New Musical Journey – Part 01

In a way, I am a rather strange person after all… I have lots of little habits that tend to annoy people around me and one of the most annoying is probably this habit of writing everything down, all the time. In reality, I could be accused of wanting to romanticize my life and make myself more interesting than I really am and the accusation could even have some basis. Yes yes, I totally recognize this way of doing things consisting of always making mountains out of nothing and also this great inclination to always want to record a little of everything I do, to archive it like a storage memory that would feed the legend that I am not…

Well yes, we have to face the facts, I am far from being a legend. Besides, most people have lost sight of me and have forgotten my very existence. While it is true that it is convenient not to have to worry about the “social” aspect and sociability in general (except for work where sociability is an obligation of my job in particular), it is also true that in the end we feel isolated and that we have no one with whom to share our experiences, doubts and legitimate questions. Now, it is not that there is a lack of them, eh… But hey, when half of the people who remember you imagine that you spend your time pulling each other’s socks off while you work hard every night until late… How can I say it? Feel bad? Yeah, and more if you like!

So no, far from being a potential wanker (you’re going to have to get used to flowery language or even tropical jungle at times, I’m warning you from the first deviation so you can’t say you weren’t warned), it must still be said that if I never talk about what I do, well obviously we’re going to look for the most plausible scenario: I spend my time on video games or watching series while stuffing myself with sugary junk that’s not good for your health at all. I admit, I sometimes do that (video games, series and disgusting food for potential diabetics) but it’s quite a minority compared to what I usually do.

And what do I usually do? Well, I suggest you embark with me on a musical journey that started on April 12, 2024 and has not yet finished to this day… Quite the contrary! Come on, don’t be afraid: there will be something to read but I will put pictures anyway for people who don’t even bother reading anymore. Bunch of lazy people!!!

I think we all have memories of our childhood when we discovered music at school during music lessons… We must all still have somewhere the pieces of a flute that our parents paid a fortune to have their ears broken and more if affinities, right? Well, I admit, I am not very young anymore either but in my time there were music lessons, the flute and singing lessons at school with the repertoire of French songs. Very honestly, that is not where I started and frankly I did not particularly like music lessons even if a priori I did not do too badly in the pipe (I did rather well, let’s say in good French). At the same time, I already had some basics…

He also plays a lot of nonsense sometimes…

I must say that at my First Communion (yes, I am also a Catholic relic) I was given a Viscount RBX 300 electric organ. At the time it was the best of the best and it was worth a fortune! So of course, it is a great gift but you have to feel like you have an artistic soul and I must say that at the time I had a hard time expressing an ounce of creativity. In hindsight, I would say that the context in which I was evolving did not really facilitate the development of any beginnings of creative fiber. Yes, it is a little complicated because I myself have always been a little… How to say? I was not the child that all parents dream of… More introverted, distant and lunar rather than sunny, extroverted and affectionate. Afterwards, we don’t necessarily choose how we evolve… But in short, it was complicated for me to get interested in activities and before music there was Judo and it wasn’t a great success. In short, was the first contact with music going to be as complicated as before?

This is what it looks like! You can still find pictures of it on the internet and it’s incredible!

So I was 8 years old at the time and in addition to the organ, a music teacher of a certain age who came to give me lessons on Wednesdays when there was no school. So obviously, if you like music and it’s a passion, it’s not disturbing to spend your Wednesday afternoons learning to play music but when you’re more oriented towards skateboarding and cycling with your neighborhood friend (hello Jean-Christophe) it’s still less pleasant. And then above all, training on the Rose Method and then on Czerny after a while ends up becoming complicated for a kid who has trouble following the paths already traced. Because that’s really the problem: I’m a young person who has trouble understanding that before starting to compose you have to acquire the basics and that the basics are only acquired through hard work, repetition and willpower. In reality, I probably should have presented music as a mission, a challenge to take up… I would have then worked twice as hard to succeed because I have this ability to persevere in the effort when it represents a real challenge. Yes, this is also what we call primary masochism.

