In the previous installments of our interview with JM, he talked us through his time with Fad Gadget, forming Kid Montana and then the Weathermen and his work with Front 242. In this final part, Jean Marc brings right up to date as we go through the 90s and into the 21st century.
Part 4
-So you were working
with Front 242, then into the 90s you collaborated with Alain Bashung and
Julianne Regan from All About Eve (in Jules Et Jim), there seems to have been a
lot of experimentation and freedom in that period…
Well, it’s funny. I got myself a sampler an Akai s3000 in the early 90s and started doing sampling and one day I got a call from Alain Bashung –
for you English people must not mean much to you but he was the hugest rock
star in France at the time so when he called me asking me to work one song with
him and I immediately said yes. I ended up doing 5 songs with him so he really
loved what I was doing. He really pushed me to experiment with stuff and I
enjoyed that immensely. It was an experiment with him because he gave me tracks
without the vocals and without ANY indication of what the chorus was and what
are the verses and what the song is about. He also took out some instruments
and so it was a really weird experiment for me to work on something so big and which
was supposed to be still enjoyable for people in the mainstream audience. I
supposed he liked what I did because he called me two years later and asked me
to write songs for him that was even one step further. I’ve got one song on his
album Fantasie Militaire which has been voted Best French Rock Album of the
last 20 years which is kind of cool. I made some experiments with Julianne Regan from All About Eve under the Jules Et Jim name which was great also which
was more kind of … electronic pop I would say you know but it didn’t have much
success to be honest which is a shame because the songs are very good I think.
And she’s marvellous.
-Around that time –
the end of the 90s – one of the musical directions you embarked upon was
composing for video games. How did you get into that?
In the mid 90s somebody I didn’t know but was working in a
studio I did know of was asked to do the soundtrack for a game called V-Rally
one of the early car games. The producer of the game wanted something that
sounded like 9 Inch Nails. They thought of me and they called me said why don’t
you do the soundtrack for that so I did soundtrack for that. Gluing to the idea
that they wanted industrial style music like trance which I was doing at the
time. It was for Infogrammes and they hated it so they didn’t use my soundtrack
so they asked some rock band to play some hard rock music but I then started to
make soundtracks for video games and I loved that to this day I still love it.
I think it’s music complemented with images - it’s much more powerful than just
music.
-Do you approach like
a film soundtrack composer or is the process different?
It’s very different. In a game first you have to think
things will be looping. If the player has to be in one interface if he can’t
resolve the puzzle he’s going to be there for 5 minutes. So you have to think I
have to do something remarkable but at the same time the player can’t notice it
because if he notices it it’s going to distract him but at the same time it
needs to be immersive. It’s a very complex thing. It’s not like in a movie
soundtrack where you have to do things in layers which is going to be in the
background. In a video game it’s very much up front. I try to do something
which is great and at the same time I try to make it blend with the image. It’s
quite complicated but it’s a great process. I start with either playing the
game in its early form or with images from the game and then I build from that.
-Most recently you
have been working with Masayuki Akamatsu and of course the legendary Kraftwerk
keyboard and percussionist Karl Bartos on the iPhone app Minicomposer. How did
that all come together?
I had done a remix for Karl Bartos a few years ago and we
kept in contact. I went to see one of his shows which happened in Belgium two years
ago and I thought it was just brilliant. It was imaginative and at the same
time it was very nostalgic and sentimental and romantic, powerful – all the
emotions that come with Kraftwerk. I told him you should do this and do that.
He was bored of me telling him what he should do so he said, well, show me now.
So I started to work with him more closely to find gigs. Then I thought why
don’t we do a free application for iPhone. So this is how it happened … I
looked for somebody to work on it that could program the application. I found
Masayuki and we went on from that. It came out. It’s still available, still free and still fun to play!
-A final question –
what are you working on now, what are your current projects?
Well, I have got several projects coming on. I’ve got one
album which is made of cover versions which is called Leatherman with a guy
who’s more of a lyricist than a singer. It’s cover versions of songs but the
songs are totally deconstructed and played differently from the original- The Ghost & Writer project which I’m doing with a German singer. We’re
doing it the way more and more bands are doing it which is all the members of
the band are disbanded all over the internet and they send files here and
there. I send the music, he sends the vocal and then I mix the stuff.
