Albums : M83 : You And The Night (Original Soundtrack)
Albums : M83 : You And The Night (Original Soundtrack)
Listen To M83 : You And The Night (Original Soundtrack)
Who Is M83?
Plain big is not so hard to pull off. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”, Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”, Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park”, Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”…rock history is landmarked with preposterously massive songs that are often bloated and overwrought, songs that stand as giant signposts to feeling, but communicate little actual emotion. Grand-scale songs may be impressive, but filling tunes of a synapse short-circuiting enormity with real emotional resonance – making them memorable for reasons other than size – is much more difficult.
It’s a talent Anthony Gonzalez has clearly mastered with ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’, a double album that brokers a brilliantly effective accord between the ostensibly conflicting demands of ’80s commercial pop and experimental rock, and packs some truly giant tunes. The Antibes native has been steadily working to perfect the art of the megalithic alt.pop song since founding M83 in 2001. His self-titled debut from that year and sophomore release two years later, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts’ established him as a heavy hitter in the post-rock/bliss pop/cosmic electronica league, a skilled producer of hazy, lusciously layered, irresistibly narcotized, epic dreamscapes crafted (essentially solo) from treated electronics, plush synths, murmured vocals and fx-heavy guitar. Third album, ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’ (2005) upped the cinematic, star-spangled ante but added a dark strangeness, while in 2007 M83 released the entirely ambient ‘Digital Shades Vol 1’. It was 2008’s ‘Saturdays = Youth’, a nostalgia-soaked paean to Gonzalez’s teenage years – and an unashamed celebration of artists such as Kate Bush and Jean-Michel Jarre – that paved the way for the monumental ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’.
Co-produced by bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen (known for his work with Beck, NIN, The Mars Volta, Goldfrapp), it took just 13 months to complete and features guest vocalists Zola Jesus on ‘Intro” and Brad Laner (from 90’s band Medicine) on “Splendor”, plus contributions from Gonzalez’s long-term collaborator, his brother Yann. Gonzalez’s decision to record a 22-track double LP was the result of a youth impressed by The Beatles’ white album, ‘Ummagumma’ by Pink Floyd and Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’. “Artists that tried to do something as big as a double album were always inspiring to me,” he explains. “It’s a lot of work, but I always wanted to achieve something like that one day, and I just felt that the time was right for me to make one.”
The wryly contradictory title is a reference to a loose theme of dreaming and remembering, which Gonzalez found himself doing a lot more of after he moved to LA to live in January 2010. “The initial three months were very tough,” he reveals. “I was feeling lonely in my apartment, working on the album and I don’t really know why, but I started to have memories from my childhood. It made me nostalgic in a good way, and I started to remember some of my dreams from being a kid – nothing very precise, but more the feeling. So, I thought that was a good concept for the album. It’s a retrospective of my life, from childhood to being a teenager and then an adult.” These recollections surface most explicitly in “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire” (when he was five, his mother used to buy him a kids’ magazine with the same title, which had a cassette of narrated stories mounted on the cover) and “OK Pal”, which reminds Gonzalez of episodes in his teens, “like when you first meet someone who really understands you.”
The album title is also a neat summary of the record’s twin tempers – urgent and introspective – and of Gonzalez’s dual identity as dancefloor enthusiast and solipsistic muser. So, “Midnight City” is a huge chunk of glittering and euphoric nu-disco that somehow joins that dots between Peter Gabriel and Underworld, and features not only that big no-no of contemporary pop – a saxophone solo – but also a fade-out. “Reunion”, too, is built on a triumphantly massive scale, its layer-cake vocals suggesting Toto as produced by My Bloody Valentine, while “Claudia Lewis” ramps up M83’s feelings for ’80s music from affection to passionate love, even sneaking in the slap bass usually verboten by the contemporary pop police.
Conversely, “Where the Boats Go” wraps woozy pop soundscapes around a sombre piano coda, the aptly titled “Splendor” summons a divinely doomed, synth-centric romanticism and the album’s wild card, “Soon, My Friend”, drops all things electronic in favour of acoustic guitar, strings, brass and a choir. “I like the fact that the album is like a rollercoaster,” Gonzalez says. “Sometimes it goes fast, and then it will slow down for a while. You can’t stay at the same tempo all the time.”
