Bounce into battle

>> Ghislain Poirier, ready to deploy his
Ninja Tune debut, talks trauma,
mayhem and strategy

WHOLE NEW BALLGAME: Ghislain Poirier

By RUPERT BOTTENBERG

“It just comes in once in the whole album!” Montreal’s Ghislain Poirier is protesting, over the phone from a hotel room in Rotterdam, my observation that it took all of three minutes and 10 seconds before his notorious airhorn squawks loud and dissonant on his Ninja Tune debut No Ground Under.

“Indirectly, the album is reflective of the last two years of DJing a lot, and I use the airhorn a lot when Djing. It’s my way to talk with the crowd. I wanted an album that reflected a bit more the dance side of my DJ gigs, and have, let’s say, five tracks that I can put right away in a DJ set, even if no one heard them before.”

The first one, on which the airhorn sounds, is “Blazin,” the lead single with Kulcha Connection’s Face-T taking a patois turn on the mic. It’s a fine example of Poirier’s penchant for reconfiguring third-world hip hop, next-step bounce and scruffy sonic abstracts into fierce, fun jams, often with political punch. The obvious follow-up would be the appropriately ass-kicking “Go Ballistic,” a furious, stand-and-fight stomper with Chicago’s Zulu, but Poirier tends to think one step ahead of the obvious. The second single will be the dark and decelerated “No More Blood,” again with Face-T.

“I never thought it could be a single, but I’ve been playing it a lot at DJ gigs, and people really reacted well. Also, I wanted to give another perspective on the album, not just two super-hype tracks, and strategically, I want to release ‘Go Ballistic’ during the spring, not the winter, because it’s a summer song. I want it to be the summer song of 2008.”

It’s true that the big bangers are only part of what No Ground Under has going on. Beyond the joints with MCs like Omnikrom and Abdominal, there are instrumentals perfect for some crazy-ass videogame that Nintendo never made. “‘Diaspora’ was, for me, to do something beginning with dubstep and melting into soca, but with really electronic sounds, and ‘It’s a War War War’ was about doing the most off-balance melody and beat possible, but trying to make it work, and ending with the fucking mayhem beat.”

Another sharp turn comes in the haunting “Exils,” with the driven discontent of its layered Middle Eastern violin motif. It’s a sequel to a collab with violinist Abdelhak Rahal on DJ/Rupture’s Special Gunpowder, reuniting the three. “To me, it’s one of the most dramatic songs on the album,” says Poirier, noting that “Exils” was inspired to an extent by a climatic, extended scene in the film of the same name by Tony Gatlif (Latcho Drom, Gadjo Dilo). “It was like a traumatic trance, but you come out safe.”

Highlighting the album’s variety are the bookends. No Ground Under opens on a goofy phone-message lark—“What I do sometimes is pretty intense, and I wanted to defuse that intensity at the beginning, to give people a chance to get into it”—and closes on the sneaky, sinister “Mangnen l’Boulé” with Nik Myo.

“The moment I did that beat, I knew it would be the last song on the album. It ends a really intense album pretty well, rhythmically and texturally. I thought it was good to finish with something contemplative. It’s a song I would have put on twice again at the end.”

CD launch with Megasoid at
la Tulipe on Thursday,
Nov. 1, 9 p.m., $17