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of les Amis au Pakistan

LIBIDINAL MESSAGES: Les Amis au Pakistan

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“When I was 10 or 12, between those ages,” recalls Laval native Joël Chevalier, “friends and I used to take these old instrumental records and make improvisations over them, recording our voices on cassettes. It was a bunch of children, very happy, screaming in the house and having fun.”

You’d think a posse of prepubescent pranksters let loose on a recording device would be a recipe for endless fart gags and boner-joke balladry, but even at that point, Chevalier showed a penchant for somewhat more well-thunk weirdness.

“We did about 10 albums, and I used to call them Les Amis au Pakistan, Les Amis en Yemen, Les Amis en Iran—every Islamist country. I used to have a fascination with that,” he says, pointing to the Sally Field film Not Without My Daughter and news stories of young Muslim women under effective house arrest in Yemen as his lyrical fodder, never to mention the darker strain of European fairy tales, the ones with grey morality and grim conclusions.

Chevalier hardly recognized it at the time, but those lo-fi shenanigans constituted a template for the unhinged avant-pop of les Amis au Pakistan, his project with composer Simon Tremblay and four female singers. “At the age of 20—about five years ago—I’d found those old cassettes and thought, I’d like to restart that concept, but to it better. I did two little albums with some friends, but instead of using records, I did it myself with some software. I don’t have training in that, so it was pretty experimental.”

Chevalier made contact with local electro-lounge producer Monsieur Max, who tossed a few tracks on comfortstand.com, his showcase site for leftfield, under-the-radar, home-baked sounds. Tremblay was a regular visitor, and eager to break out of his solitary M.O., so he immediately clicked on the potential for Chevalier’s idea.

“His lyrics are always very full of imagery,” says Tremblay, “they offer a lot of images and atmospheres. He’ll send me a text and it will make me laugh, or it’ll inspire a particular sound. His lyrics are always absurd and unusual, they make me want to experiment. They’re very free, there’s no barriers.”

The holdover moniker aside, Chevalier’s obsession with fundamentalist Islam has subsided, supplanted by the more immediate concerns of a boy who has become a man.

“Our album’s called Espace Libidinal, which comes from ‘libido,’ so a lot of it’s about sex,” Chevalier points out, but the tone of the material ranges from snarky faux-dispassion to shrill instability to eerily upended innocence—“Les parties de mon corps,” for instance, rejigs the familiar kindergarten biology spiel to suit a full-grown woman.

There are four of those in les Amis, each with her own angle. “With Jacynthe [Fradette], it’s more yelling and screaming,” says Tremblay. “Solange [Lavergne] and Evelyne [Mireault] sing more softly so I do more melodic pieces for them, Caroline [Fournier] is more trashy. I often get a text and it’s already got the singer’s name on it.”

Live, les Amis are as unorthodox as they are on a silver disc, with Chevalier handling managerial, projectionist and ringmaster responsibilities. “Seeing as we’re not all musicians,” says Tremblay, “it’s not a band that plays. It’s more on the theatrical side—the singers are all in costumes. They sing live, it’s not lip-synced, but I used pre-recorded loops, because it would be too complicated. I’d need 15 keyboardists, but I do add touches live—unless my laptop crashes, and it crashes all the time.”

At petit Campus on Friday,
Sept. 7, 9 p.m., $12