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Champion mixes electro and guitars
New album Chill’em All
Paris
24/11/2006 -
RFI Musique: How did you get involved with music in the first place?
Maxime Morin: I’m from the Laurentides region. I was born right in the heart of the countryside about 40 minutes from Montreal. My father was a carpenter by trade, but he was also a great music lover. He used to listen to a lot of different things, mainly it was old blues and Frank Zappa, though. He used to play slide guitar and a bit of percussion, too. Anyway, when I was around 17, my father started encouraging me to play music, but he warned me not to put all my eggs in one basket – so I ended up doing a bit of carpentry with him as well!
When did you decide to launch a professional career as a musician?
Well, I moved to Montreal when I was 20 and started my own carpentry business. Thanks Dad! But I always made sure I used any spare time I had to work on my compositions. The turning-point in my career came when I was around 26. I got a bit sick of guitar, because I felt I’d become a bit too concerned with the technical side of things. So basically I took a sabbatical, I took a whole year off. I used to go to this famous bar called Les Foufounes Électriques all the time and that’s where I got into electronic music. I started composing my own stuff - trance, minimalist techno and drum’n’bass…
Anyway, I ended up meeting Benoît Charest who, at that time, was teaching jazz guitar in Montreal. He’d also written the soundtrack for the animated feature film Les Triplettes de Belleville. Benoît suggested we should team up together and set up a studio specialising in music for films and advertising. So we created the Ben & Max Studio and that’s when I really started making my living from music. Meanwhile, I was also pursuing a parallel career on the electro scene as a DJ under the pseudonym Mad Max.
Montreal seems to be very in right now in terms of music…
Well, that’s what everyone’s saying abroad and it’s certainly something you feel when you’re in Montreal. But it’s something that’s been more picked up on in France than elsewhere, because the French are more open than English-speaking audiences who can afford to be much more chauvinistic in their musical tastes.
The reason Montreal has produced so many good artists is because it’s a city that believes in itself. There are a lot of organisations out there who’ve worked hard to give more visibility to ‘underground’ artists – organisations like Sopref and the bilingual magazine Night Life and then there’s a newspaper called Bang Bang and the website Bande à Part. They’ve provided a platform for alternative artists and given them the chance to believe in themselves and what they’re doing. The other thing is you don’t get the feeling there’s much competition between bands. People are more into the idea of helping one another than treating each other as rivals.
When you perform live you have two very different formats - either you go out on stage alone with your computer or you’re accompanied by four guitarists, a bassist and a female vocalist. So do you see yourself as evolving more in an electro or a rock universe?
I’d say definitely electro. My album is primarily electronic. And I listen to a lot of electro too. There’s some really good stuff around at the moment but I’ve forgotten the names of the artists involved…
I think what an artist like Tiga is doing is good although it’s not really groovy enough for my liking. No, my main influence is probably Akufen – aka Marc Leclair. He’s a personal friend of mine and what I like about him is that he doesn’t follow music trends, like minimalist techno for instance. He goes his own way and has a very individual attitude to things. Then there’s Fred Everything, who’s developed his own distinctive sound. I love what he does. And Numéro, which is basically electro with French vocals. There’s a Numéro album coming out soon on the same label as us: Saboteur.
What groups on the Quebec scene would you recommend?
Well, the closest to us would be someone like Patrick Watson from Montreal. He’s a pianist and singer who does this sort of hypnotic rock. We know each other quite well actually because he’s sung with us in the past. And then there’s Plaster, who I discovered through members of my group. They’re jazz musicians who play a sort of progressive electro that can be really full-on sometimes. We played with them, too, at Le Metropolis. Recently I also got to know a band called Georges Leningrad. We met at a music festival in Brittany. I feel pretty close to them, too, because I went through my own industrial rock period at one point.
Last question. Would you say that Montreal has more of a rock or electro scene?
It’s more rock. Rock bands generally have a higher profile than DJs, apart from maybe Tiga or Mistress Barbara. Marc Leclair and Fred Everything rarely get any kind of media coverage at all. Then there’s Ghislain Poirier – I like his attitude, the way he sends up rap. But to be honest I’ve been a bit out of touch with what’s going on on the music scene in Montreal for the past year. I don’t have that much time any more because I’ve always got concerts with my group. I didn’t even know the Osheaga festival was being launched – I only found out about it afterwards because friends told me about it on Monday morning!
Nicolas Dambre
Translation : Julie Street
10/02/2006 -
24/03/2006 -