I’m
actually doing a soundtrack for a great video game which is going to come out
in a few months which I’m working with classical instruments. After the early
analogue synthesizers, digital synthesizers and samplers, now you have the libraries.
Some libraries are amazing and I’m using one which is brilliant which allows me
to play with orchestral instruments. I’m just f**king around with it. It’s
really entertaining too. Sometimes it does sound a little bit like an orchestra
but most of the time it’s just the sounds that you use but you use them in a
way that a classical composer would never use. I am also doing a [sound track
to a] movie. It’s very funny because this project is a TV movie about wildlife
in Africa [so I thought] ‘What the f**k am I going to do with this? How is this
going to work?’. So to start with I made some African music, High Life music,
music I know and I love. I tried to do that with guitars it sounds OK to me but
I thought when I try to place that on the images it doesn’t work at all. I was
supposed to make music about elephants going to the river to drink or
rhinoceroses at night or hippopotamuses … and it doesn’t work with High Life
music like this. So I thought what am I going to do? What about if I did what
Camille Saint-Saens did with the Carnival Of The Animals and I gave every
animal a sound. So started working on it and I gave the rhinoceros a cello
sound [from the library], the hippopotamus woodwind sounds and the elephant brass–
and it works marvellously. The producer loves it, everybody loves it! I managed
to get myself out of a hole I put myself in. How am I going to do music which
is basically electronic in a field which is totally opposite to what I do. Wild life in Africa – how do you come from
listening to Kraftwerk and Brian Eno to end up doing music for that. I don’t know! But they [the production company] love it.
Jean-Marc has put together an exclusive Spotify playlist for us that chronicles over 40 years of music including classics, influences and some key tracks from his diverse and unique back catalogue. Listen here ...
Here's part 2 of our exclusive interview with electronic composer and artist Jean-Marc Lederman. In part one he talked about his early musical experiences culminating in his time with the legendary Frank Tovey AKAFad Gadget. In this installment JM takes us through phase two of his diverse career following the Fad years.
Part 2
- The next band you put
together, was Kid Montana, right?
Yeah. So I already had done an EP by myself with a concept
band called Kid Montana. And Daniel [Miller] provided the remix for that EP. So I went to
London. I played with Matt Johnson, you know [from the band]The The. I played
with Gene Loves Jezebel. I played with several people like that. Then I went
back to Brussels because Les Disques Du Crepescules were offering me a deal for
Kid Montana. So I decided to stop singing because my voice is terrible and I decided to team up with this American guy
called Dudley Kludt and we decided to do the Kid Montana adventure which was
brilliant because we could have access to a great recording studio which was
the studio where Marvin Gaye recorded Sexual Healing. State Of The Art
technology and my brother was doing the engineering. So we had a few days in
the studio and we really experimented. At the time it was the Emulator II [early
sampler technology] so the Temperamental album is entirely made with that and
the MSQ 700 sequencer. That was already better than the early days with Fad
Gadget and I was seeing Daniel [working] in the studio. He had to put on a tape
a square [sound] wave of LFO and he would be able to come back to it and
trigger his synth from that. So by the time we did the Kid Montana
Temperamental album things had evolved because it was the beginning of MIDI. It
was also the [Yamaha] DX7 [synthesizer]. The DX7 was a revolution. Nobody seems
to remember that but the last days of real early analogue synthesizer were very
very very boring. There was the Jupiter 8 – like you have all over the last
Human League albums from that era. It was just like brass sounds. So nothing
was happening really. In the mid 80s sampling started to be about and I went
into it totally. I loved sampling.
-One of the things
about Kid Montana which you touched upon earlier [in part 1 of the interview], that I get when I listen to
it is that soul and funk influence. I think that quite a lot of music out of Belgium and
the Netherlands at that time seems to be about bringing these two things
together. The electronics and the black and African influences …
Maybe it’s because in the UK you have a scene that lives by
itself. You don’t need outside
influences. Belgium is a country that is in the middle of so many different
things. It’s normal that we kind of mix things more, you know. So for me it was
obvious to start mixing the African music I love and the electronic music I
love. This kind of influence you can even see it with Kraftwerk. They were
totally about black American music. Funk and stuff like that. The electronic
music scene – if you take it from the late 70s which was kind of the early days
and quite trashy and noisy and then romantic and then you get into the mid 80s
and you see it gets more into the African melody and kind of vibe. It helped to
give it some new blood.
