by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Imagine no possessions. Or, as pictured on the cover of Ensemble’s eponymous album, imagine your possessions flung upward, newspapers, food, shopping bags and other odds and ends airborne against a blue sky. Of all the things one loses over a lifetime, caution may be Olivier Alary’s primary missing possession, one that may have prevented him from leaving Toulouse for Montreal five years ago, and spending the last four years globetrotting to make a record, with no label and no financial support.

“I had this vision of using real strings and acoustic instruments and also a lot of electronic textures,” he says, “but it was very difficult to be alone in front of this huge musical mess.”

Miles more ambitious than his debut album Sketch Proposals, which he describes as “cute electropop,” Alary shaped the mess into a sonically rich yet emotionally genteel record, its organic quality enhanced with vocals by Alary and his ex-girlfriend Mileece, as well as Cat Power and Lou Barlow.

“I have the bad habit of collaborating with my girlfriends,” says Alary. “Mileece [and I] split during the recording, and I did the same thing for the first album, with another girlfriend. I need to stop doing that.”

With Mileece having completed only two songs, a friend of Alary’s suggested contacting Cat Power, who agreed to provide vocals, as did Barlow. Having already recorded the Babelsberg Film Orchestra in Germany, Alary travelled to Cat Power’s Atlanta home, and chance later brought Alary and Barlow together in Toulouse. Alary admits that it wasn’t the majesty of his music alone that inspired these indie rock celebrities to lend themselves to such an uncertain project.

“They were really reassured by the fact that I worked on two Björk albums. If I hadn’t, it would have been a different story.”

Yes, Alary remixed two tracks from Vespertine, re-recording the Icelandic pixie’s vocals in studio, and provided long-distance production to Medúlla.

“She’s not a control freak, she leaves you a lot of freedom” he says. “The way she handles production is extremely intuitive. She’s got this weird vocabulary—she used colours and sensations [to describe sounds]. She was like, ‘No, I think this one’s a little too red.’ Actually, I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it was interesting.”

Another Björk collab seems unlikely, but Alary is already working on the next Ensemble album, his second for FatCat Records, one he swears will have a more swift production schedule. Apart from confirmed contributor Dominique A from France, Alary hopes to enlist anglophone and francophone Quebeckers to shape a concept album about Montreal.

“I really love this city. It’s the first time in my life that I see my identity in a city, and I love the place I have here because I’m francophone and I also speak English, so I feel like a bridge between both communities. But it seems that sometimes anglophones are a little stuck in their own community, and same with the francophones. Fuck, you know, you have such a huge chance, this city’s amazing, the cultural diversity’s amazing, there’s a dynamic that doesn’t exist anywhere else—so use it!”

With Stuart A. Staples at la Sala Rossa
on Friday, Nov. 3, 8 p.m., $18

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