More than 25 years has passed since Rock in Opposition political and musical movement: a circuit of people who wanted to free their music from the show business compromises. The canadian Miriodor, from Quebec, with other groups from Europe like the italian Stormy Six, the english Henry Cow, belgian Univers Zero and french Etron Fou Leloublan created a network for the promotion of a non-mainstrem rock, full of formal complexity and political demand.

Why don't you consider Miriodor a technical group and which is you main buzz?

Pascal Globensky: Our main interest is not into technology. We like to convey images in our music (since there's no lyrics). And technology is just a mean to achieve this. We see our music as a score for a weird movie.

Bernard Falasie: The way I understand this is that we don't like technical virtuoso playing (you know that very fast guitar player style...). Our main buzz would be virtuoso playing as an ensemble and a good sense of humor.

Nicolas Masino: The main idea behind Miriodor's music is not to display the amazing instrumental virtuosity of its members or to let them loose for 10-minute solos, but to bring to life a music whose interest resides in its composition, arrangements, little overdubs, surprising shifts in meter or timbre, and so on. The virtuosity is mainly in the composition themselves, as opposed to the sheer instrumental brilliance of one musician at a time.

Miriodor has his 25th birthday this year. Lot of people passed from the group to move elsewhere. It seems that lots of things has changed, but not your music, that still is fresh as yesterday. Which are the main items of your recipe?

PG: Well, we don't have a recipe and I think this is the key to what we're doing. Even if our music may sound cerebral to some people, we have a very intuitive approach to it. I think also the fact that Rémi and me are in the band since the beginning has helped a lot in keeping our identity as well as our signature.

BF: I'd say to have fun while composing and always try out stupid ideas, just in case they work well...

NM : First of all thank you very much! If indeed the music is still very fresh, I think the biggest factor is precisely that it does not come from any recipe. Each piece has its own story, each album reflects where we stand at that particular moment in our lives, and since we constantly change as individuals and as musicians, the creative output will also change constantly. Sometimes an idea will come up that sounds like something else we have already done, and we'll reject it. We try to surprise ourselves as much as possible, while still preserving what we feel is a 'Miriodor aesthetic'.

You have pubblished few records: six with this last "Parade". Is this due to some thickness of your music?

PG : We have released 6 records on a span of 25 years. This is due to the fact that Miriodor is not a full-time occupation for any of us. Most people in the band are engaged in many other bands and projects. So, little time is devoted to Miriodor (less than 10 hours a week). Working that way, it takes a lot of time to produce a 60 minute album of that kind of music.

BF: I guess it has more to do with the very long process of composing together and that all members have other projects or jobs.

NM : Well we would have done much more if this was our main job, and we could work on it for 40 hours a week! But just scheduling 1 or 2 rehearsals a week is sometimes problematical, so the pace is quite slow. On the good side, maybe if we did work together for 40 hours a week, we would have got to a point where we could not stand each other any more ; - ) So maybe a slow schedule has advantages too…

Miriodor changed from trio, to sextet, and also in your last CD there are a lot of guests. It seems that groups like yours fit very well with enlarged ensemble. Am I right? And how
large would you like to have Miriodor?

PG: It is true that a 6 piece formation fits Miriodor well. The first real formation was a sextet and now we're a sextet again (sometimes there's also a bassoon player with us). But it is also true that Miriodor was a trio for about 10 years and we did good stuff as a trio. In fact, over the years, Miriodor has been a band with 2,3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 members. I think Miriodor has and will have over the years a multidimensional identity, crew-wise. But I think 7 or 8 people is the largest I would go, personally.

BF: In Portugal, for a few pieces, we were eight on stage (with Lars Holmer on accordeon and Michel Berckmans on bassoon). Technicaly, I would find it very difficult to be more than that (monitoring on stage, etc). But in the studio, you can do whatever you like, depending of the budget. Miriodor with strings and a woodwind section and a teremin quartet ? Why not ?

NM: Sometimes a large ensemble is just not as nimble and agile as a small one. You can see this if you listen to Zappa's pieces for symphony orchestra : it just doesn't have the kind of tightness that you'll find on One Size Fits All, for example. So eventually the formation could in theory become too big, but I think we're far from that point yet. It all depends on the technical skills and level of implication of the musicians involved.

As i said before your music has a kind of density, but also a great precision. Nothing seems though by chance, but written in every details. Can we say this rock looks like a kind of
Zappa' style?

PG: Yes, we can compare our music to Zappa's in the sense that it's a thoroughly composed music with, again like in Zappa's music, with a few sections where musicians can express themselves somewhat freely.

