by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

The list of contributors to the recent Jaune_2005 album, a reworking of the 1970 québécois classic Jaune by Jean-Pierre Ferland, could be broken down into two columns - artists from Quebec (Champion, Ariane Moffatt) and from France (Kid Loco, Nicolas Repac).

One name on that list creates a conundrum - Jérôme Minière. Originally from Orleans, France, Minière released his first two albums (1996's Monde pour n'importe qui, 1998's La nuit éclaire le jour qui suit) on the noted, now-defunct French alt-pop label Lithium. At the time, Minière was regarded by some as a founding figure in the neo-chansonnier movement, which reconfigured classic Gallic songsmithery to suit an age of accelerated technology and musical mish-mashing.

Then again, those two records, and the subsequent trio of discs on Montreal-based label La Tribu (2002's Petit cosmonaute and the two conceptual albums presenting his fictitious friend Herri Kopter), were created in Montreal, where Minière has lived since '95 and now has a wife and two kids.

"I read articles from France sometimes," says Minière, "and it seems I don't exist in my generation in France anymore. It's weird, because I know these other singers and I feel part of it in a way. Mais c'est pas grave, c'est pas grave. Here, what is nice is that I could really explore. I would not have done exactly the same thing in France, that's for sure."

Refugee from the real world

Minière's explorations have taken him and his listeners to some fascinating places. "For me, there are two things," he explains, "one more like an intimate diary, like Petit cosmonaute and my earlier records, and the last Herri Kopter is different from that, it's more like being a movie director."

The latter, Minière should know a bit about - he studied film in Brussels for four years before settling on music as his métier. "In a way, all the work I did on the two Herri Kopter albums has a direct link to my film studies - the scenarios, and the way I'm not always at the front of the stage. Some people listened to the last album and said it lacked unity. I understand them, because it goes from style to style. But to me, it's like sequences in a movie. You can have a quick start and then a nice sequence, then dramatic violins, then you go to hip hop - it depends on the story, and I tend to work like this. I like to have different sequences, then step back and look at it and give it a setting."

Minière's CV is comparably scattered, encompassing his own albums, soundtrack work, collaborations with and compositions for other artists (like Françoiz Breut, with whom he's performing at Francofolies) and remixes like the Jaune_2005 track "Le petit roi." Musically, he draws from a palette that includes chanson of course, and assorted folk styles, but also modern pop au miniscule (and, increasingly, rock), experimental electronica, touches of dub and, particularly on 2001's Jérôme Minière présente Herri Kopter, the serial music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.

That first Herri Kopter disc also took Minière's complementary creative strength - a fanciful, poetic imagination and a taste for the delicately surreal - to new heights. Kopter, according to Minière's exhaustive mythology, was a refugee from the Arctic ice island Laanka, peopled by stray Vikings, Basques and Inuit, that had dissolved due to global warming. Kopter had relocated to the bowels of the old Eaton's building on Ste-Catherine, and Minière was tasked with bringing his otherworldly compositions to the world.

Insider trading

While Minière assumed the role of Kopter's spokesperson, it seems that the reverse was to an extent true. Minière's shyness and humility comes through both in person and in his music. Through the character of Kopter, he was able to express and expand to outsized proportions his own personality and ideas, his fondness for the simple and the unpretentious, his uneasiness with speed, superficiality and especially cynicism that surrounded him.

Minière followed Herri Kopter with Petit Cosmonaute, but Kopter wasn't done with. The character had taken a life of his own, and by the time last year's Chez Herri Kopter was released, he'd overcome his isolation - and established an all-things-to-all-people mega-corporation to boot.

"With the first record, I didn't know if there would be a follow-up to it, so it was a story. People asked me, does he exist, does he not exist? What's funny is that now it's easier for me, because a corporation, in terms of law, it's not a physical person but it is a moral person, I believe. So now, in a way, whatever we say, Herri Kopter exists as a corporation - even if it is a weird corporation."

And thus Minière finds himself in the rocky realm of socioeconomic statement, striking a graceful balance that avoids both the stridency of earnest agit-pop and the vacuum of cynicism, his philosophical nemesis. "Sometimes, in the past, people told me I was cynical, but I never felt like that. What I mean is, when I began to work on this, I very soon realized that I was not outside. We're all inside, in the present, here.

"I think that at this moment, there are a lot of records that are what we call in French altermondialiste, anarchist and anti-globalization and all that. Me, I'm a little distrustful of that, because maybe I share a lot of those ideas, but I often find it too much a caricature, and I don't think that's going to improve things. It's too easy, the good guys and bad guys - it's more complex than that.

"Under it all, I wanted to create a tableau of our time, by way of the market, because that's the principal system of belief in our era. But I didn't want to just judge, or if I did make judgements, to have contradictions."

The poetry of profit

Indeed, Herri Kopter the corporation may offer a world of imaginary goods and services, but those seeking a battlecry for big-business bashers best look elsewhere.

"Before, I found the language of marketing threatening. It scared me. At a particular moment, I thought, I'm going to write a poem in the language of marketing. After that, it became a game. It doesn't belong to an outside, Big Brother world that threatens me. We're all part of it - we can play with it, transform it, redirect it, change it and improve it."

"Since the last year, I've started to feel that there are two tendencies, one of which I feel more a part of, which is more pragmatic. It says we're part of it - like, we're in our bodies, and if we become sick, we have to heal that within our bodies. The others want revolution, to break the whole thing. It's not definite, nothing is, but right now I feel more on the pragmatic side."

It's oddly appropriate that Minière's critique of capitalism should also be by far his most accessible album, in numerous respects. It features a cameo by Lhasa de Sela and lyrics in three languages, and it offers pulsating electropop and rock noir to counter the mellower moments. Furthermore, his live shows have never kicked so much ass.

"I think the reason there's more rock in there now goes back to my roots. When I was little, my dad listened to a lot of rock, and at a certain point, I rejected that to an extent. I think that, oddly enough, since '99 or 2000, in my tastes, I've listened to less and less electronic music. There wasn't much that I enjoyed. I still use that tool, but there wasn't anything new. It's true that rock and electronic music are more and more mixed, and maybe with the last album, given its intentions, it was easier to move towards that. Maybe it's also because there are fashions, there are cycles, things that come back - like I said, I'm not outside of the world. But I don't think I've ever followed fashion in a stupid way. At least, I hope not."

With Françoiz Breut at le Spectrum on
Wednesday, Aug. 3, 11 p.m., $9.50

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