In short, I had a lot of trouble saying it because I didn’t want to offend this lady of a certain age who would have liked to pass on to me her love of music, but I could no longer find any interest in what we were doing. Once again, I had wasted my time and that of others… In reality, not quite. It’s not because I didn’t want to learn to play the classics that I didn’t want to compose, create something new and experiment with things… So okay, when you don’t want to learn the basics it’s really limiting, but I worked on rhythm, sound and dexterity rather than technique itself. And I did it alone for years, when I was alone or with a headset when my parents were nearby. Of course, the arrival of video games (Doom, Hexen, Duke Nukem, Blood, Starcraft, Diablo…) still largely captured my attention at the time but it would have been complicated to miss out… So for years I occasionally used my organ, especially to clear my mind. Music became a kind of outlet and a means of personal expression.

An outlet to better exult… but it costs a lot in guitars…

And so that’s why music lessons didn’t seem that complicated to me… The rhythm, the accuracy of the notes and the dexterity had finally already been acquired and so I had little difficulty using a flute even with relatively little work. I played one of my compositions only once in music class. My classmates looked at me incredulously; probably my period style was perhaps a little too far from what one might expect from a real pianist? In any case, incomprehension mixed with embarrassment and that day I understood that the minimalist and creative side of things is not necessarily accessible to everyone. To impress people, I would have had to be a real virtuoso and I was not, far from it. Cooled by the experience, I did not try the adventure in public again afterwards. At least not for several years.

For almost 11 months, I no longer have any contact with anyone. It is true that the training is difficult: I have to do in 11 months what you normally learn in 4 years and very sincerely I work during the day and even at night and on weekends. I do not hesitate to give my all in what I do to succeed in what seems out of reach at first glance but if there is something I have learned through 10 years of musical experience, it is that to succeed you have to work again, and again, and again, and again, and again… and if that is not enough, you have to work even more! That is the only way to acquire technique and then to perfect it and succeed in evolving. Afterwards, besides the fact that I work almost all the time, there is also the fact that I don’t have Internet where I am staying and even if I took my guitar with me my colleagues next door like their peace and quiet… So I am limited in creating new things. In truth, I no longer have the time or energy to build large projects. On the contrary, the training is wearing me out and the challenge is proving to be complex to take up… However, I would end up winning it hands down despite certain difficulties linked to a divisive personality. So I wouldn’t have gone there for nothing and I am returning home at the end of 2019.

Almost a year has passed and when I return it is chaos. Apparently there are not many people left of those I used to know… The paths have separated and some have gone far away. Others have given up and still others have become unfrequentable when at one time they were still more or less so. Finally, I come back and I discover that I have been completely forgotten. Well, ok… Everyone has moved to Facebook and Twitter and YouTubers are making their mark on the web. I have become anonymous and in a way it suits me as much as it bothers me because until 2007 I was quite present and even followed by a very small and modest community of followers and now I find myself cut off from everything. I no longer have any contact on a musical level and the few rare people I have met again have decided to do something else. Suffice to say that there, I put my guitar in a corner with a cover and I let it gather dust.

Even through the cover it looked almost the same…

When I hung up my job in 2008, it wasn’t really a choice but rather a necessity. When I came back, I didn’t try to start again right away… First, I tried to do a few other projects that were close to my heart, including redoing my website for the umpteenth time. Creating an archive with the means available at the time and trying to make something cleaner and more attractive. I started over many times, knowing that in 2007 I had a fairly sprawling site for the time and that it was hosted by Free. Putting music online for listening was done but through a homemade player… Needless to say, the hours had accumulated to update this site and keep it running. In 2009, I completely destroyed it, only to start it again and never really finish it. It must be said that the following 10 years were tumultuous, both on a personal and professional level. However, I had two goals: The first was to redo the website from scratch and the second was to take all of my personal and group repertoire and enhance it, even if it meant recreating and re-recording it entirely.

Initially, I had tried to re-record some compositions with real instruments, but the truth is that it is almost impossible to play like most of my former playing comrades. The sensitivity of each person through their instrument is something that cannot be reproduced because everyone has a particular relationship with their instrument. The way of playing it, the way of making the instrument vibrate and getting the sound out of it is something subtle that you only understand when you play an instrument yourself. However, even if mechanically it is not impossible to reproduce a melody, there will always be this “aura” that will be missing compared to the original material. And then, more pragmatically… To master all the instruments you still have to be damn talented and there I admit that for some instruments (if not all) well I’m not at the top… Or even I’m bad! Drums can’t be improvised: either you know, or you don’t know and if you don’t know either you practice for years until you reach an acceptable level, or you give up. I chose option 2 but I haven’t said my last word yet.

