Speaker 1: Ephemeral is a production of iHeart three D audio for
Speaker 1: full exposure, listen with that phones.
Speaker 2: One of the amazing things about music is how it
Speaker 2: can form connections across language.
Speaker 3: Direct to the nice thing with Danielle is we don't
Speaker 3: need to use many words. We understand each other without
Speaker 3: speaking very much. We trust each other immediately.
Speaker 4: And we can be a lot more direct in our
Speaker 4: feedback and saying things to each other.
Speaker 2: The French voices here are those of siblings Danielle and
Speaker 2: Dde Jean. Together, Danielle and Dda make up the band Uman.
Speaker 1: Human Human hu Uma umen umah Man Mummen.
Speaker 2: When we talked last year, their nineteen ninety two album
Speaker 2: had just been re released by the New York based
Speaker 2: label Freedom to Spend. Wherever he might have heard it
Speaker 2: in the first place, this album left a strong impression
Speaker 2: on label founder Matt Worth.
Speaker 5: It's an album for imagination, imagination that birds more imagination,
Speaker 5: or that inspires more imagination. I think a lot of
Speaker 5: that has to do with the way language is not
Speaker 5: only explored across dialects and regions, but also in the
Speaker 5: way that it is then fractalized within the sound itself,
Speaker 5: almost like this alien transmission. It feels like contact with
Speaker 5: another kind of life force. Our reason to reissue this
Speaker 5: was because it just felt so hard to place in
Speaker 5: time and therefore a timeless album.
Speaker 2: My interview with Danielle and Dda was conducted with a
Speaker 2: live French English translator. Today we'll have some friends performing
Speaker 2: the English translation of their words.
Speaker 1: When did you start writing producing your own music?
Speaker 3: At a very young age, a friend lent me a
Speaker 3: tape recorder. I was fascinated by the stape recorder and
Speaker 3: I started experimenting with speeding up and slowing down. The sound.
Speaker 4: Is the one who started playing with different bands, and
Speaker 4: at some point I joined them. We started songwriting, and
Speaker 4: then we started with instrumental music, but it happened progressively.
Speaker 1: Vico pamaldu choregra.
Speaker 4: To this album. We were working mostly with choreographers for
Speaker 4: contemporary dance, and we were creating instrumental music with or
Speaker 4: without voice. But part of us felt like it was frustrating,
Speaker 4: like we had to hold back because the music couldn't
Speaker 4: take up all the space of this art form. And
Speaker 4: so finally with this album, we felt like we could
Speaker 4: employ our creativity and do more to give it more
Speaker 4: to voice.
Speaker 1: If I understand correctly, before this record, you cut a
Speaker 1: couple of albums recorded in like commercial studios in Paris,
Speaker 1: and then I think for this one moved to you
Speaker 1: built a home studio, right.
Speaker 3: So, yes, we were recording albums of French music or
Speaker 3: pop and some very commercial professional studios. But our feeling
Speaker 3: there was that the sound engineers would oftentimes impose their
Speaker 3: point of view or their mixing, and so even if
Speaker 3: we had less means producing, we had more freedom at
Speaker 3: a home studio.
Speaker 4: Se at those big studios, and time is money. It's
Speaker 4: very costly and there's a lot of pressure to work faster.
Speaker 4: At home. We had all the time that we needed
Speaker 4: to record.
Speaker 1: Did you go in with with a vision of what
Speaker 1: this album should be like? Would be like? See?
Speaker 4: Things happen little by little and it really depends on
Speaker 4: the mood I'm in at that time, so there's never
Speaker 4: an overarching vision. Things happen slowly progressively.
Speaker 5: This is.
Speaker 3: The swell was at the time. My process was more
Speaker 3: working at night. I would come up with different harmonies
Speaker 3: and then in the morning I would propose some different
Speaker 3: ideas to Danielle and she would improvise based on those things.
Speaker 3: Then I would do gimmicks with my m one.
Speaker 1: And after did kept my melodi and the create a
Speaker 1: new melody.
Speaker 4: Not always but sometimes. And what was great about it so.
Speaker 3: Based on the long minutes of improv that Danielle would
Speaker 3: come up with, I would sample parts on my keyboard.
Speaker 3: I was keeping a lot of their original melodies, but
Speaker 3: I was adding to them or cutting them, and that
Speaker 3: was very exciting, like a ping pong match.
