The last season I discovered the music of ’DAY BEFORE US’and I was impressed ,especially by the last album ‘child of a new light’.In 12/05/14 the song ‘blood out of a mother’s breast’ featured ‘TRANSMISSION' radioshow.According to the band’s official page it's a microtonal,lyrical and dark ambient music project coming from old Europe.
Philippe M. Blanche(instruments,electronics), Effrosyni Papamichalopoyloy(vocals,lyrics).
Welcome to the world of 'DAY BEFORE US’… a discussion with Philippe is always interesting ..
▲Can you
tell us a few things about the selection of the name DAY BEFORE US and the idea
of the band?
Philippe: The origin of the band’s
name comes from an old poem by the romantical female author Flower Adams. I’m
sensitive to it because it draws a spiritual connotative meaning I was looking
for to translate in words my aesthetic sensibility and the musical journey I
want to express, a world made of ghostly evocations, a mythical time, the
fundamental silence and a poetical dialectic around human finitude and its
transcendence. The project was born in 2012. I previously made a few
appearances in a collective work (based on avant-garde experiments), in the LP
This crying era (from Nimh). I’ve decided to explore my own compositions to
answer one question: how to use a musical language which could approach through
melancholic imagination the primordial needs of the soul ?
▲Can you tell me a few words about your profil and especially for your music backround?How did Effrosyni and Philippe met each other?
▲Can you tell me a few words about your profil and especially for your music backround?How did Effrosyni and Philippe met each other?
Philippe: I’ve been initially
trained in classical music, from (post) romanticism era (Rachmaninov…) to
modern impressionism from Debussy, Satie and a few others. This is the reason
why most of the pieces conceived for the project turn around the grand piano
technique and narratives. I’m occasionally using various keyboards (synth,
organ), samples, field recordings and effects to consolidate the musical
architecture. This project was firstly designed in the continuation of
traditional-neoclassical instrumental music. I rarely incorporated vocal
elements (except some recitatives in my conceptual album “Autumnal Wandering”
and in one title on “Misty shroud of regrets). With Effrosyni we at first step
organized experiments based on materials I was working on at the moment (back
in early 2013), I’ve rapidly felt seduced and convinced by her singing
qualities and the emotional strength she develops…then the compositional
alchemy worked naturally. We met online then a few times in real life.
▲Have you
you collaborated with other bands and projects over these years?
Philippe: The historical course of
this project is fundamentally articulated around exchanges with artists from
various horizons. My first collaboration was with Nimh for a work produced by
Rage in Eden. Giuseppe Verticchio encouraged me to explore this creative direction…I’m
truly grateful to him because he was the first to believe in my potential and
to adopt a real supportive attitude, still valuable along the years. I
cooperated with a British duo (6&8) the past year for an album around sound
poetries and glitch ambient, it was a nice experience, more electronic-tinged
as well. Otherwise I can notice the presence of a few guest artists such as the
minimal synth performer Oksana Rodionova (Xiu) or the sound lyricist Markus
Pape.
▲I think there is a cinematographic
atmosphere in your work. Are you in any other way related to the art of cinema?
Philippe: Art-cinema or what we
commonly name the cinema of poetry has an enormous influence in my musical
trajectory. I’m totally enthralled by the passionate mystical heroism we can
detect in the work of Tarkovski, Vlacil, Parajanov or in the existential
animation films of someone like Piotr Dumala. For soundtracks I’ve been working
with the surreal painter Jana Brike for a couple of animation films. I feel an
intimate relationship with this art form and the way it communicates originally
to the heart and mind.
▲I want you
to describe with 2-3 words each one of your albums
Philippe: “Under Mournful Horizons” (2012) is a
radically dark ambient musical inferno with some discreet neoclassical elements
and bleak noisy touches. “Autumnal wandering (2013) is a more bucolic and dark
romanticist soundtrack, purely acoustic with a few add of synthesized textures.
This is a conceptual album about the German poetical weltschmerz. “Misty shroud
of regrets” (2013) is the finest example of my music considered in its
instrumental properties, long and languorous
plaintive chants around the piano, field recordings and processed sound forms. “Child of a new light” (2014) is the first
album to introduce full vocal parts and lyrical ingredients. The aesthetic
imagination of this last is turned to dream like scenes, enchantment and nature
rituals.
▲Tell us a few
things about your new album. What is the prevailing theme?