There too, it had the same effect on me several times…

In short, I am incapable of playing all the roles and of equaling on a musical level most of the musicians who accompanied me during my years of musical activities. To be honest, without being virtuosos, some of them still had a hell of a level and I clearly do not have the level. Without being totally bad, I was a bass player and I left room for the guitars most of the time… And even if some pieces turned out to be quite technical for me in my way of playing, it is clear that I lack technique for most of the instruments including the guitar itself. So obviously to get something decent out of a multi-track recording session it still requires a lot of effort and very sincerely I quickly stopped, discouraged. The amount of work to be done is immense and the investment must be total… The problem is that besides that I have a professional and personal life and that even if it is not the desire that I lack I cannot blow everything like that to launch myself into music. In terms of career plan it is still quite random especially since I have already said it but I am far from being a virtuoso. I know how to do a few things but it is clearly not enough to make a real career in music. So I will find another solution.

At one time, I had the opportunity to test some music composition software… Software like FL Studio is great for composing, but you can spend a crazy amount of time setting up a piece in detail… And now I don’t have only 10 to redo but almost a hundred… I tried to make one with the sequencer and it took me almost a week or two to have all the arrangements. It’s horribly and horribly long because to emulate a drum kit you have to use the cymbals, the toms, the bass drum, the hi-hat and the snare drum… and I had a drummer who used a cowbell! As for the guitar effects, I’m not going to talk about the multi-effects pedalboard of one of the guitarists or the fact that he used a motorized panda to produce the sound of a song through the microphones of his guitar and his gigantic pedalboard. Honestly, how do you want to reproduce something like that? It’s pure and raw madness!

This is madness! Madness? NO, THIS IS SPARTAAAAAA!!!!

So to resume, learning all the instruments is dead. Playing with a sequencer is dead. Putting a band together and going on an adventure? It’s dead. Why? Because concretely, by taking stock of the situation, I spent 10 years of my life training and trying to compose songs that people like… All that so that every time one of the musicians farts, the band ends up in a mess and we start almost from scratch. I assure you that this is more than demoralizing… We put together a repertoire, we spend the weekends playing for hours just to be square and have enough songs to do a concert, then we have to find a place to perform knowing that the “fan base” is not acquired… So we have to go and find people and keep them over time… And me, really, I got tired of wasting my time on bullshit with people who are mostly immature or have an oversized ego (even more than my own ego, that’s how far it goes!) and who only see their “personal glory” instead of thinking “group”. So no, I’m not ready to hold on to the adventure.

Musically, I wasn’t really “awakened”. That is to say that my musical tastes were relatively in tune with the times before seriously deviating… Indeed, I started by listening to 90s Dance, then techno… then I went through Michael Jackson and I must admit that I still miss the King Of Pop terribly today. He died a few days before my 30th birthday, that’s how much I remember! In short, nothing predestined me to get into rock or even the Grunge of the time with Nirvana, which I finally discovered quite late (Post-Nevermind, when In Utero came out). And yet, at one point there is a shift in my life that makes me move towards more and more brutal and extreme musical styles… This shift leads me not only to appreciate other styles of music but also to have rather strange behaviors of a bootleg collector.

Yes because I have this tendency to go to the end of things… If for example I discover a group like Nirvana, I will get the albums Bleach, Nevermind, Incesticide, In Utero and the MTV Unplugged in New York. After that, Kurt Cobain committed suicide and a reworked live album was released under the title “From The Muddy Banks of the Wishkah”… We quickly went through the band’s discography but between 1995 and 2000 it was still possible to find “unreleased” albums that were not published by record companies but that contained rarities… Knowing that on an official level, apart from “Hormoaning” which is almost impossible to find there is nothing left to put in your ears, well… I became a Bootleg collector. And not just for Nirvana… Foo Fighters, Hole, Rage Against The Machine and especially the Smashing Pumpkins were going to be the bands I was going to look for first… Lives, unreleased songs, special versions, demos… Musically it was a real festival and I also discovered the hidden side of some bands.