Speaker 2: Woven across the album is a single poem, spoken eight
Speaker 2: times in eight different languages, French, Hebrew, Dutch, Vietnamese, Portuguese
Speaker 2: and English.
Speaker 3: It's this force, almost animal warm, like a kiss, fresh,
Speaker 3: like the morning June that we call human warm. It's
Speaker 3: not quite sexual, but it's something to do with human
Speaker 3: nature that is so.
Speaker 1: Tangible, some opportunity to lay.
Speaker 3: In that time, there were a lot of social liberation movements,
Speaker 3: a lot of human warmth, especially in the fall of
Speaker 3: the Berlin Wall.
Speaker 5: Some of the.
Speaker 3: No Man doing New Yorkshires.
Speaker 4: The poem Park came at the very end of the
Speaker 4: process of this project, and then it was integrated into
Speaker 4: other tracks, but we did it at the end.
Speaker 3: We used people that were around us and people that
Speaker 3: we knew we used those opportunities to record their voices.
Speaker 3: So one of the first ones was Russia. That's because
Speaker 3: we had a cello player that played on some of
Speaker 3: our tracks who spoke Russia. At the time, we lived
Speaker 3: in a university town, so we had lots of nationalities
Speaker 3: around us. Popular for us, the voice is truly an instrument.
Speaker 3: We also use phonetic syllables and sounds in the place
Speaker 3: of words.
Speaker 4: Gembiells just the mom I've loved to play and have
Speaker 4: fun with my voice, not just with singing, but with
Speaker 4: making noises. I like when my voice can be very breathy,
Speaker 4: with lots of air, or sounds that are more jazzy.
Speaker 4: And I've done a lot of world music, so I've
Speaker 4: learned to create sounds that are in my nose or
Speaker 4: in my forehead or other parts of my body.
Speaker 1: There is a way in which very lyric forward music
Speaker 1: can be so much direct addressed from the composer, like
Speaker 1: a very specific meaning that.
Speaker 3: You're supposed to take.
Speaker 1: And something that I find so enjoyable about your album
Speaker 1: and so like re listenable about your album is that
Speaker 1: that's not the case, that it's full of language and
Speaker 1: the human voice, which is one of my favorite sounds
Speaker 1: in the world. But it's so much more ethereal and evocative,
Speaker 1: and it feels almost like choral music, like a lot
Speaker 1: of voices in concert together. Let's talk about gear for
Speaker 1: a second. What kind of Simpson in the in the samplers,
Speaker 1: and what kind of gear did you have in your
Speaker 1: home studio there.
Speaker 4: In the beginning, we were just experimenting. We had two
Speaker 4: two track recorders, so we were recording one track and
Speaker 4: then singing on the other track, and we were doing
Speaker 4: a lot of mixes and experimenting, and I think all
Speaker 4: of that developed our creativity. When the first samplers came out,
Speaker 4: we had that preparation. We were ready to start using
Speaker 4: them because we had been doing this before.
Speaker 3: JEVI. My first sampler was from Kawai. Then I had
Speaker 3: an EPs from Insnic and that's what I used to
Speaker 3: do the guitar sounds on the keyboard. I had the
Speaker 3: D fifty synthesizer from Roland, the j D nine to
Speaker 3: ninety from Roland, the Corg wave station, the COG. We
Speaker 3: had a rhythm box from in Sonic too. We had
Speaker 3: a software called Notator. It was the ancestor of Logic,
Speaker 3: and I could create different versions of music modules. We
Speaker 3: also had a digital keyboard, the m K S twenty
Speaker 3: from Roland, which is a really important part of this album.
Speaker 3: Initially I trained as a bassist. I played the bass,
Speaker 3: but I don't think there's any real bass on the album.
Speaker 3: I think it was all digital essentially. On this album,
Speaker 3: I was just playing the synthesizer and the sample.
Speaker 4: Obviously, we played with other musicians as well on this album.
Speaker 4: We had the trumpet, the piano, and the saxophone.
Speaker 3: Would play them the theme and then they would either
Speaker 3: improvise or try to play the same theme on their instrument.
Speaker 4: We recorded our guest musicians on an eight track, which
Speaker 4: allowed us to then mix the.
