New moon rising
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With their new disc, Moon Patrol, les Jardiniers leave planet disco behind
by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
Here's a scary piece of information: the early spacecraft used to hustle American astronauts to the moon, back at the dawn of the space race, were technologically simpler than the average Honda Civic hauling your mom to the grocery. If Neil and the boys knew then what they know now, they'd likely have been far less interested in climbing aboard and strapping in.
Hurtling into the ether helplessly in a glorified go-kart seems a wild and unnecessary risk, but it's a good thing they did. Had they not, there'd be no shuttle program today, and hence no place for Canadarm. There'd be no proof positive of the lunar surface as potential golf course. And there'd be no cool moon photos to nail down the loony, lunar theme of les Jardiniers' latest, greatest CD, Moon Patrol.
"You've gotta take chances," says Jean-François Charette, half of what's now a duo. "Sometimes they even work!" Yeah, tell that to the Apollo 13 crew. For their part, Charette and his collaborator Martin Dumais took a lot of chances with Moon Patrol, and now that the disc has safely splashed down, they can breathe easy and smile. The chances they took worked out fine.
Roots in the earth
Here's a bit of background, for those who came in late. Moon Patrol is the second Jardiniers full-length, following up (but departing substantially from) the excellent Cafeteria of last year. An easygoing, housy affair, rife with the requisite filtered disco loops and a smooth-contoured fine-living vibe, Cafeteria seemed to be Quebec's eleventh-hour auxiliary contribution to the now largely played-out French Touch thing. "We benefitted a bit from that wave, consciously or unconsciously," admits Charette.
They'd already planted some seeds with their very first release, in fact the high-profile theme song for the Radio-Canada TV show Christiane Charette en direct. Don't be fooled--Christiane and J-F aren't related, so nepotism wasn't involved. It was actually Sylvain Houde, the third green thumb of les Jardiniers' original lineup, who brokered the deal. But we'll get back to that.
Going even further back, to the late '80s and early '90s, we find Charette and Dumais holding down the fort at Foufounes Électriques, where Charette made like a pocket-sized Pink Floyd as lightman and Dumais handled bookings (guess who gave Double A & Twist their first gig) and promotion, and also turntable duties on the seminal Dimanches Techno. For perspective, consider the fact that techno was still bubbling under the surface at that point, which is why it was relegated to the wasteland of Sunday nights.
Some may see that as the dawn of contemporary e-music culture, but for Dumais and Charette, it was already well on its way. "The first tunes I was really into," recalls Charette, "were Giorgio Moroder's stuff with Donna Summer. I was 12 at that time, around '79, the era of disco." He remembers the Star Wars disco mix with more reverence than is probably appropriate.
For Dumais, the story began with Kraftwerk. "'Trans-Europe Express' changed my life when I was nine. I didn't know much about music then, but I heard Kraftwerk and I decided I was into music now."
Industrial-strength Abba fans
Into music is right. Kraftwerk and Telex, Depeche Mode and Moroder, Soul Sonic Force and Afrika Bambaataa, the boys were on all that from square one--equivalents of the astronauts in the go-kart, products of an era when DJ culture hadn't yet settled into a rigid set of rules and categories. As they gravitated towards Foufounes, they were getting into industrial and cold wave, often forgotten as the missing link between the old guard of rock and the new-school rave scene. "We met Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire at Mutek last year. I gave him a record of ours and said, 'We grew up listening to your music, so if you think ours is bad, it's your fault.'"
Maybe, but Kirk can't be blamed for the ZZ Top records or the pop fixation, still very alive in them. "I listened to the Swans, to Einsturzende Neubaten, Merzbow and Japanese noise stuff, but at a certain point you can only take so much. At the other end of the spectrum, I'd be listening to Abba all the time. When I was doing stuff that sounded like Godflesh, I'd be asked what my influences were and I'd freak them out by saying I listened to Vanessa Paradis at home. They thought I was joking, but I was very serious."
Which is one of the few things Dumais is prepared to be serious about. One really has to wonder how a pair of machine-heads raised on icy autobahnica and imperiously negative industrial dance could ultimately come to release a fun, friendly, unpretentious disc like Moon Patrol. Moreover, when compared to much of the other product on the sister Hautec and Haute Couture labels, which Dumais runs--the sheer, no-nonsense drum & bass mix of Maues' Intersections, the minimal glitch-no of Akufen (currently blowing up in Deutschland) and Mateo & Pheek.