-That whole post-punk
era was about melding influences. I think that’s why that music has so much
resonance now …
Yeah, I think so, too. People seem to forget that the New
Wave movement and the post punk era which went on to the mid 80s was a very
rich era because people were starting to be bolder and bolder and bolder. The
influence the alternative bands had on the media was huge. Alternative bands
were making it. You had people like Matt Johnson [The The] who was making
records that were quite alternative but still made the charts. The technology
was helping too. So you had three reasons why the mid 80s were so interesting
musically. Also the arrival of the DX7 which made a huge difference for
electronic music and the sampler. So you had a new rush of blood.
-It’s interesting you
mention the DX7 because a lot of people seem to think that’s kind of the end,
that it’s a negative influence on sounds and the 80s generally. Interesting that you see it as a real
positive…
Well it was positive because let’s face it the Jupiter 8 was
a bore! There was nothing happening there anymore. People weren’t experimenting
so from the moment that you start to take an analogue synthesizer and play big
chords on it you just kill it. It’s not interesting. Yeah, you can make big
waves, you can make this and that but it’s boring. I think the DX7 started the
era of digital synthesizer which peaked being really boring with the Roland and
Korg products. That’s probably more the case. But the DX7 was a liberation for
me and many people because for once you had different sounds and you had a
different synthesis. Because before that it was all about additive or substantive
synthesis. Not about new algorhythms.
-So, with Kid Montana
you did 2 albums?
I did a few EPs and one album and it was re-released 2 years
ago on an English label. A label called LTM.
It’s a double CD which I think is really interesting if you’re into the
early 80s because you can hear what I was doing. The early days when what I was
doing was really home-made music to the end when it was 48 tracks going really
crazy with the Emulator and stuff like that. Kid Montana was camp and pop so I
needed something more extreme so I started the Weathermen...
Jean-Marc has put together an exclusive Spotify playlist for us that chronicles over 40 years of music including classics, influences and some key tracks from his diverse and unique back catalogue. Listen here ...
Spanning more than 3 decades, Jean-Marc Lederman’s
fascinating career has seen him work with legendary figures like Frank Tovey
AKA Fad Gadget, Daniel Miller of Mute, Front 242 and most recently Karl Bartos
of Kraftwerk whilst producing innovative electronic music with his bands Kid
Montana, the Weathermen and Jules Et Jim and latterly as a composer for TV,
video games and apps. In this four part interview, JM will take us on a true
Electrospective as he talks us through his musical life from tentative teenage
beginnings in Belgium right through to composing for apps and video games in
the 21st Century. He also touches on some of the advances in technology he has seen over that period including Midi and many of the iconic synths of the past 30+ years.
Part One
- Hello Jean Marc!
Hello!
- So, to start things off, can you tell me a bit about your
formative musical experiences – what were your first experiences in making and
listening to music?
Well, when I was very young, when I was about 16, I wanted to
do image experiments. I went down to London to see the Spectrum which was built
by EMS. I didn’t know about it before but when I was there they told me about
the synthesizer. I was interested but not much more than that because I started
music really late, about 19 or 20. So, a friend of mind had an AKS synthesizer
and showed me how to get around it and I loved it. I started to experiment with
that AKS then after that I started to play with a punk band using a synthesizer
which was quite “out” at the time. You had the punk sounds at the top and the
electronic sounds in the background. That was quite funny.
- What was the first electronic music that was inspiring
you at this time?
It’s very simple – I was totally in love with what Kraftwerk
and Eno were doing at the time. I was especially in love with, first the music,
but also the way that they were doing music because Eno was just an amateur –
he didn’t have a real musical background like me. He was just making things
with sounds. The same with Kraftwerk. I remember listening to Radioactivity or
[Taking] Tiger Mountain by Eno all night long and thinking this is great music.
Everybody else around me was into the Sweet and the bands of the moment and I
was more interested in what was happening in the alternative scene.
- So your first synthesizer – that was the AKS?
No, I learned on the AKS but my first synthesizer must have
been … 1977 … So I brought my little piggy moneybox and went to London
and bought myself an ARP 2600 because they were quite cheap in the UK at the
time. So I was doing bass synthesizer for the band called Digital Dance. It was
the first synthesizer I really had. So, I was on stage with that band using an
ARP 2600 just for the bass sound which was really stupid but there you go!