Speaker 3: Mints, and the eight track was synchronized in the Notator software,
Speaker 3: so all the synthesizer sounds were recorded digitally, and then
Speaker 3: all the other instruments were analog.
Speaker 1: The initial release, you released it in nineteen ninety two, right,
Speaker 1: So what do you remember about releasing it then? Sort
Speaker 1: of was what was the reaction?
Speaker 3: The album was very well received. We had many articles
Speaker 3: written about it, so we felt very emotional and very proud.
Speaker 4: But this album was still kind of a hybrid and
Speaker 4: an alien people were surprised. I am little destabilized by it.
Speaker 4: At the time, it wasn't possible to compare us to anything,
Speaker 4: at least in our own environment.
Speaker 3: We couldn't be classified as pop or jazz or anything else.
Speaker 3: A lot of record companies had to turn us down
Speaker 3: because they didn't know how to classify us, and sometimes
Speaker 3: they did it regretfully. We could see that they liked
Speaker 3: our music, but they didn't know how to sell us.
Speaker 1: When did Matt come at you guys and be like, yo,
Speaker 1: I want to do this record again, you want to
Speaker 1: put it back out?
Speaker 3: I think it was at the beginning of Lockdown.
Speaker 4: We actually got a message from Matt and didn't answer
Speaker 4: for a while because we had other things to do,
Speaker 4: but Matt was very persevering.
Speaker 3: Well. What I liked about our conversation was that it
Speaker 3: didn't feel like a dialogue between an artist and a
Speaker 3: record company. It felt like a dialogue between two artists,
Speaker 3: and that really built our trust in math Is. As
Speaker 3: any artist, we start out by being very cautious of
Speaker 3: any commercial offer that comes our way. We've been signed
Speaker 3: with Universal before in the past, and that wasn't a
Speaker 3: great experience. We felt like there was always a lot
Speaker 3: of pressure on our heads and we didn't have a
Speaker 3: lot of freedom. But with Matt it felt different. We
Speaker 3: felt very comfortable from the start. And something to note
Speaker 3: is that we always kept the rights to our album.
Speaker 3: We always have this feeling inside of us that maybe
Speaker 3: one day we were going to be able to use
Speaker 3: them again.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about the the re release? I mean,
Speaker 1: what sort of attention have you seen? Is it felt
Speaker 1: a lot different than it did nineteen years ago.
Speaker 4: It's a very very different experience, especially because we hadn't
Speaker 4: listened to it in so long, But of course we're
Speaker 4: extremely happy. At the time, it felt like the beginning
Speaker 4: of something, and right now that feels very different.
Speaker 3: Supposed to nineteen years ago. It felt like the beginning
Speaker 3: of an adventure and also the beginning of what I
Speaker 3: felt was pure freedom of expression. At the time, I
Speaker 3: started writing children's literature and making a living from that,
Speaker 3: and so I didn't feel this pressure to make best
Speaker 3: selling music anymore. The music could be one hundred percent
Speaker 3: my expression, and I felt a lot more free in
Speaker 3: doing that.
Speaker 2: Well felt that music.
Speaker 1: You know, do you still play music together.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because the re release of this album has
Speaker 3: changed our way of working together. Actually we ex more
Speaker 3: so we find ourselves working together like we did in
Speaker 3: the past maybe and you'll see it in our next album.
Speaker 3: There's a feeling in the mood of that time, the book.
Speaker 4: And nowadays we have to work a little differently because
Speaker 4: we've lived far apart and Didier lives in the south
Speaker 4: of France and I live in your parents. But we
Speaker 4: still work with this back and forth and send each
Speaker 4: other byle Well.
Speaker 1: Dan Didier, thank you so much for taking the time.
Speaker 2: This episode of Ephemeralm was written by me Alex Williams,
Speaker 2: produced with Max Williams and Trevor Young, edited by Casey
Speaker 2: Pegram and Rima il KLi, translated by and de Valence,
Speaker 2: and performed in English by Lauren Vogelbaum and Noel Brown.
Speaker 2: With special thanks to isis O Reagan, Sammy Jo Concilio,
Speaker 2: Danielle and Didejean and Matt Wirth. The re released album
Speaker 2: is available in multiple formats on band Camp and I
Speaker 2: get our vng dot com. Just search human m Am
Speaker 2: and look for us on social media. We are at
Speaker 2: Ephemeral Show. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio
Speaker 2: app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.