Philippe: Conceptually this album
is trying to make a bridge between Ancient Greece mytho-poetical world and the
Western romantical exaltation. Both movements are aspiring to connect the human
creature to the revelation of an ideal where the great Nature is at the same
time a source of ecstasy and metaphysical fear. Musically speaking it will
reveal new ideas with an inclination for dark ambient music, ritualistic in its
form with neoclassical melodic idioms and a slight taste for the Ethereal wave.
The album is in production. If nothing wrong it should be available very soon.
▲Nowadays with the spread of technology that has made the music production easier, a lot of groups are coming out..which are the ingredients that make your project unique?
▲Nowadays with the spread of technology that has made the music production easier, a lot of groups are coming out..which are the ingredients that make your project unique?
Philippe: I’ve never been
dependant to technologies in the compositional process. I would even prefer to
compose and record only with a single voice and a piano. Technologies
facilitate things, but these are optional and non essential. It scares me to
think that many emerging bands are only creating albums based on softwares
without using any real instrumental basis. For my humble opinion music should
stay a craft based-artisanal thing based on self-discipline, devoted practice
and intuitive imagination. Anyway those technologies can not restitute the
delicate timbres and the varied tone colors of an acoustic instrument…even
someone like Brian Eno develops a relative skeptical position about technological
tools. I think that in a musical industry severely dominated by labels and
subgenre categories, the stylistic autonomy is the best way to make one path
durable, in stillness.
▲Nowdays ,
many bands promote their music just
uploading it on websites like youtube,soundcloud etc. Which are the advantages
and the disadvantages? Tell us your
opinion.
Philippe: Hard to escape to
networks and to those channels of communication when the musical creation is
now completely globalized and flowing through spaces, just like capitals, ideas
and other cultural products. Conceived as an instrument those one can be useful
and a real chance for artists to enable their music to be listened by many and
by a larger audience. On this side I’m an iconoclast, I don’t pay more
attention to a top celebrity than to an unknown artist…renown and fame are a
matter of visibility and opportunity, not based on an objective judgment.
Thanks to those networks I discover plenty interesting bands and projects which
are sometimes totally outside of the music business, deliberately. The bad
let’s say effect is that the quantity of production which is now massive tend
to “standardize” the sensibilities, tends to kill the appreciation and pleasure
we have to generate a certain apathy.
▲Any plans for gigs?A live performance requires more energy and stage
presence.Is an ambient project suitable
for live performances?
Philippe: At the moment we don’t
have any gigs plans. I’m not writing albums having those objectives in mind. After
the launch of our upcoming release we are opened to suggestions if the context,
environment and disposals to play are adequate to this type of music which is
mostly suitable for “home listening” experience. Festivals and private live
concerts may be two prior options.
▲Most influential bands-musicians?
▲Most influential bands-musicians?
Philippe: I’m
profoundly moved by musicians who have the capability to enlighten the
depth of our soul with mysteriously
evocative and religious sound forms…I’m notably thinking about representative figures of the holy /
mystical minimalism like Arvo Part, Valentyn Sylvestrov, Henrik Gorecki, Erkki
Salmenhara and a few finish composers from the Sibelius Academia. With
respective cultural heritages their music is of great significance to
understand the spirituality and the intangible in our problematic (post) modern
times. I’m marginally inspired by other musical genres, from dark ambient,
neofolk, to martial industrial music by Loki Foundation, Malignant Records (…)
▲What is the source of your creativity?
Philippe: I’m taking my creativity
from “rimbaldian” visions, from the revolt of the soul, the oppressed secret
world, any reflective experience which has the vocation to liberate us
(metaphorically / symbolically) from the heaviness of our daily routine. Art is one of the keys to renew with unity
and with the secret self.
▲Tastes in art and literature?
Philippe: Anything related to the
true, urgent and integral forms of poetical effervescence, from the Russian
poets of the silver age (Alexander Blok…) to the federative and frenetic
community of the “poètes maudits” from everywhere (Corbière, Chatterton, De
Nerval, Trakl, Graneli, Campana, Kariotakis, Polydouri…). I cultivate also an
interest for classical goth novelists (Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis….)
personalities of the philosophical anthropology despite that is not an unified
school of thought (Klages, Scheler, Evola…) or from the philosophical
skepticism (Leopardi…). Otherwise the list can go on regarding visual art
matter, from early experiments in pictorialism art photography to poetical animation
cinema.
Studio
albums:
Under mournful horizons (2012)
Autumnal wandering (2013)
Misty shroud of regrets (2013)
Crystal sighs of a broken universe (2014)
EP:
Child of a new light
(2014)
Websites:
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Categories:
INTERVIEWS
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