This is an album that’s epic not only in terms of scale, but also of structure, with both an intro and an outro, and brief tracks like “Train to Pluton” and “Fountains” functioning as interludes. M83’s music has long been acknowledged as cinematic, not least of all by Gonzalez himself, who’s a huge film fan (Terrence Malick’s ‘Days of Heaven’, ‘Nowhere’ by Gregg Araki, Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ and Todd Haynes’ ‘Safe’ are some of his favourites). “The whole album is like a movie, with opening and closing credits,” he explains. “It’s a journey, you know?”
This love of cinema even helped Gonzalez ratchet up his vocal power levels for the new record. When writing in the studio, he often plays films in the background with the sound on mute and, while working on “Wait”, he watched ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’, “with Klaus Kinski and all his anger. And so I decided to try something where I was almost screaming, alone in my studio in LA. That inspired me to go forward in my vocals. Morgan [Kibby, vocalist and keyboardist] came into the studio and I played her the vocal as a work in process. She told me I should start singing like that, so it was a kind of discovery. A good one, I hope!”
Kings Of Leon, The Killers and Depeche Mode – all of whom M83 toured with in 2010 – can also take some credit for Gonzalez’s newly beefy vocals. As he says: “When you see all those frontmen onstage who are very confident in front of a large audience, it gives you confidence to try the same thing and that’s what I wanted to do with this album. I said to myself, ‘Okay, Anthony; you just turned 30. It’s time for you to be less shy in front of a microphone.’ I’ve never sung as loud before as I have on this album.”
The widescreen, gee-wow monumentality and seductive mirror-ball dazzle of songs like “Midnight City” provided Gonzalez with a songwriting and production challenge “because [my] history is very indie, very post- rock and ambient and cinematic. But I’ve also always been fascinated by pop artists, especially during the ’80s – Tears For Fears, Prefab Sprout, The Thompson Twins – all these bands are a huge influence on this album. It’s my first record where the musical spectrum is so wide and that’s very important to me. Most of the time, people only remember my more cinematic and melancholic songs, but I also want them to remember my pop songs.”
One thing you won’t hear alongside the synths, slap bass, Sindrums and sax solo on ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’ is Gonzalez apologizing for romanticizing the ’80s. He’s hopelessly hooked. “I’m in love with the sound of the ’80s,” he enthuses. “I always thought the production then was stunning. It’s very clear and very powerful, with not a lot of elements. Commercial music was better in those days. I’m not saying music is bad nowadays – on the contrary, music is very interesting and a lot of it is very innovative – but if you listen to the radio now, it sounds like shit. If you were listening to radio in the ’80s, you were hearing acts like Blondie, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Tears For Fears, Talk Talk… there were great songs that were also fantastic and meaningful pieces of art.”
Fantastic songs that are also meaningful pieces of art – for M83, that means instruments played live in the studio, not by a computer, apart from the Pro Tools software he uses for actual recording. He may have been smitten by the impossibly lush, futuristic synths of Jean-Michel Jarre’s ‘Oxygene’ when he saw him on TV as a kid, but replicating those thrillingly futuristic sounds was never Gonzalez’s aim. “The main idea with this album was to make something in the way that people used to make albums, before computers. Going into a proper studio, taking time to find the right sounds for the guitars…it’s more about crafting.
“Mine is the story of any artist,’ reckons Gonzalez. “I have more experience now, I’m more mature and I have more confidence in my music. This is the first time in my career when, if I have an idea in my head, I can create it in music. It’s something I was never able to do before. I’m a big romantic, especially about music,” he adds. “There’s nothing more beautiful than something well recorded that you can listen to on a good sound system.” Something meaningful – and massive –he might well add.
You And The Night (Original Soundtrack) Review
M83 is excited to announce their latest collaboration: the soundtrack to Yann Gonzalez’s first feature film, You And The Night. Mute will be releasing You And The Night via digital download on November 19th, 2013. Anthony warns that You And The Night is not a typical M83 release. “People who only like “Midnight City” are going to be disappointed. Mellow and romantic, this soundtrack pays tribute to French soundtracks from the 70′s and is much more intimate than Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and the Oblivion Soundtrack. This score is really for lovers and ghosts.”