- So, the first band you were using the synthesizer for was
Digital Dance and then where did you go on from that? What was the next project
for you?
After Digital Dance …? Well, I quit the band and then decided
to go and try my luck in the UK. I called Daniel [Miller] and asked him “Do
you know someone who is looking for a musician?”. It was quite bold because
I was a terrible musician and he said “Yeah I’ve got this guy Frank and he’s
looking for somebody to play live with him”. So this is how I met Frank
Tovey from Fad Gadget and how we ended up playing gigs in the UK, Belgium and
Germany.
- So literally, you’d have heard Warm Leatherette, heard
about Mute [Records] …
Well, actually, I met Daniel at the place called BetterBadges. I think it was about '79 or '80 and I remember very clearly meeting this
guy there who had a big long coat and he had a green bucket and he was putting
badges in it – I thought that was quite funny. We just got together and
clicked. There weren’t many people into electronic music at the time. So we got
in contact then kept contact going. After this he told me Frank is looking for
someone. I went to meet Frank and I didn’t audition or anything like this. He
decided “That’s the pair!”. So Frank, this bass player called Philip Wauquaire who was with me in Digital Dance and myself we started to play
live
- Were you involved in the records or the live set-up?
Err, no we were involved in the live set-up. The tour was
based on the songs you find on Fireside Favourites.
- The First [Fad] album?
Yes, I played some stuff on the first album but it wasn’t on
the last mix.
- So you went out on that first tour for the first album.
Frank sounds like he was a real character …
He was a real character and he had a great sense of humour.
Really funny – deadpan type of humour and we got on quite well.
- I think Fad Gadget are often overlooked when people write
the History Of Electronic Music and I think they’re an incredibly influential
band. Depeche Mode basically signed with Mute because of Fad Fadget. One of
things I wanted to do with Elektro Diskow – there are two Fad tracks on the
album – is to talk about and bring attention to Fad Gadget because I
think Frank/Fad is very underappreciated …
Well, totally. I was quite conscious at the time that Fad
Gadget was something totally special because all the other bands at that moment
were nice electronic bands. I didn’t really see anyone who was even close to
the intensity of Frank on stage. I loved it. I loved that time. I remember -
and I’m very fond of the memory of Daniel [Miller], Chris Haas from DAF and
myself in my little car in Germany just having fun and laughing and going to
the gigs and doing the gigs and knowing that what we’re doing is totally
unique.
- What were your highlights of that era with Fad? Your
favourite records, songs, gigs, that sort of thing?
The Clarendon gig [in Hammersmith, London] was really
something quite unique – the last gig I played with him. He opened his skull on
the drum machine. Banging his head on the Syndrum wasn’t a good idea! He opened
his head and it was bleeding and he wanted to keep going. Somebody else had to
stop the gig and put a cloth around his head because he was totally bleeding.
That was quite a moment. It was so intense. Being with Frank on stage – to be
honest you didn’t know what he was going to do next because he was totally carried
away. It was like electronic voodoo!
- What year was that? ‘81? ‘82?
That was ‘81, yeah
- That was the final tour you did with Fad?
I just did one tour with Frank and then he went on and had
the band, the band which he is known with. We were playing all the songs from
the first album but very crude versions. I was a really bad keyboard player
– I still am! So it was all about the shock of Fad Gadget on stage.
- From that era of time [early 80’s] what were the records
you were listening to?
Human League, obviously the Mute records, and also black
music. I have always been fond of black music. After the Fad Gadget thing I
went back to Belgium I did my military time, and then I went back to live in
London and I put an ad in NME or Melody maker, I don’t remember, saying
“European musician looking for someone into Roxy Music, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and
Fela [Kuti]”. I had no response because somehow my influences were too much of
extremes. It was quite unusual at the time to be able to enjoy African Highlife music made by Fela Kuti. And Kraftwerk. And Brian Eno and Roxy Music. But
for me it’s the same. The same music. So I was listening to that. I was
listening to Faust. I was listening to most of the time electronic music,
really. And black music.
Jean-Marc has put together an exclusive Spotify playlist for us that chronicles over 40 years of music including classics, influences and some of the key tracks from his diverse and unique back catalogue. Listen here ...
