Tte a queue

#		Title	Length
1		Un lutin	4:40	Play
2		La mer a boire	4:02	Play
3		Mono ferraille	4:10	Play
4		Champtre 1	4:29	Play
5		Champtre 2	4:06	Play
6		Jean Baribeau	5:32	Play
7		Fla-Ming-Kh	4:13	Play
8		Didgi boa	3:05	Play
9		W. B. est mort	4:11	Play
10		Automate	5:30	Play
11		K. O.	3:04	Play
12		Sango	4:24	Play
			51:26

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Description

15 dreams about Papa Boa:
1.Who we are
Papa Boa is a musique actuelle / avant-garde / experimental (whatever!) ensemble from Montreal. Members are Bernard Falaise (guitars), Remi Leclerc (electronic and acoustic percussions), Pierre Labb (winds) and Frederic Roverselli (bass, synths and samplers). We've been around since 1991, we do few but regular shows and our latest effort is the CD Tte queue on the Ambiances Magntiques label.
2.Our opinion on pornography?
Papa Boa hasn't heard about that band, but we're open to all kinds of influences. Send us a tape...
3.If we were a donut, what kind of donut ?
Papa Boa means "good food" in portuguese, so it has to be tasty and tasteful: All these big franchises don't know a good donut, but there is a little place north of here called St-Donat (which is you guessed it a mispelling of Saint Donut brought by years of cold isolation) where you can find a mean honey dipped donut. So if Papa Boa were a donut, it would come from St-Donat. It's not what kind, it's where...
4.How's the experimental scene in Montreal?
Pretty good or pretty bad? On one side there's probably not enough support, venues, festivals for the musicians, on the other side we don't get to see half the shows that are going on! We tend to be on the minimalistic, "small is beautiful, if you don't have a lot you really appreciate it" side of things, so we prefer to do and see a couple of good shows a year. But enough considerations on the consumer society... and back to the scene: there's the electronic side and the more instrumental side. Ambiances magntiques, the label distributing our cd, puts out a lot of stuff, they do shows, events and festivals regularly. More electronic labels like Ninja Tunes are pretty active too, i like them. Then there are the festivals: Rien a voir (electroacoustic), Mutek (electronic), FIMAV (festival de musique actuelle de Victoriaville: ok, that's an hour and a half from Mtl, but it's close enough...), ACREQ does an electronic festival (Elektra). They have a series in the jazz festival which is devoted to more experimental stuff, that's where we've already played. SAT (Societe des arts technologiques) have a nice space downtown on the main St-Laurent street, they present experimental techno stuff. There's also an anglo and french scene, for x reasons they don't seem to melt very much (Papa Boa vs Godspeed YBE?) but all that makes for a pretty varied scene we think.
5.Is there a lot of drugs involved in our music?
Does it sound that way? Well at least we can say drugs have been a part of our lives/music/experiences. But we don't usually take drugs when jamming, composing or performing. Hey kids!, we do all this without drugs! Now that's a good healthy example for our youth...
6.Musical influences?
It's funny cause each of us has a pretty different musical history, we play or jam in very different directions/styles, and on the other side we've developed a distinctive sound. Any style we play, punk, bossa, or country, it will sound like Papa Boa. Crossing genres is definitely a caracteristic of our music. Let's try a couple of names (not in any order of importance): Tom Waits, John Zorn, William Parker, Fugazi, Primus, Ali Farka Toure, Ligeti...

7.We've read a review that said that our album "Tete a Queue" was " The creative methodology involved in the bi-directional transition from chaos to order". What the hell did they mean?
Ouch! that sounds pretty scary... our interpretation of it is if impro = chaos, then manipulating and structuring impro is doing so with chaos, thus bringing chaos to order? Then if you take that order and improvise with it then you go back to some form of chaos, so there you get the bi-directional transition... It might also be a new restaurant concept of take-out where you can order chaos... which sounds great!
8. Five good reasons why somebody should discover Papa Boa?
1-With all the pieces on the album being so different, you're sure to like at least one.
2-If you believe in democracy, this is surely one of the most democratic bands in the world, and it works!
3-Musique actuelle/avant-garde/experimental, whatever: it can rock.
4-Free 2 minutes listening! go to cdbaby.com/papaboa and listen for yourself!
5- your turn...
9.When nobody is looking, we __________
take out the cabosy and the bongos and sing songs from Madagascar.
10.How's the creation process?
Most of our creation process is based on impro. We'll get together and jam, we're big fans of impro, we try out all kinds of things together, and we experience strong and intense musical moments together. But that's our own little trip. In a show or on an album these moments don't necessarily transpose well. We're also pretty much involved in the use of technology and digital tools. We aso use synthesis and sampling a lot, and consider the studio as a wonderfully creative instrument (that takes a lot of time to master!), not just a recording facility. During the creation process, we record all our impros on multitracks, then listen, listen, listen and extract/sample stuff from there, which we will manipulate and re-structure with various digital tools (samplers, editing software, etc) and then we're back to improvising with this new material. That's why there's a snake biting its tail on the cd, which is called Tte queue (head-to-tail): this is a very dangerous feedback process which can lead to mental disorder, so we're always on the verge...