Growing up together in Antibes, France, Anthony and his brother Yann were both inspired from an early age by European filmmakers such as Luis Bunuel, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Similar themes underline each of their individual artistic expressions, via both film and music: an appreciation for the majesty of hope and an overall embrace of humanity. Describing his career up until now, Yann explains “if all of my films are put together they form a kind of ensemble, a sort of community. And that is precisely what You And The Night is about: an emotional community, the utopia of a community.” For the Gonzalez brothers community and family allowed them to grow into their roles as filmmakers and musicians, so when the time came to chose someone to create a soundtrack for his first feature film it was obvious that Yann would look to work with his brother. “Music is an organic part of the films I make.” “M83’s compositions bring together the most diverse kinds of music that can only communicate in the end through the logic of emotion and the faith you place in them.”
For Anthony You And The Night is a film about love, loss, new love and melancholia. He comments “The movie is very emotional and it’s the movie of my brother, so it was a very important project for me. Yet as we share the same values, have the same artistic influences, it was also a very natural and uncomplicated process.”
In creating this sultry and luminous soundtrack Anthony reunited with several of his previous collaborators. Joe Trapanese (Oblivion, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming) returned to assist with the orchestral arrangements, whilst long-term M83 collaborator Morgan Kibby(M83, White Sea) and Susanne Sundfør (Oblivion) performed vocals on several tracks on the album. Evolving from their time working together on Oblivion’s title track, it seemed a natural step for Sundfør to become involved in the recording sessions for You And The Night. Susanne comments “It was very inspiring to see how Anthony works and how his perfectionism and high ambitions brought out the best in everyone around him. It’s something I’m grateful to have been a part of, and I think the soundtrack ended up sounding beautiful and mystical, just like the movie.”
Once again You And The Night highlights the musical richness of M83 and adds an impressive chapter to the growing repertoire of work that Gonzalez has produced since his initial, self-titled release. M83, in 2001, right through to the 2011 Grammy Nominated release Nominated Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which included the platinum selling hit-single “Midnight City”.
Contact M83
Website | Twitter | Facebook | GM
Contact Pittsburgh Music Magazine
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Email
Sources : M83 Photo | Listen To You and The Night (Original Soundtrack) | M83 Biography | You And The Night (Original Soundtrack) Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon
Listen To M83 : You And The Night (Original Soundtrack)
Who Is M83?
Plain big is not so hard to pull off. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”, Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”, Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park”, Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine”…rock history is landmarked with preposterously massive songs that are often bloated and overwrought, songs that stand as giant signposts to feeling, but communicate little actual emotion. Grand-scale songs may be impressive, but filling tunes of a synapse short-circuiting enormity with real emotional resonance – making them memorable for reasons other than size – is much more difficult.
It’s a talent Anthony Gonzalez has clearly mastered with ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’, a double album that brokers a brilliantly effective accord between the ostensibly conflicting demands of ’80s commercial pop and experimental rock, and packs some truly giant tunes. The Antibes native has been steadily working to perfect the art of the megalithic alt.pop song since founding M83 in 2001. His self-titled debut from that year and sophomore release two years later, ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts’ established him as a heavy hitter in the post-rock/bliss pop/cosmic electronica league, a skilled producer of hazy, lusciously layered, irresistibly narcotized, epic dreamscapes crafted (essentially solo) from treated electronics, plush synths, murmured vocals and fx-heavy guitar. Third album, ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’ (2005) upped the cinematic, star-spangled ante but added a dark strangeness, while in 2007 M83 released the entirely ambient ‘Digital Shades Vol 1’. It was 2008’s ‘Saturdays = Youth’, a nostalgia-soaked paean to Gonzalez’s teenage years – and an unashamed celebration of artists such as Kate Bush and Jean-Michel Jarre – that paved the way for the monumental ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’.
Co-produced by bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen (known for his work with Beck, NIN, The Mars Volta, Goldfrapp), it took just 13 months to complete and features guest vocalists Zola Jesus on ‘Intro” and Brad Laner (from 90’s band Medicine) on “Splendor”, plus contributions from Gonzalez’s long-term collaborator, his brother Yann. Gonzalez’s decision to record a 22-track double LP was the result of a youth impressed by The Beatles’ white album, ‘Ummagumma’ by Pink Floyd and Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’. “Artists that tried to do something as big as a double album were always inspiring to me,” he explains. “It’s a lot of work, but I always wanted to achieve something like that one day, and I just felt that the time was right for me to make one.”
