the limit between melodies and sound design, and
wanted to take a more ‘pop’ and direct, let’s say ‘intuitive’ approach for “Futur
Antérieur”. In a way we wanted to mix everything we’ve tested and developed on
our previous albums over the years.
Q: I experienced “Futur Antérieur” as one of your most
intimate releases to date. Is it something you recognize and what did you try
to express lyrical wise?
Celluloide: I think it’s an impression. Just
like when changing a chord makes the melody sound different… Of course
writing in French let us express more precisely what we have in mind, but lots
of Celluloide lyrics have deeper meaning than what you think at first. I know
that lots of people think that most of our lyrics are typical love songs or
melancolic themes, but it might be completely something else actually…
usually we hide some keys in the text to decode the real meaning of songs, just
like we did for tracks like “Et Si…” or “Le Baiser
Géométrique” on “Hexagonal” or “Art Plastique”. This time we decided not
to give the keys…
At first we wanted to add a sticker on the
album or the limited mini-album “Modulation De Fréquence”, as a joke,
with written ‘unexplicit lyrics – not easy to understand’…
Q: I’ve always experienced Celluloide as a band with a
particular sound-DNA, which is mainly created through the typical bleeping
noises and sequences. In, which way and after all the years do you feel
‘imprisoned’ and/or ‘restricted’ through this sound? And did you ever consider doing
something completely different?
Celluloide: Well, actually we have always
tried to evolve with each release, and work with new elements into each new
album… and to us, we’ve always tried to move on.
I don’t think you can hear any EBM element in
our two first albums, like “Words Once Said” for instance, but you can clearly
hear them after the “Bodypop”-EP.
But you’re right, it’s true that we didn’t
change everything at one step to do a completely different music, we evolved
more gradually. Nevertheless I think we really try to reduce noises and bleeps
on this new album, but I guess we can’t completely stop and we are what we are.
We think that every artist is doing more ore less the same two of three songs
again and again. We’re all just trying to make it not too obvious… some are
managing to hide it better than others.
Q: Another typical element of the band is the artwork,
which always had this styled and abstract, goniometric style. Tell us a bit more
about the artwork and the link with the music and the lyrics?
Celluloide: This abstract geometric style,
strongly inspired by the early 20s century avant-garde like De Stijl, Futurism,
Constructivism or Suprematism, is actually not linked to the lyrics, but to the
music.
When we hear sounds, we see shapes, colors…
everyone speaks about the ‘roundness’” of a bass sound or the ‘sharpness’
of a medium sequence… That’s exactly how we see our music… and these 20’s
paintings are expressing it so well that we couldn’t do it better. We’ve explained all our influences and references about graphic design on
our webpage: http://www.celluloide.online.fr/c-artwork.php
Q: I think you never got the international recognition
you deserve! Do you think there’re particular reasons to explain this lack of
international recognition?
Celluloide: Thanks. of course when you write
and record music, you want to reach the maximum amount of people, and you
expect that they will like it. So we would have loved to be bigger. If we knew
what to do for getting a bigger audience, we would have done it already.
Maybe French lyrics didn’t help us at some
point… I don’t know. We have always tried to write and produce music,
graphics and videos the best we can. That’s where our limits are. We probably
can’t sell ourselves much better.
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