BF: In a way, yes, but the main difference is that Zappa used to bring finished and written compositions to his band. Miriodor has a collective approach to composition. Pascal, Nicolas, Rémi and myself work a lot together, each one bringing elements of a piece. It's not written music (some members don't read music) although some parts are
written down, mostly for memory reasons.

NM: I must be the one who has been most influenced by Zappa, having written a Masters' thesis on him. But Miriodor has had this kind of intricate playing long before I joined the group, so I am not sure that this influence is so strong. I think both Pascal and Rémi have been more influenced by the RIO movement than by Zappa, and that Bernard has been influenced by millions of things. But in the end, this sort of 'blending classical contemporary music with a rock group' will probably always be associated with Zappa's aesthetics, and he certainly was among the first musicians to climb that mountain.

In Italy there were always two schools in progressive music. One baroque, symphonic and so on (we could think about Emerson, Lake & Palmer) and another one more creative and esperimental (Henry Cow). Here we always had this ambiguity. Is this the same overther?

PG: First of all, I don't like labels and I avoid them most of the time, specially the progressive one because its meaning has been so distortionated over time that nobody is too sure of what they're talking about when it comes down to progressive music. To me, progressive music is the one that has been done between 1967 and 1973 (about) before the the industry got a hold of it and before musicians started repeating themselves. What has been done after that, I don't know how to call it. We don't have such a clear division of progressive here. People know that there are different kinds of progressive music, but we do not classify them.

BF: Yes, it's definitely the same here, so I usually don't use the term "progressive", just to be sure people don't think we are making an ELP revival, with the keyboard player wearing a cape.

Do know any italian musician that you like?

PG: I know and like a few: PFM, Area, Il Volo. I'm sure there are many more I would like.

BF: I saw live and have one record by the band Ossatura which is excellent. I also know some of the work of the very good drummer Mirko Sabbatini.

Miriodor is well known in Italy because of the large simpathy once had political musicians. Which is your idea about RIO today and which is the heritage of that movement?

PG: RIO today is more like an ideology of a way of making music, in a totally uncompromised way. And that's what Miriodor have been doing all the time. The heritage of RIO is that it kind of opened a door for many bands that want to do music without targetting any movement or style.

Tell me some of the instrumetal sets from "Parade".

PG: On Parade, we have keyboards, 2 electric basses, acoustic and electric guitars, drums and percussions, octapads, violin, erhu, alto and soprano saxophones, bassoon, accordions, melodica, harmonium, turntable, noise. My gear is mainly composed of : Yamaha KX-88 MIDI controller, Access Virus (first generation), Oberheim MC-3000D (MIDI Dispatcher), Oberheim MiniGrand piano module, Ensoniq MR Rack, Roland VK-8M Organ module, Roland P-330 piano module, Kawai K4r, Yamaha DX7. I don't have vintage keyboards because I like to have only one main keyboard. But I do like some vintage sounds and I try to incorporate them in my set when possible and when they sound great.

NM: I played most of my keyboard parts on a Roland A-90, and my bass is an old Fender Precision. I also played a bit of Steinway grand piano on a few tracks

The CD seems to be recorded in real time, like the records from the past. Is there something behind this CD? I mean digital/analogic manipulation, overdubs and so on.

PG: No, it has not been entirely recorded live in studio. We did multitracking, recording first bass-guitar-keys-drums, adding the melodies afterwards, and more overdubs. A few manipulations on computer but not extensively.

NM: There is a lot of 'live' band playing involved, especially for the rhythm section. Then some themes are overdubbed, some minor mistakes corrected (punch in/out), and MIDI events edited. A longer song may have been recorded in 3 or 4 different segments, so these will have to be digitally spliced together, and so forth. So we try to go for the 'best of both worlds' between live playing and studio corrections.

BF: Parade is the first Miriodor album that has been mixed on a computer.

From studio to live Miriodor doesn't changed so much in appearence. You look like an orchestra with a score. Are you used to improvvise together?

PG: On all our albums except the first one, there are improvisations. And we do some live as well (not all the time but regularly). It's important for us to have at least a minimal intake of improvisation to counterbalance the very written side of our music.

BF: We do. There's two improvised pieces on Parade: "Checkpoint Charlie" and "Getting Ready". On some of our show, there used to be some long improvised moments. It's funny you mention that, we have the intention of adding more improvised sections to some of the new pieces, just to see what happens...

NM: Yes, we do. We also included some impro within certain sections of some songs (Mrs X, Bulgarian Cave, Jack-in-the-Box), but they often blend in a very specific mood created by the rest of the song, so from one version to another they may not sound all that different. But it is something that we wish to do more of.

febbraio 2006 © altremusiche.it / Michele Coralli
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Su am: vedi la recensione di "Parade" di Miriodor