Technically, we avoid saying that in public, Mr. Corgan…

In fact, most of the time it’s the demos of the songs that make me realize that any band starts with an idea for a song, and that little by little this idea is worked on, developed, transformed until reaching a point from which we can consider that the composition has reached maturity. In fact, it’s this path through certain music that made me understand that in fact what makes music good is not just the fact of being a virtuoso or not (even if it helps) but it’s the work over time. Taking up the work again and again, improving it a little more each time, making it more fluid, more efficient, cleaner… And all that takes time, rigor, application… Everything that I hadn’t understood at the time, years ago. So in 1998, I took the plunge and asked for a guitar to relearn music.

My parents, incredulous and still cooled by the series of failures suffered as to my ability to adhere to something concrete, finally decide to offer me a second chance with a 3/4 neck acoustic guitar that sounds horribly bad but somewhere I don’t care. I’m not going to take lessons, I’m going to learn by myself, as an autodidact. I would work by ear, especially for tuning in the early days. Of course, at the beginning my guitar sounds bad, out of tune, out of tune but little by little I understand how to tune it and play it but (because otherwise it’s not fun) instead of a classic tuning in E A D G B E I have an unfortunate tendency to tune it in D A D G B E… The famous “open D” or the “Drop D” which allows (among other things) to play “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana because yes, in 1998 I want to learn to play Nirvana and even why not to compose in the style of Nirvana?

Admit that this old worn-out guitar still catches your eye from time to time…

In a few months I used my guitar so much and sweated for hours on it that my strings rusted. I have to change the whole set and I don’t know how to do that at all. Luckily, I have an acquaintance of an acquaintance who is a guitarist and who knows how to do that… So we meet and finally he shows me how to change the strings and asks me to play him something… So I say to myself “Ok, let’s go for Nirvana” and automatically I tune to “Drop D”. The guy sees me play, listens and ends up saying to me “So as a guitarist you suck as shit… Let’s not beat around the bush… On the other hand, you would make an excellent bass player”. Should I insult you by telling you that he was missing a bass player in his band at the time? But after all, why not… I worked for 6 weeks in a factory and I bought myself a new Ibanez TR70 electric bass and an old 100 watt Fender amp (for guitar) second-hand. Here I am ready for a new musical adventure, in a band this time…

I’ll go over the next 10 years very, very quickly: from 1998 to 2008 I composed a little over a hundred demos through the various bands I formed (The Darkers, Neo Generis, Lain, Lain Rebirth) or that I joined (Metal Acid, Pentastar). Among these hundred demos, I really count about twenty that have gone down in history in the various bands, which represents a little less than 1/5th of my production during this period. So yes, everything is not necessarily good or finished, but the idea is not to make complete songs… The idea is precisely to bring back a riff or a melody that makes the band want to compose on it to make a piece that will evolve and become part of the band’s repertoire for a while before being abandoned or put aside to make room for others. Such is life! In 2008 however I found myself forced to give up music for a whole series of reasons, the first being that I was going to go away for 11 months in training 800 kilometers from my vacation spot. So I left everything behind in 2008 and went to take care of my professional future.

It’s 2018. It’s been exactly 10 years since I hung up on music and haven’t done anything since… In any case, nothing serious. I’ve taken the guitar out of its case from time to time to revise my classics and not lose my touch too much, but I admit that my heart is no longer in it. In fact, I feel totally stuck… I have a real audio archive with crazy potential if you consider that I am the custodian of the audio archive of 5 of the 6 bands I’ve played in. Technically, I “inherited” Metal Acid, The Darkers, Neo Generis, Lain and Lain Rebirth, which represents a vast reservoir of compositions from which it would be tempting to dig to get a few hits to recycle. However, I have a principle… It may be a stupid principle, I grant you, but I respect the original composer. That is to say that titles like “Vital Hope”, “Another Day With You”, “Living On This Earth”, “Breathe Alone” or even “Sarah” are extremely interesting but they are not mine originally and I refuse to touch them without having received the agreement of my former playing comrades. It is a limit that I refuse to cross when others have not bothered to try to sell demos recorded in rehearsals without warning the other musicians. Because yes, not everyone necessarily has a notion of what honor and respect are.

So in 2018 I say to myself “It would be good for the 10 years to mark the occasion, to release some new stuff or even why not make a new collection of PrEvIoUsLy UnReLeAsEd demos?”. Because yes, during the 10 years that I was making music I archived my demos on demo compilations that I numbered… I have reached number X (that is 10 in Roman numerals) or practically one demo compilation per year. And here, we are only talking about my own demos on which I have all the rights. Even though some have been included in the repertoires of groups with significant changes, I can easily claim paternity and above all I have the original demo which attests that I am indeed the sole author-composer of the piece. This is important because concretely on a stock of a hundred songs from the repertoire of 5 different groups, I have in front of me at least as much material in demo on my side… This is also a reason why I hung up in 2008: when you have more than a hundred demos and you know that more than 90% will remain in the state of demo recorded in a corner waiting to disappear completely while you have devoted a significant amount of hours to it, it is enough to disgust a little bit, right?