11.How could we describe Papa Boa?
This is from Marcelle Hudon, who was a collaborator on the last album (she sings on Automate). It's originally in french: "The interior of the boa is huge. Strangely, he is defined but undefinable. The Papa Boa is not a domestic animal. He's an untamed beast that travels a lot. When i met him, he hypnotised and bewitched me, and in exchange for my obedience, granted me, for a while, his nature. He is an unpredictable being. I don't think we'll ever totally get through him."
12.Why Papa Boa?
Man, i don't remember but that's a case where drugs might have been involved... Still we were very happy to learn 2 years ago that it meant something very clear to a couple of million people in Portugal. Maybe that's where the summit of our carrer will be, as a portuguese avant-garde wedding band.
13.About the album "Tete a Queue"?
We recorded several hours of impro in a studio here in Montreal called PRIM. We did it ourselves, no techs, no sound engineers. For a lot of pieces, we then extracted samples from the impros, or made up new structures in Pro-Tools, and added new tracks and overdubs. The result often doesn't sound like impro at all. We had prepared almost no material before going in the studio and recording, as a matter of fact we hadn't played together for quite a while. So that's how Tte queue slowly emerged, it was done over a 2 year period. Another interesting aspect of the album is the collaboration with other artists, mainly singers. We had already tried that on a previous recording project (Les fourmis dans les jambes, 92, a road-movie soundtrack), inviting people to jam and record with us, sometimes people not necessarily involved with musique actuelle or impro. That's the case with singer Marie-Jo Thrio or harmonicist Normand Lalonde on our latest album. It's nice to bring people somewhere else, in a different setting. In that context if we invite people for a jam we don't want them to do their usual stuff. So we need people who don't mind being de-stabilised. And usually they really like it! Of course that also brings us elsewhere. Papa Boa could cross genres, styles, with many many artists as long as everybody approaches that with an open mind. Other guests include singer/actress Marie-Hlne Montpetit, singer/puppeteer Marcelle Hudon, narrator Michel F. Ct, and storyteller Michel Faubert. We had exterior help for mixing most of the songs, we really don't regret having done that because the album came out sounding really good, it's really on the same level as other pro recordings, which can't be said of a lot of musique actuelle or experimental recordings. So as you can see, we're pretty much happy with the album!
14.Do we have a weird or unusual way of recording?
Sometimes, it's a lot of trial and error. We usually do everything ourselves technically, so there's no absolute right or wrong way of doing things. For example on one piece (la mer boire), the drum is made up mostly of cardboard boxes who really get destroyed during the recording, on the piece William Burroughs there's a blanket covering the snare that slowly slips until it's not there anymore at the end of the song. Evolving drum sounds... We recorded snares or tools in big spaces for reverbs, stuff like that. But i think we're more weird or unusual in the way we play or tune or prepare our instruments, or in the found sound department (basically playing with anything, tape rolls, grids, pans, etc) than in the way we record them.

15.What do we say to people that say that music actuelle is "intellectual musical masturbation"?
Man we don't like these huge generalities. We don't like to hear "musique actuelle is ..." or "country is..." because it isn't! That's the same as saying "black people are..." or "french are...". We don't need that, it doesn't have any use, and it doesn't bring any better understanding of the subject. There is stuff we like and stuff we don't like, in any genre, and it's the same for everybody that makes an effort not to be ignorant. But another important thing is to know what you're looking for: when listening to experimental music, you are looking for surprises, new ideas, not necessarily comfort and polish, which you might want from a pop or classical work. And if people are experimenting or improvising, there might (will!) be ups and downs, and sometimes it just won't work, no good, we shouldn't be afraid to admit it.