Houde-winked
Hate to say it, but the fun quotient, if perhaps not the quantity of redeeming intellectual content, went up a bit with the departure of Sylvain Houde, multifaceted man-about-town who chose to focus on his literary project, which probably doesn't contain anything about moon buggies or space girls or fast cars in Tokyo.
"What was a bit touchy," says Charette, "was that it was Sylvain who brought les Jardiniers together. Télé-Quebec asked him to be appear on a TV show, as a multidisciplinarian. He asked Martin to come along because Sylvain doesn't play music. He's an idea guy. It went really well and we had lots of fun, the three of us. Then we did the theme for Christiane Charette, the 12" came out, we got signed in France. And the more the thing advanced, the more he was asking himself what he was doing there."
"Toward the end, it didn't even feel like he was part of Jardiniers. He wanted to focus on his job and his book. He wanted to put literary content, poetry and stuff, that we weren't really into. Because we're basically an instrumental band, even if we do have vocals sometimes. Apart from 'Poupée Folle,' the lyrics are just an accessory. There's vocals on 'Spacegirl,' but just try to decipher them."
That is, if you're not too busy trying to make heads or tails of the didgeridoo on "Alpine Fever" (bushmen in Switzerland?), the accordion on "Molokai" (Cajuns in Hawaii?!) or the myriad strange sounds in this booby-trapped electro-kitsch-exotica-groove-pop mélange.
"On 'Tour de Glaçe,' you hear ice-skating," says Charette. "We got that by bringing mics out on the frozen lake next to the cottage where we recorded. You hear someone skating around the mics, you hear a big icicle breaking against another one, you hear the scraper going back and forth on a car window. One thing that was very important for me was that each individual song have its own identity, its own life."
"'Stag Hunt' starts with a chick-chick of loose change in a pants pocket," says Dumais. "Many of the sounds on this album, maybe five years ago, I would have said, no, we're not using this. But now it feels natural."
What's with the chicken?
"We didn't know where we were heading when we started," continues Dumais, who says his only rule off the bat was to steer clear of the disco/house axis of the first album. "We thought it should be an album one can listen to while relaxing at home," says Charette. "Too many techno acts do albums that sounds like live set. Listening to something like that at home, something that sounds the same beginning to end, that gets tiresome."
"Some people want that though," notes Dumais, shedding light on one of the hidden risks of throwing an album by turns silly, poppy, idiosyncratic and just plain weird at the often humourless electronica scene. "They want to recreate the clubbing experience all the time."
Charette concurs. "Clubbers! They wanna be in the clubs all the time, 24-seven."
Not that les Jardiniers are out to bite the hand that feeds. "There's going to be remixes," says Dumais, "by Mad Max, Mateo, Reno Disco and one of our own, very dark, heavy tech-house. Live, it'll different from the album as well. Depends on the show, but usually people are there to dance, so you can be sure it'll be four on the flour with us."
Still, clubbers beware. "There's plenty of tricks hidden up the boys' sleeves. As DJs, we try not to be elitist. I play pretty much straightforward tech-house and techno. But we don't like to be pigeonholed--you can drop some drum & bass in there, sometimes. I remember playing Ennio Morricone at an afterhours for a bunch of bug-eyed ravers. They wanted to kill me. I was sure they'd enjoy it, around 10 in the morning. Or Jean-François dropping the Spiderman theme in the middle of a house set.
"I don't think we can get away from who we are, even in our music. We spend most of the day joking around saying insanities. We love the absurd." Well, that would account for the album's closing sample, and utterly ridiculous chicken squawk which has simply no business being there or anywhere else. What's with the damn chicken, anyway?
"It's the mother of the egg on the cover of Cafeteria," shrugs Dumais. "We tried ducks, geese, whatever, but it had to be the chicken. I think it means we're not chickens, not chicken to try new stuff out."
"That's the thing," adds Charette. "With the two of us, we can get away with anything. Or maybe not--but we did it anyway."
Les Jardiniers launch Moon Patrol, which is in stores now, on Friday, May 4, at SAT (305 Ste-Catherine W.). Listening party from 5pm-8pm, Haute Couture party with les Jardiniers, Sylvain Houde, Mad Max, Maues, Akufen and Mighty Kat, 8pm-3am, free
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