RFI Musique - - New album - Phoenix rising

Phoenix rising

Back to electro-pop

Paris

25/05/2009 -

Choosing to call your new album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix might be considered an open act of provocation. However, given their burgeoning international success, French foursome Phoenix have no reason to be modest. RFI Musique talks to Branco, the band's guitarist, about the making of the band's fourth opus.

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RFI Musique : Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix finds you going back to the electro-pop sound you originally made your name with…
Branco : Our last album, It's Never Been Like That, was very minimalist. We never actually sat down and discussed how this album should sound. The scales just swung back in the other direction and we found ourselves experimenting with richer, fuller textures this time round. We also worked with Philippe Zdar (one half of French electro duo Cassius) who was involved on our first album, United… There was definitely a sense of this album being a new departure for us.

Why did you decide to make the first single release, 1901, available as a free download ?
The modern world is so fabulous ! These days we can give our music directly to our fans without any kind of intermediary. It's just such an ideal situation that we'd have been crazy not to take advantage of it. When you've spent eighteen months in the studio there's an intense sense of excitement when you put something out there in the world. A few years ago an operation like this would have required months of preparation with factories and PR people, whereas now we can just decide to release a single ourselves in three minutes flat.

Aren't you worried that this will encourage fans to download the entire album without paying ?
Well, there's obviously a small price to pay for our pleasure ! A lot of people are going to download our album for free. Let's face it, the album was already out there on the Internet before its official release... But there are so many advantages to modern technology that we can hardly complain ! I only hope this encourages other artists and record companies to act consistently.

You spent eighteen months in the studio !?
We've got a bit of a unique way of working together. I don't know how other bands operate, but we don't have a main songwriter. We all compose together and as soon as we get an idea for a song we go ahead and record it. We may come up with a good idea, but then it doesn't fit with the rest of the material or we can't play it. So we have to go back to the drawing board and start again. The way we work, the whole foundation of a song can change right up until the last minute. It's a method of working that we find hard to understand ourselves at times. There's always a moment when the song comes through, but it's often very, very late in the day. Things just seem to take a long time with us...

After eighteen months in the studio you only managed to come up with ten songs ?
Yes ! But we must have recorded about six thousand bits and pieces ! We're not all that productive in the studio, so fans shouldn't expect a stack of bonus tracks any time soon. We must have around eight hundred spare verses knocking around, though ! They were just things that were cluttering up our brains, ideas that we had to get out but which didn't make the grade as songs. We've just selected around fifty of these rough drafts and we're going to press them on vinyl. It'll be a sort of diary recording the "making of".

Are Phoenix still a French band? These days you seem to spend a lot more time abroad than you do at home…
The better things get for us, the more we love France. We absolutely love being French ! When we were kids we all wanted to leave because we were attracted by anything exotic, but these days we've come to appreciate what a beautiful country France is. Believe me, nothing beats drinking your morning coffee in a local village square here...