by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“‘Celebrate’ is a monkey-fest,” says Montrealer Miguel Graça of a specific track on his latest album, A New Dawn. “I wrote that song for New Year’s Eve, 2004, when the Year of the Monkey was finishing. I was playing and I didn’t want to get requests for ‘Celebration’ by Kool & the Gang.

“I said, ‘Know what? I’m just going to write a song called ‘Celebrate’ and play it at midnight, so whoever comes and asks for the other song, I’ll tell them, ‘I played it at midnight—didn’t you hear it?’ Funnily enough, someone did, and they were just as confused as I thought they would be.”

There are those likely to be confused by the rest of A New Dawn as well. Released on the local label Trigger, the album isn’t what one would anticipate from Juno-winner Graça, firmly established in many minds as a deep-house producer. “It is how I made my name, because that’s what the first album was. But you know, the second album was a bit more techy. It wasn’t deep house. And the third album [Cravo e Canela, with Trevor Walker], was world beat. This one is just a mish-mash.”

A New Dawn is indeed a hybrid affair, touching on and tying together the various musical strands that Graça has been exploring in recent years. There’s house in there, of course, but also electro (moments on the record suggest Depeche Mode and John Carpenter soundtracks), a bit of that global-village flavour (Walker pops up with one of those noisy lil’ Brazilian cuica thingies) and no small amount of dirty rock noodling.

“For me, it’s all the same thing,” says Graça. “It’s all music that I like. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to achieve, to make—not everybody, but a few people realize that at the end of the day, it still all fits together somehow.

“Someone told me that art needs to be like a river, to always be flowing, otherwise it becomes rotting, stagnant water. To a certain degree, it’s true—you tell people on the street that there’s a house party with DJs, and they’re not too excited. But you tell them, ‘I’m going to be singing live with my band,’ it’s a completely different reaction.”

Singing? Live band? Yes and double yes. Graça does have an ensemble assembled for occasional deployment—“I’m not writing any sequences. It’s a straightforward band—a drummer, bassist, keyboardist, guitarist and me. It’s a band—a band, man.”

And he sings throughout the record. Judging by the voluminous lyric sheet, this producer of largely instrumental house music has had a lot on his mind he’s been wanting to put into words, and now that he has, it’s come spilling out in a torrent.

“I found that I had these amazing words that come together and have these great meanings, multiple meanings sometimes, which I find super interesting and cool. I had this spring and early-summer writing binge—65 per cent of the album was written in a period of two or three weeks. At a certain point, I was writing the music, writing the lyrics and editing parts of the music at the same time, all together in one.”

In keeping with his unpredictable, intuitive modus operandi, Graça’s not ready to make any long-term predictions about where his live-band project is bound. “To certain degree, these things all end up telling me where they’re going. I try to have a certain honesty, and that comes from me listening to the music, and the music telling me where it should be going.”

CD launch with guests Max Hébert and Mike Casali at Taro (862 Ste-Catherine E.) tonight, Thursday, June 15, 9 p.m., $10

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