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>> Balancing beats for your brain and bouncefor your behind, Montreal’s
Ghislain Poirier breaks new

PUBLIC DISTURBANCE: Ghislain Poirier

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“There are plenty of books about the history of DJing,” muses Montreal DJ/producer Ghislain Poirier in the basement studio of his Parc Avenue flat, “but I’d like to read one about the psychology.”

If he did, he wouldn’t need an introductory text. In a remarkably short time, 30-year-old Poirier has become a black belt in beats and bass. Consider his recent set at the outdoor Igloofest, a deliciously diverse spread of ass-kick tracks, ranging from obscure third-world hip hop to nutty gems like “Popcorn” to his own exciting collaborations, such as the highly appropriate three-way “Pour te rechauffer,” with France’s TTC and our own Omnikrom. The whole affair was punctuated by routine blasts of his beloved airhorn and exhortations to the plenty psyched-up crowd.

“Sometimes, when I’m DJing, I feel like a boxer in the ring. Now I’m giving a couple of jabs, now I step back with a song that seems innocent but makes you feel like dancing, and after that I come with a big roundhouse. I’m playing, having fun. I sometimes have fun disturbing the public, but gently.”

But that’s the psychology of DJing. What about the psychology of the DJ, Poirier in particular? He’d make a good case study, and the heading “idiot/savant” wouldn’t be too far off the mark. The same way Poirier will happily watch Jackass and Japanese art flicks back to back, he straddles the realms of the brainy and the booty-oriented, and moreover bleeds the two together.

“I like both, and I like both on the same album. I don’t see them as being in opposition. I almost want to say that the booty stuff is more intellectual than the experimental music, because when you do dancefloor or pop music, you have a goal—to make people dance. So it’s psychological.”

Hoop dreams and loop schemes

A basketball enthusiast to this day, Poirier’s teenage tastes took shape while shooting hoops. Hip hop is that game’s unofficial soundtrack, and so Public Enemy, Run DMC and the infamous Rap Trax comps were his starting point—but only the start.

“I’ll say, thanks to all the college and community radio stations in Montreal—CIBL, CISM and CKUT. I remember shows—I have cassettes of them still—which were really my education. They were fascinating, this weird, underground music, when I was living in the suburbs. What I’m doing right now is an indirect gift from community radio.

“After that, I also did college radio, at CISM, for five years. That’s why it’s a pleasure, and I’ll say almost an obligation, to go on college radio shows if people ask me. People don’t always think these radio stations are of so much importance. They say, ‘If I play on commercial radio, I’ll have success.’ They’re so fucking wrong. I believe in the network—the people who do the interviews there are really the passionate ones, the ones who really support the music.”

And in cases like Poirier’s, go on to make their own. Editing his program, the young visual artist and cinema student got his head around Cool Edit Pro, and off he went. “I started fucking around, and it brought me back to when I was younger, when I was 14 or 15, doing cut ’n’ paste tape-deck stuff. I have maybe seven 90-minute tapes, just simple ‘bla-bla-bla-bloop-screech-bump-click-hoot-hoot.’ It was like, I don’t know, early Coldcut stuff, really raw, just pause-play, pause-play. It was really annoying for my parents. I broke their tape deck.

“When I saw Cool Edit Pro, I saw that all the ideas I had with the tape deck could now be really musical. I did a small track, and said, ‘That’s it. I can do a song, not just a one-minute skit.’ So I brought it to a friend. I said, ‘Look, man, I’m going to have a career in music.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand! We can play my music on the radio, you can DJ it in the club, I know people, I can do it!’ He still said, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ but I wasn’t joking.”

The glitch gets ditched

True, chuckles were hard to come by in Poirier’s early productions, which were in a murky, minimalist ambient vein (he’d later wink at that with a track called “Don’t Laugh, It’s Post-Modern”). Dozens of demos mailed out earned him just one positive reply, from Brooklyn’s 12k label.

