by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

A clear highlight of the inaugural Montreal Electronic Groove fest back in 1999 was the local debut of a Paris-based trio called Ekova. Consisting of singer Dierdre Dubois, oud player Mehdi Haddab and percussionist Arach Khalatbari, Ekova stood out in the MEG lineup. This was in part because, to be honest, electronics accounted for very little of what the trio was initially up to.

If they didn't quite fit the fest's mandate, nobody made much of a fuss about it. The band won resounding approval for making a fine sum of their seemingly incongruous parts. Khalatbari's drumming suggested the drum & bass patterns in vogue at the time, playing well off Haddab's light yet energetic Middle Eastern oud pluckings. Add to that Dubois's lively and convincing vocals - inspired by Dead Can Dance's neo-medieval flights of fantasy, she'd fashioned a fictional language of her own.

More than half a decade later, that fictional language makes only intermittent appearances on One, the solo debut on the Six Degress label by Dierdre (Dubois goes by her first name alone now, at least on record). Were you to draw a direct line from the fundamentally electronic One back to Heaven's Dust, the first album by the now-defunct Ekova, the distinction between the two would be striking.

"I was with Ekova for 10 years," says Dubois from a hotel room in the shadow of Seattle's Space Needle, "and during that time, we really came together. It was a time in all three of our lives when, although we had been brought up on contemporary rock, pop, gothic, hardcore, modern music - we're talking about the '80s, right, the emergence of techno and all that - we all wanted to do acoustic music.

"I was playing the cello, Mehdi was playing the oud - although he was an electric guitarist in his first band - and Arach was into percussion. So there we were, even though our actual, modern culture and what was happening around us was very different from that."

Moody Blues and bluesy moods

Zeitgeist can have a powerful pull, however. Ekova's second release was Soft Breeze & Tsunami Breaks, an album of remixes by Da Lata, DJ Cam and more. The band's final release was Space Lullabies and Other Fantasmagore, a far more consciously modern, e-pop effort.

"As time went by, Ekova was forging our kind of sound. We had our limits - where did the three of us actually meet? That was Ekova. You can see the progression on our second album. Little by little, the electronic and pop influences were already coming out. Still, we had limits on where we would go.

"On One," Dubois continues, "because I got to do it, I got to produce it, I got to be the deciding person, artistically - all of those different influences that were my musical voyage and culture got to express themselves. When the album was begun, I hadn't left Ekova, and so it was a project that I wanted to be very different, because I hadn't imagined that Ekova would no longer be. It wouldn't be logical to do a second project using the same elements. It seemed like it wasn't necessary."

With the dissolution of Ekova, though, Dubois felt that some aspects should be retained - "I didn't want to disregard the work that had been done by the people who'd worked on the songs with me, or the people who liked Ekova." So yup, the speaking, or rather singing, in tongues pops up. So, for that matter, does Mehdi Haddab. Not only does he play oud on One, he has co-writing, programming or production credits on half the album's dozen tracks.

But make no mistake, One is a reflection of Dubois's complex history. Turned on to Irish folk music as a kid by her mom, she later took up the cello, busked for four years, indulged in a phase she describes as "hippie goth" and clocked in 'nuff hours in the early techno club zone - all before Ekova was born.

"It's all of the different parts of me that I've been able to show with this album. I'm a person that has many facets and many moods that I wasn't necessarily showing in Ekova. There is a really dark side to my musical influences, a goth side, that maybe wasn't being conveyed at all before, or was being conveyed in another way, transformed into melody."

There are three cover versions on One: the distinctly altered essays at "Nights in White Satin" by the Moody Blues and "Lolita Nie en Bloc" by famed French rockers Noir Désir, and "A Maid in Love." Although the gorgeous melody of this traditional tune harkens back to her childhood memories of Irish folk, the production by Desi deck-nician Karsh Kale reflects the clubber in her. So does funky, hot 'n' bothered "Firefly," of which she says, "I really let myself go back to my mid-'80s experiences, remembering that time when I was listening to the Cure, the Smiths, maybe some punk. It's one of the dancier tunes. I wanted it to be fun - and coy!"

Switched-on Bach

Speaking of coy, Dubois is hesitant to give away too much about the very personal "Sweet and Sticky Perfume," on which she has a go at the spoken-word thing. "That was talking about a past experience, I would say. It was a poem that I had written to a girlfriend over the Internet a while back and changed around a bit for the song. I really liked the minimal harshness that the programming had, how it contrasts with a kind of calm reminiscence of heartbreak. Because that's what the poem's about, and we all know how that feels. A lot of my songs are feeling-oriented, and of course the ones I feel the most stick out the most."

One number that sticks out for this writer is "B.A.C.H.," based on a melodic motif by - well, take a guess. The classical composer had famously fashioned the basic four-note riff from his own name (the "H" representing B natural in German music notation).

"I found this little, eight-bar loop in the computer that Mehdi was working on. He'd programmed it with synths, and called it ‘B.A.C.H.' because he'd been inspired by the piece by Bach. So I found it in this very minimalist, electronic loop form, and duplicated it for five minutes and started improvising on it. That's what we started to build on. Like most of the pieces on the album, it was a very long creative process. ‘B.A.C.H.' had several transformations, but it was fun starting it out that way. I'm almost a bit nostalgic for the original electronic version.

"Mehdi really wanted it to be more acoustic, though, so he invited a good friend of his, Pascal Monteilhet, who plays the théorbe - do you know what that is? It's incredible, you have to see this thing! It's like a lute except it has 11, or 17 - oh, I wish I could remember. Maybe 17 strings, with sympathetic strings, like a sitar. It's an incredible instrument, it looks like some mad scientist made it."

The new crew, reviewed

There'll be plenty of mad science at Dierdre's show next week albeit the fully modern kind. She'll be joined by Christian "Cricket" Ricau and Wayne Frost, the two producers who helped her craft One. "Ricau does fun dance music for clubs, with good, warm energy. Wayne, on the other hand, is a very technique-oriented drum programmer. I was struck right away by his drum programming, which made me think of one electronic musician who I love very much, which is Squarepusher. Very broken-up, breakbeat drum programming - one of his terms is ‘glitchy.' So they're very different, but complementary."

Frost's partner in the duo Cartesian Lover, Elizabeth Tesla, will also be on hand. "She's mixing live video, mostly based on the video creations that Patrice Mugnier did for the show. He did the videos for ‘Firefly' and ‘Waiting for Spring,' so I asked him to do some more and he actually did video for almost every song in the show, about 90 per cent. Elizabeth also created some. So each song has its dedicated video, which will be mixed live. We've been doing a lot of rewriting on the songs, to put some spice and improv in there and make the fun last longer. As with Ekova, we've taken into consideration that a live show is very different from listening to a CD at home."

At Cabaret la Tulipe on Wednesday, March 23, 8 p.m., $15

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