Aaron, fiery pair

Portrait

Paris 

11/10/2010 - 

Following the dazzling success of their first album, two-man band Aaron’s new offering, Birds in a Storm, takes their dark, dreamy music into a realm of changing moods. Moving on from U-Turn (Lili), the hit that made their name back in 2006, they establish their own clear musical identity.

Simon Buret and Oliver Coursier met in 2004 through a mutual friend, Vanessa Filho, who went on to take charge of their video clips and photos. At the time, Simon was an actor who wrote texts and lyrics in English, and Olivier was a musician, playing guitar with hardcore band Mass Hysteria from 2000 to 2005. He says about that time: “I had got to the end of something, of a musical style, and that frightened me.” After being more or less forced to play the piano by his parents, he grew up to thank them for it, before moving on to bass guitar and electronic programming.

Simon’s musical background was less formal, but he had played the violin for a long time. His father is American, and he not only speaks, but enjoys writing in English. In the studio, Olivier and Vanessa asked him to sing, and the results were pretty convincing. Finding time between Oliver’s recording and Simon’s filming, the pair managed to compose their first title, Endless Song, which lay the foundations for their musical quest of creating dark atmospheres that marry piano with electronic effects and disillusioned lyrics.

Physically, the two young men are uncannily alike – both are tall and dark and they often dress alike. Each studied art and graphic design, but it is music that really attracted them. The duo became Aaron, which stands for Artificial Animals Riding On Neverland, in homage to the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Their musical influences range from Janis Joplin to Nina Simone for Simon, "The Doors, The Cure, not particularly happy sounds. But Portishead in particular is a really major band for both of us, they were a turning point," admits Olivier. The relationship between the English group’s trip hop and the French duo’s dreamlike pop can still be heard.

U-Turn (Lili)

In the space of a year, Olivier and Simon had composed around twenty songs, but couldn’t find a record label. They put their music onto their MySpace web page and sold it through the iTunes Store. Simon carried on acting and played in a film by Philippe Loirie with his friend Mélanie Laurent, who asked the director to listen to Aaron’s track U-Turn (Lili). He fell under the spell of its melancholy lament, which inspired him to change the name of the heroine of his film to Lili and use the song as a symbol of her lost brother. When it was released in autumn 2006, Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas quickly drew an audience of one million and its leitmotif song introduced the public to Aaron’s world. The pair’s first self-produced album, Artificial Animals Riding On Neverland, became a golden disc.

Simon made his first appearance on stage in a live concert; Aaron set off on the roads of France and then abroad. On stage, they tried to take the recorded version further by reinventing their music live.

They played with a quartet, with machines only, with a children’s choir and even with a symphony orchestra. “The success we had changed our day-to-day lives. We set off on the road and met a lot of people. After all the energy we put into the tours, we wanted to get back together within our own bubble. In the studio, once we get going, everything’s really fast, it’s instinctive, obsessive and frantic. We didn’t say to ourselves that we were going to make a second album. We made music. The only thing is that the lyrics and music have to fuse together and illustrate each other.” The two men spent four months in Olivier’s home studio getting back to the intimate formula that had led to their success.

For this awaited second album, the duo hasn’t abandoned the piano, but it has been joined by guitars. Simon’s voice is freer, and used as an instrument all of its own. Some tracks flirt with highly interiorised blues (Waiting for the Wind to Come), while others are more urgent (Inner Streets). “We constructed this album like a cycle, like a day going by. The order of the tracks is really important, with a beginning, Ludlow, and an ending, A Thousand Wars. The title, Birds in Storm, is a kind of synthesis of the different sides of the album.”

With its ghosts, lies, dreams, wind, rain and storms, this second album wanders between soul-searching and the natural elements. Aaron are as disillusioned as ever, but with more fire.

Aaron Birds in Storm (Cinq7/Wagram) 2010.

On tour from 21 October. Concerts in Paris on 14 & 15 December at the Casino de Paris

Nicolas  Dambre

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper