March 19, 2024

Interview with Gautier Serre from Igorrr

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Madness has landed in London last 8th of November by the hand of French musician Gautier Serre and his perfect combination of electronic, black metal, musique baroque, breakcore… to name few, Igorrr.

This homogeneous pasta has released their 6th album Savage Sinusoid (Metal Blade Records) last June and it’s literally mind blowing, if you are into any of those genres mentioned above, you better give Igorrr a listen.

On his visit, Gautier gave us the opportunity to ask him a few questions and this is the result, enjoy it!

What are you listening to lately?
Gautier Serre: Lately, I’m mostly listening to classical guitar, from composers as Augustin Mangore Barrios, Bach or Andrés Segovia, but also the new Cannibal Corpse album has been on my list, as much as Fantômas – the director’s cut, that has been on repeat for a while.

In your tracks vocalists sing in a made up language, Who came up with this idea and is there a story behind it?
G.S.: The idea behind it is to avoid any intellectual meaning of the music. I want the voice to be an instrument as much as all the rest in order for the music to be as straight and direct as possible. I don’t want the sound to be « polluted » by any way, and with real lyrics, it feels a bit like if you force your brain to work more than your heart. To be as powerful as possible, I need the music to go straight to the heart, and not make any detour.
Laurent, the singer, came up with the idea as he was the one creating his own language, but in fact, I don’t remember we even spoke about that, it came up naturally as we were on the same vibes.

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Your latest album Savage Sinusoid took you around 4 years to make, what was the most difficult track to record/produce?
G.S.: I’m not sure there were any track specifically more hard than the others to record. It was a pretty challenging album to make as a whole thing.
Recording all the different instruments, all with a specific material, to fits the « real » sound of each style as much as possible, learning the things I didn’t know, musically or technically, and make everybody join together.
For example, I wanted to work with the harpsichord player Katerina Chrobokova on this album, she is living in CZ Republic and my studio is in the deep country side in the centre of France, so basically we had to rent a truck to bring her harpsichord from Prague to my studio, and then to wait for the instrument to get the temperature of the room for her to be able to play perfectly in tune. Speaking about tuning, the sitar part on « Opus Brain » needed a special tuning as well as the rest of the track is not made at all in the Indian mode, so the instrument didn’t correspond at first, and to make it even harder, the name of the notes on this Indian instrument are not the same as the « regular » notes I knew. As small as the sitar part is, I wanted it to be perfect. Basically, it has been the same for all, a research to get the perfect recordings from every instrument and being able to join all those things together. Like a big party with everybody playing music together, the metalheads, the classical guys, the electronic nerds, the gypsies. Making the necessary for everybody to understand each other despite their very different musical background and playing together, according to each other.

For you last albums did you have all the parts written already or the musicians had their freedom to compose whatever they want?
G.S.: The songs are written by myself before the recordings, then when I give the scores or the ideas to the guests, they sometimes adapt in their way to try making sounds better, so it becoming a kind of co-composition. That was the case with Nils Cheville on the guitar introduction of ‘Spaghetti Forever’ or the track ‘Cheval’ with Pierre Mussi, I kept their ideas of adaptation as they were making the track sounding better at the end.

Any plans to make another album with Ruby my Dear?
G.S.: We spoke about it last week, we both would like to make something again as the experience was awesome, but I’ve no idea if we will manage to make it real one day.

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What was the weirdest place/venue you ever played at?
G.S.: We played in very special and unexpected venues in the past, but the weirdest was probably a church in Huddersfield, in UK, a big church with a ton of reverb, very inappropriate for the music ahahaha

Are you planning to get permanent members involved into IGORRR, for example guitarist, bassist, keys, giant chicken with accordion haha  😀
G.S.: I’m not sure yet as the idea with Igorrr is not to have a band: the idea is to experiment music and to make the music I love, I wanna be free to go in any new fields at any time I want.
Having permanent members would mean I would need to always use those instruments, this goes against the initial idea of why the project was created.

Why chikens?
G.S.: Yes.

Would you like to play with a live orchestra?
G.S.: Could be awesome, absolutely!

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Do you feel like with your music you make people more open minded?
G.S.: Maybe when a metalhead listen to my music and that he likes a track with metal and something else in it, this gives him a hand to discover something else, indeed.
The intention at the beginning with this project was somewhere else, but I like this idea very much, I think some people could enjoy a way more than they think musical universes very far than the one they come from.

How do you think Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin would react if they heard your music?
G.S.: I think they would go back to their coffin, happy to be dead before this period of time arrived 😀

Have you got any ideas already for new Igorrr?
G.S.: Yes, I got some sketches, some pre recordings and ideas, tho, I don’t know if it gonna lead to an album or not, this is too early to speak about it. For me to release a new album, I have to love every single part as little as it could be of the music probably even more than the last album, and this is not the case yet.

Any future plans for your side projects Whourkr or Corpo-Mente?
G.S.: Whourkr is dead, so there will be no new album anymore, but we have been writing a lot of music with Corpo-Mente, and if the Igorrr craziness would fade out one day, we would be able to make a second album!

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http://igorrr.com/

Interview by Andrei Verner

Photos by Paulina Leyton

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