The wryly contradictory title is a reference to a loose theme of dreaming and remembering, which Gonzalez found himself doing a lot more of after he moved to LA to live in January 2010. “The initial three months were very tough,” he reveals. “I was feeling lonely in my apartment, working on the album and I don’t really know why, but I started to have memories from my childhood. It made me nostalgic in a good way, and I started to remember some of my dreams from being a kid – nothing very precise, but more the feeling. So, I thought that was a good concept for the album. It’s a retrospective of my life, from childhood to being a teenager and then an adult.” These recollections surface most explicitly in “Raconte-Moi Une Histoire” (when he was five, his mother used to buy him a kids’ magazine with the same title, which had a cassette of narrated stories mounted on the cover) and “OK Pal”, which reminds Gonzalez of episodes in his teens, “like when you first meet someone who really understands you.”
The album title is also a neat summary of the record’s twin tempers – urgent and introspective – and of Gonzalez’s dual identity as dancefloor enthusiast and solipsistic muser. So, “Midnight City” is a huge chunk of glittering and euphoric nu-disco that somehow joins that dots between Peter Gabriel and Underworld, and features not only that big no-no of contemporary pop – a saxophone solo – but also a fade-out. “Reunion”, too, is built on a triumphantly massive scale, its layer-cake vocals suggesting Toto as produced by My Bloody Valentine, while “Claudia Lewis” ramps up M83’s feelings for ’80s music from affection to passionate love, even sneaking in the slap bass usually verboten by the contemporary pop police.
Conversely, “Where the Boats Go” wraps woozy pop soundscapes around a sombre piano coda, the aptly titled “Splendor” summons a divinely doomed, synth-centric romanticism and the album’s wild card, “Soon, My Friend”, drops all things electronic in favour of acoustic guitar, strings, brass and a choir. “I like the fact that the album is like a rollercoaster,” Gonzalez says. “Sometimes it goes fast, and then it will slow down for a while. You can’t stay at the same tempo all the time.”
This is an album that’s epic not only in terms of scale, but also of structure, with both an intro and an outro, and brief tracks like “Train to Pluton” and “Fountains” functioning as interludes. M83’s music has long been acknowledged as cinematic, not least of all by Gonzalez himself, who’s a huge film fan (Terrence Malick’s ‘Days of Heaven’, ‘Nowhere’ by Gregg Araki, Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’ and Todd Haynes’ ‘Safe’ are some of his favourites). “The whole album is like a movie, with opening and closing credits,” he explains. “It’s a journey, you know?”
This love of cinema even helped Gonzalez ratchet up his vocal power levels for the new record. When writing in the studio, he often plays films in the background with the sound on mute and, while working on “Wait”, he watched ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’, “with Klaus Kinski and all his anger. And so I decided to try something where I was almost screaming, alone in my studio in LA. That inspired me to go forward in my vocals. Morgan [Kibby, vocalist and keyboardist] came into the studio and I played her the vocal as a work in process. She told me I should start singing like that, so it was a kind of discovery. A good one, I hope!”
Kings Of Leon, The Killers and Depeche Mode – all of whom M83 toured with in 2010 – can also take some credit for Gonzalez’s newly beefy vocals. As he says: “When you see all those frontmen onstage who are very confident in front of a large audience, it gives you confidence to try the same thing and that’s what I wanted to do with this album. I said to myself, ‘Okay, Anthony; you just turned 30. It’s time for you to be less shy in front of a microphone.’ I’ve never sung as loud before as I have on this album.”
The widescreen, gee-wow monumentality and seductive mirror-ball dazzle of songs like “Midnight City” provided Gonzalez with a songwriting and production challenge “because [my] history is very indie, very post- rock and ambient and cinematic. But I’ve also always been fascinated by pop artists, especially during the ’80s – Tears For Fears, Prefab Sprout, The Thompson Twins – all these bands are a huge influence on this album. It’s my first record where the musical spectrum is so wide and that’s very important to me. Most of the time, people only remember my more cinematic and melancholic songs, but I also want them to remember my pop songs.”
