Salm aka
SomethingALaMode are a duo who brings strings to electronic music. They'll be performing live from a Parisian gallery Loft19 this Thursday (26th March).
Awdio listeners will have the unique chance to hear the duo play some tracks from the forthcoming album signed to Bob Sinclar’s label Yellow Prod, produced by the other half of Black Strobe Arnaud Robotini. These classically trained musicians with a passion for electronic music are set to make it big. We met up with them to find out more:
Read the interview.
Tell me a bit about who you are and what you do
Yannick Grandjean: Hello I’m Yannick, I’m the cellist from Salm, I’m 27, in real life I don’t work in music I work in finance.
How did you meet Thomas?
Yannick: We’ve known each other since we were very little, since we were what, about 10 year old? Since I was 10 at least, he’s older than me. We met at La Conservatoire in Dijon which is where we were born and we grew up. We met at orchestra practice Tom was a violinist, I was a cellist and we chatted during coffee breaks..
Thomas Roussel: (laughs) Yes we had coffee breaks at ten years old!
Yannick: and then we did chamber music together and then much later we created a group with another mate from Dijon, it was a classical and an old style music group
Thomas: Tango, Jazz.. so it’s about 12 years now that we’ve been playing together. We started making electronic music in 2002. We got into electronic music with the first wave of the French Touch scene in 97, 98 so we took what was going on at the time, we didn’t really follow people like Jeff Mills at that point We really caught the virus during the French Touch period.
The real SomethingALaMode project was born 2 years ago. We wanted to make electronic music tracks together but we said why not use our real instruments which were the cello and violin and without having a particular objective of mixing classical music with electronic music, the real objective was to add strings to our tracks, people say our music is classical and electronic but it’s more strings and electronic.
We had good feedback as I had started working with Jeff Mills in 2005, I did the symphony part of Blue Potential which enabled me to meet lots of people on the electronic scene. We had some good feedback from labels when they heard our first tracks so we decided to make an album as a utopian idea, with 12 tracks that we composed over 1 and a half years at home. And that was how the project was born.
How does a classical musician move towards using machines?
Thomas: It’s true that classical musicians have proper training and that electronic musicians are often self-taught, although some of course are also musicians like Jeff Mills who was a jazz percussionist to start with. There isn’t really specific training for using machines, people just try things out on their own. That’s how we started out we each tried out programs like Cubase on our own and tried to reproduce what we heard, effects that we had never heard before like Daft Punk, compressing effects which have become very fashionable, may be too much so, which we started to discover and reproduce. Like everyone I suppose.
Yannick: The difference is that as classically trained musicians I think we are less interested in the sound but more interested in the composition of a piece. When we use a machine we start by composing a melody with the machine, whereas many people twiddle the knobs which can create amazing sounds because that work for hours on end until they discover configurations..
Thomas: That’s a bit pretentious..
Yannick: No not at all, there are guys who aren’t musicians who play around with samples and they end up with massive sounds because they have experimented with all sorts of configurations. Our relationship with the machine is to ask it to reproduce a melodies which we have already prepared.
Thomas: Yes that’s true it’s more the other way around, we start with an idea that we try to reproduce with the machines.
Doesn’t that way of working go against the ethos of electronic music that is based on short loops rather than compositions using a structured melody?
Yannick: Yes totally, our music is more composed, You couldn’t say our music was minimal for example.
Thomas: Our way of composing is more based around a theme developed using chords and that evolves throughout the piece, certainly less repetitive. I started this way of working with Jeff Mills by adding symphonies to repetitive music. We have continued to develop this. We both come from the same pop background, which I think you can hear in our tracks.
Your tracks are more like songs with a beginning, middle and end rather than the repetitive and hypnotic sounds of the music you hear in clubs.
Yannick: Yes exactly. They’re more songs for chords, rather than having a voice, the instrument does the lead.
Aren’t you worried what the purists of either genre will have to say about mixing classical music and electronic music together?
Thomas: The classical purists are probably the most dangerous, but as we really come from a classical background, Yannick has played in renowned orchestras; I compose Operas and the like which are known classical circles. We’ve already has a few virulent opinions like you don’t have the right to remix Schubert with electronic music, others have said they thought it was scandalous when they heard what we had done they liked it.
Why did you sign with Yellow, was it because of to your love of the French touch scene of the 1990’s?
Thomas: This is how things happened, We met our manager Stephane 2 years ago who naturally pushed us towards the right people. Very quickly Christophe (Bob Sinclar) came to see us play at The Techno Parade as he had already heard our music thanks to Stephane, and he asked us to come and produce an album on his label. We hadn’t started looking at record labels yet, it was all very quick. We asked Arnaud Robotini to help us produce the album as we had really liked his album Music Components, that’s how it happened, we didn’t try to get a deal everything came to us!
Yannick: Yes it was an opportunity not to miss.
Thomas: What’s great is that he (Bob Sinclair) totally understood what we wanted to do, he didn’t try to change our sound to make it more commercial.
Arnaud Robotini as producer is a surprising choice
Yannick: Yes it’s true that there’s a big gap
Thomas: Not so much really, what we liked about him..
Yannick: as well as his mustache..
Thomas: is the Zend Avesta project he did a few years back where he combined classical instruments and touched on more experimental sounds, he has a huge musical background
Yannick: Yes very eclectic and hugely vast
Thomas: So we had loads in common and he already liked what we had done before. We really liked how he produced his last album using real machines from the 80’s. When he heard our album he recognized lots of sound made with computer synths and he said, well look I’ve got the same ones but their real. So we were really excited about that. We mixed the album at his place over 3 months using real synthesizers that added richness to the sound.
At the moment we are working on a 12inch- Black Strobe vs SomethingALaMode,
Yannick: We’re remixing one of his tracks, it’s a great collaboration.
And the name SomethingAlaMode, what’s that about?
Yannick: It’s a joke, a bit tongue in cheek, it’s our way of coping with the stress of whether we will be fashionable tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, so it’s easier to say that we are, so that’s done and we can just get on with making music.
Apart from the concert at Loft 19, where else will you be playing soon, will you be playing for example in any clubs.
Thomas: That’s a good point as our music is more for sitting down and listening to, so great for galleries and concert venues and we always play the same live set; so we thought it would be a good idea to have two different live sets one for listing to and one for dancing to put still using our real instruments.
Yannick: The idea is to arrive with our violins and cause more havoc than Justice.
What will you be playing on the 26th
Yannick: It’s divided into 2 parts, one is more improvised and conceptual but structured and which goes with the exhibition and the second part where we’ll preview tracks from our album for the first time.
2009 a year ‘a la mode’?
Thomas: Yes it shoud be. What’s great is that we’ve contacted lots of people to feature on our album through myspace and have had some excellent feedback.
Myspace really works then?
Thomas: Yes it does, people like Tracey Thorn from Everything But The Girl contacted us to compose some string orchestration for her new album. Lots of new collaborations for the coming year.
Interview by LS
