Poissons d’Octobre
>> With Because They Speak French in Quebec,
Wetfish leave the blood, bats and robots behind

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It’s very likely that the name Wetfish will mean more to local film freaks than to music buffs, even if they are a musical act. This is because, from the outset in 1996, Wetfish (Sandro Forte, James Duhamel and their rotation gang of musical misfits) intended to bridge the gaps between different media and artforms. “I’d point to our frequent appearances at the Vache enragée nights as an example,” says electronics guy Forte. “We’d work with the poet Mitsiko Miller and the filmmakers Karim Hussain and Mitch Davis.”

The best match, they soon realized, was music and film. That both Forte and Duhamel had an outsized appetite for film scores, and that Forte was already neck-deep in the local film-fest community, certainly helped. “We had this big dream of doing soundtracks, but in Quebec, there weren’t a lot of productions, especially feature-length films. So we started out with short films and documentaries. Along the way, we wanted to show that we could do a soundtrack for a full-length science fiction film. Since there were no contracts like that coming our way, we went looking for films that already existed. That’s what led us to Metropolis, Nosferatu and the Hitchcock films.”

Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis was the raw material for the first Wetfish project combining live performance and projected film, taking place at the Cinéma Imperial as part of a sci-fi fest. “We did it fairly straight—we projected the film and there we were, at the base of the screen, doing a live interpretation. We did modern music for this old film—we wanted to distance ourselves from Giorgio Moroder, who’d also re-scored Metropolis in 1984. Don’t get me wrong, I like Moroder, but I don’t think he respected the dramatic intensity of the film.”

Moreover, whereas Moroder employed Freddie Mercury and Pat Benatar in achieving his vision of the film, Wetfish employ throat-singers and didgeridoo (c/o Duhamel, who also twiddles knobs), samplers and turntablists (P-Love was on hand for Metropolis), strings, percussion and the beatboxing skills of mouth-music oddball EJ Brulé. It’s an incongruous, almost contradictory mess of a line-up, but damn, if it doesn’t work out well in the end.

The vampire strikes back

In October, 1999, the Festival Macabre gave them the chance to try horror over sci-fi, and they selected F.W. Murnau’s creepy Nosferatu to that end. “That was a better experience because we came closer to what we wanted to achieve, musically. We’re proud of Metropolis and the positive reactions we got, but we put that together in three weeks. We were frustrated with parts of it. This time, we had breathing space.”

Their taste for the eerie then took Wetfish to the Hitchcock catalogue, for a show connected to the MAC show of his films. “We took eight sequences from those Hitchcock films that were scored by Bernard Hermann—Vertigo, The Birds and so on—because it was, in the end, more a tribute to him. We put those outtakes together and did a reinterpretation. That was closer to what we did with Metropolis, the second time, at the New Media Festival, and what we’ll do at Victoriaville—the idea of further manipulating the visual side of things.”

What’s different about their upcoming Victo show is that they’re not drawing on genre films—no vampires, no psychos, no robots. The show’s called Because They Speak French in Quebec, and the English title is deliberate. It’s a meditation on the media and mindframes of France, compared with those of the Québécois, all the while noting the anglo context that Québécois find themselves immersed in. Note that the visuals for the show, all taken from French and Québécois films, are subtitled in English for the American contingent at Victo. Plus, the thing’s on Victoria day—oh, the irony.

“We’d met Trio Angulaire, a French group who had also worked with silent films, when they came through Montreal,” explains Duhamel. “The two groups got together for an improv session which turned out to be really interesting. We started thinking about how FIMAV is a festival that would have the budget, space and resources for a collaboration like that.
“We planned a dialogue between French and Québécois films, French and Québécois music. FIMAV was very interested, so we started exchanging sound files with Trio Angulaire. However, fairly recently, it started to become clear that they might not make it down. They weren’t sure, they weren’t giving us straight answers, so unfortunately we had to drop them. We decided to bring the ball back to our court and work strictly with Québécois musicians. My feeling is, the presentation won’t be any less trippy and interesting.”

Poetics over politics

Not with the talent they’ve got on hand this time, it won’t. DaZoque!’s Norman Nawrocki and Hélène Boissinot will be handling violin and cello respectively, Sebastien Croteau will do his throat-singing, this kid Øvn1 brings the leftfield beatboxing and Ramasutra collaborator Philip Hornsey will handle percussion. Yann Borgé and VJ Pillow will be discombobulating the film segments. But without Trio Angulaire, whither the French/Québécois dialogue?
“Take a composer like Jerry Goldsmith, for example,” says Forte. “If you listen to all his scores from a certain period, you’ll notice that he was in a particular mood. Likewise, working with the French put us in a certain mood. Even if the original project was derailed on the way to FIMAV, the idea, the spirit, is still there.

“French cinema, because of its history and greater financial resources, developed very differently. They have a different way of saying things with film and different preoccupations. These might be positive or negative, but we’re not passing judgment. That’s why we address the October Crisis, for instance—it had an influence on our cinema. In the show, we won’t say whether it was good or bad. Sure, people might be shocked, but that’s not what we’re after. We wanted to present things in a poetic manner, as we felt them, as they were. What we want is emotion—will people laugh? Cry? Will they get angry? There are many possible reactions people might have. When we rehearsed and the visuals became political, about language, the anglo musicians laughed as hard as we did—for different reasons, of course.

“In Quebec, the friction between anglos and francophones is being managed better and better. There’s a rapprochement, the dialogue has improved since the late ’60s and early ’70s. What we found funny, in meeting these artists from France, was that we’re very different, Québécois and French, even if we’re all francophone. We’re different in our way of thinking, our approach to things, even the way we speak French. We wanted to highlight that difference—but within the context, at least for us, of being surrounded by anglo culture, with the U.S. nearby and bilingualism at home. Not everyone recognizes how lucky we are to be a bilingual nation, it’s culturally extraordinary. C’est hot, la.” :

At FIMAV in Victoriaville (Colisée des bois-francs), Monday, May 20, 3pm, $22. For info, go to www.fimav.qc.ca