One thing you won’t hear alongside the synths, slap bass, Sindrums and sax solo on ‘Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming’ is Gonzalez apologizing for romanticizing the ’80s. He’s hopelessly hooked. “I’m in love with the sound of the ’80s,” he enthuses. “I always thought the production then was stunning. It’s very clear and very powerful, with not a lot of elements. Commercial music was better in those days. I’m not saying music is bad nowadays – on the contrary, music is very interesting and a lot of it is very innovative – but if you listen to the radio now, it sounds like shit. If you were listening to radio in the ’80s, you were hearing acts like Blondie, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Tears For Fears, Talk Talk… there were great songs that were also fantastic and meaningful pieces of art.”
Fantastic songs that are also meaningful pieces of art – for M83, that means instruments played live in the studio, not by a computer, apart from the Pro Tools software he uses for actual recording. He may have been smitten by the impossibly lush, futuristic synths of Jean-Michel Jarre’s ‘Oxygene’ when he saw him on TV as a kid, but replicating those thrillingly futuristic sounds was never Gonzalez’s aim. “The main idea with this album was to make something in the way that people used to make albums, before computers. Going into a proper studio, taking time to find the right sounds for the guitars…it’s more about crafting.
“Mine is the story of any artist,’ reckons Gonzalez. “I have more experience now, I’m more mature and I have more confidence in my music. This is the first time in my career when, if I have an idea in my head, I can create it in music. It’s something I was never able to do before. I’m a big romantic, especially about music,” he adds. “There’s nothing more beautiful than something well recorded that you can listen to on a good sound system.” Something meaningful – and massive –he might well add.
You And The Night (Original Soundtrack) Review
M83 is excited to announce their latest collaboration: the soundtrack to Yann Gonzalez’s first feature film, You And The Night. Mute will be releasing You And The Night via digital download on November 19th, 2013. Anthony warns that You And The Night is not a typical M83 release. “People who only like “Midnight City” are going to be disappointed. Mellow and romantic, this soundtrack pays tribute to French soundtracks from the 70′s and is much more intimate than Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and the Oblivion Soundtrack. This score is really for lovers and ghosts.”
Growing up together in Antibes, France, Anthony and his brother Yann were both inspired from an early age by European filmmakers such as Luis Bunuel, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Similar themes underline each of their individual artistic expressions, via both film and music: an appreciation for the majesty of hope and an overall embrace of humanity. Describing his career up until now, Yann explains “if all of my films are put together they form a kind of ensemble, a sort of community. And that is precisely what You And The Night is about: an emotional community, the utopia of a community.” For the Gonzalez brothers community and family allowed them to grow into their roles as filmmakers and musicians, so when the time came to chose someone to create a soundtrack for his first feature film it was obvious that Yann would look to work with his brother. “Music is an organic part of the films I make.” “M83’s compositions bring together the most diverse kinds of music that can only communicate in the end through the logic of emotion and the faith you place in them.”
For Anthony You And The Night is a film about love, loss, new love and melancholia. He comments “The movie is very emotional and it’s the movie of my brother, so it was a very important project for me. Yet as we share the same values, have the same artistic influences, it was also a very natural and uncomplicated process.”
In creating this sultry and luminous soundtrack Anthony reunited with several of his previous collaborators. Joe Trapanese (Oblivion, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming) returned to assist with the orchestral arrangements, whilst long-term M83 collaborator Morgan Kibby(M83, White Sea) and Susanne Sundfør (Oblivion) performed vocals on several tracks on the album. Evolving from their time working together on Oblivion’s title track, it seemed a natural step for Sundfør to become involved in the recording sessions for You And The Night. Susanne comments “It was very inspiring to see how Anthony works and how his perfectionism and high ambitions brought out the best in everyone around him. It’s something I’m grateful to have been a part of, and I think the soundtrack ended up sounding beautiful and mystical, just like the movie.”
Once again You And The Night highlights the musical richness of M83 and adds an impressive chapter to the growing repertoire of work that Gonzalez has produced since his initial, self-titled release. M83, in 2001, right through to the 2011 Grammy Nominated release Nominated Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, which included the platinum selling hit-single “Midnight City”.
Contact M83
Website | Twitter | Facebook | GM
Contact Pittsburgh Music Magazine
Website | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Email
Sources : M83 Photo | Listen To You and The Night (Original Soundtrack) | M83 Biography | You And The Night (Original Soundtrack) Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon
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