The demo box… It’s much more than an image to me!

Finally in 2018 I don’t have enough time to do anything because it takes me between 2 and 3 hours to go to work and at least as much to come back which leaves me little time to start a project as time-consuming as composing a new collection of demos… And above all, why do it? Before, it made sense to build a collection of demos. It allowed me to present ideas for compositions to the band of the moment, who sometimes found one or two interesting or sometimes rejected the whole thing. Ok, no problem in the context of the time, but in 2018, when I’m almost certain that I won’t make physical music anymore in the years to come? So I didn’t do anything special for the 10 years; I just remade the 0m32.eu site from top to bottom and added new content to the existing one knowing that I never really finished the site as I wanted. But there too: a lot of time spent on Archives that highlight a period but almost nothing on the projects in progress since 2008 and there have been a lot of them in 10 years… Not necessarily musical projects but still, I am far from having been unproductive. Nevertheless, I would have liked to mark the 10 years of musical break and I was not ready at that time.

We are painfully arriving in 2023, after the COVID period and the birth of my children (who we were expecting more but better late than never… although? Children, when you read these lines, don’t blame your father but he wasn’t ready to start fatherhood at 41… He had even given up on it. However, he loves you but so what… I can’t wait for you to grow up a little because right now dad is shitting hats and mom too. We love you, we remind you but right now you are… In short, you will settle your scores when we are old!) I had a hell of a time getting back to doing a project at all… So a musical project on top of that, even for the 15 years of musical break, it’s just not going to be possible especially since I lent my electroacoustic guitar to my cousin for a few years now and I only have the bass and electric guitars to compose… Except that I compose on electroacoustics with my B2.1U pedalboard from ZOOM and even if the result is correct it remains a drum machine and a homemade multi-track to assemble yourself. And there, I am clearly naked and with the children I clearly no longer have time.

When I said I was “hairy”, I wasn’t lying!

And while I had come to terms with it (like when you’ve been trying to have children for 6 years and it’s not working) and I said to myself “well, finally, in terms of music, you’re going to be able to sell off your gear because you’ll probably never touch it again”, chance came to invite itself in April 2024. How? Why? So broadly speaking, I’m still invited to a personal Discord server of a friend who is a fan of Red Dead Redemption II and RP (Role Play). The connection with music? None at first… I followed her wanderings as well as that of the group of players who were gradually formed on this Discord server even though I’m not a player myself and one day, one of these players posted a link to a song he composed with the help of artificial intelligence. The title is country-western with a fabulous Quebec accent and it seems pretty great to use. Out of curiosity, I connect to the site and test the Free version of SUNO. First test: build a song called “Le visionnaire” which is in the air of time… in relation to the current events that cross my private and professional life at that moment. Quite convinced, I try “La poutre” in homage to the famous friend who invited me to her discord server and without whom I would not have discovered SUNO.

Then? I test… I take my own demos and I try generations by artificial intelligence. At this moment, we are on version 3.0 of SUNO. The songs are 2 minutes max and can be extended by one minute each time… The party of the slip is that with 50 credits per day I can generate quite a few small pieces to assemble a song, then another, then another… But 50 credits is light given the quantity of songs that I will have to redo! Especially since for most of them I will have to rewrite the lyrics or even write some because some demos have remained in demo state… That is to say an old riff recorded in a corner with a basic and approximate structure. Needless to say, it will take time! And yet, it’s fun! What a joy to listen to new versions of old demos finally completed with a “clean” and listenable sound! What a joy to be able to ask the AI ​​to transform a composition recorded in a pop-rock version into a gothic doom version as I originally wanted… I found the ideal tool to do what I never managed to do for the previous 16 years. It’s time to get back to it in “Once and for all!” mode. And there’s work to be done, to say the least! And surprises too… But we’ll see that in more detail in the next part!

The logo that marks the beginning of this adventure… Well yes, that was just the prologue!