“In life, you don’t need 10 doors to be open to progress. You just need one small crack in the door—put your foot there and stay there.” Material with Montreal’s own intr_version label followed, but just as Poirier was cementing his spot amid the IDM legions, he pulled what at least seemed like a dramatic about-face, ditching the glitch and slapping the laptop shut. As he explains it, though, his reinvention as a party-time poobah bearing big, dumb, salacious beats was hardly a sudden thing. Rather, it was a question of confidence.

“The first song I was going to release was on a compilation that never happened, and it was a big, dirty beat. I had a couple of songs like that, but to me, hip hop is pop. It’s way easier to do dark, experimental music than pop music. Pop music is a hard fucking game.”

A pair of albums in 2003, Conflits and Beats As Politics, traced the arc of his dive into that game, while 2005’s Breakupdown, on Chocolate Industries, made him a player to watch.

“It’s the best example so far of what I wanted to achieve, bringing together more fucked-up music and beat stuff. I was more conscious of how to treat the bass and vocals. I have five vocal tracks on the album, two in French and three in English, but all with different accents. I like the musicality of different accents, and musically it was all over the map. Ambient at the end, dub stuff, pure ragga and heavy hip hop, heavy electronic, looser structure versus really tight structure. It took two weeks just to do the track listing, the order, because it’s all about psychology.

“When I released it, I felt like a tightrope walker. I could fall on this side or that, but I wished to walk on the line. I was expecting bad reviews, because I thought people wouldn’t understand it. As it happened, people did.”

Enough so, in fact, that before long, Poirier was remixing, and touring with, British grime goddess Lady Sovereign. He’d wanted her on Breakupdown, but happily settled for remixing “Fiddle With the Volume” on her pre-Def Jam calling card, the Vertically Challenged EP (the only other remixer was Beastie Boy Adrock). He’s also remixed Editors, Champion, Bonde do Role, Kid Sister and locals les Georges Leningrad and Pierre Lapointe. And of course, there is his jam with TTC, which popped up on his next release, last year’s Rebondir EP, on his own label of the same name.

“It was to move fast. I was planning to leave Chocolate Industries, and I wanted to release a small EP on my own label, so that if I didn’t get any other label interest, my label would already be known. Now the story’s a little different though, because I’ll be on Ninja Tune.”

A different drummer

The ink on the Ninja deal may or may not be dry by the time you read this, but rest assured that Poirier’s Ninja debut can be expected next October. In the meantime, keep a sharp eye out for his latest, home-burned mix CD, Bounce le Remix Vol. 2.

“It’s funny, the mix CD is more for DJs, to share the music they love. Bounce le Remix is closer to the mix tape from a rapper, but with a DJ’s point of view. If you’re a rapper and you make a mix tape, you’ll rap over beats that are already out. As a producer, I don’t rap, so I’ll do beats over a cappellas that are already out.”

As well, opportunities abound to catch Poirier live. There are his two local residencies, the notorious Bounce le gros nights, recently relocated to the more spacious Main Hall, and Relaxe le gros, his new night at his old haunt Zoobizarre. The former kicked off in July, 2005, almost by accident. “What I’m most proud of is that I haven’t made any concessions, musically. This is my night, I fucking rule here,” he says with a raucous laugh. “Sometimes people come to me and make special requests, and I say, ‘No. I decide. I’m gonna make you dance—trust me.’ It’s a bit shameless, but sometimes you have to put your foot down.”

The next Bounce le gros, boasting a visit from mash-up man DJ C, is on Feb. 24, but this week, one can witness Poirier’s latest adventure, a live set with drummer Christian Olsen. The pair first played together last March, opening for Spank Rock, and have been finessing the project ever since.

“It’s hard to do live shows when you do electronic music, ” says Poirier. “I think I have more presence alone on stage than the usual electronic solo act, and now, with a drummer, it’s the perfect combination.

“I didn’t make any place for the drums, so it’s like overdubs, doubling the power. You don’t think two people can make big noise, but we make big noise. We opened for Linton Kwesi Johnson and Alpha Blondy in France, in front of 3,000 people, and it was massive. We were doing big fucking beats. I know it’s almost intimidating, the music we’re making, but I like it. It’s a challenge.”

With Christian Olsen and
vitaminsforyou at Main Hall
on Saturday, Feb. 3, 9 p.m., $10