originally written by Ian Chainey
I wonder what Luc Lemay sounds like…
After we set a time to talk, it was the only thing I could consider for the rest of the week. It was a fair thought. Here’s someone who has been screaming at me–with me, for me–for the majority of my adult life. His anguished howls have covered for my own when I could emit nothing. The discordant, carefully constructed chaos of his compositions helped me to make sense of the sturm and drang bottled up in my noggin. But, it’s not just me. He has provided a microcosm of moments of cathartic release which metalheads have used to quell the confusion of the macro universe. For a special breed of headbanger, every note of his oeuvre rings true, building in intensity until it ignites an epiphany, gifting momentary clarity in a hectic, harebrained society.
We know what Gorguts sounds like. We now hear more obscure Obscurians than ever before. But:
I wonder what Luc Lemay sounds like…
He’s gotta be deep. Focused. Brilliant. He must match his gesamtkunstwerk.
I mean, he would have to, right? Look where he has traveled, the stylistic frequent flyer miles he has put on his playing. He has made gigantic artistic leaps on every record.
He formed Gorguts in 1989 and, after a couple demos, set benchmarks for ability and ferocity with ’91’s death metal classic Considered Dead. Two years later, he magnified the dissonance and atypical song structuring with the aptly titled Erosion of Sanity; a next level DM gem gleaming in one of metal’s golden years, 1993. It took some time to get to his next location, but when he was there, he triggered a total transformation. 1998’s Obscura rewrote the rules of what a metal album could be, showcasing relatively alien-tones coalescing into a concept so unique, it continues to pull the scene towards it with its immense gravity. In his six-string idol smashing, one was able to uncover a crystal ball that either provided a glimpse at the future or acted like a mirror. It’s still remarkable. His 2001 follow-up, From Wisdom to Hate, is equally so, finding Lemay working with a fresh melodic sense to tease out new timbral shapes and colors. His work on the ’06 Negativa EP with longtime Gorguts bandmate and collaborator Steeve Hurdle added even more rhythms and raging riffs to his musical lexicon.
Then, as is expected when you’re attuned to Lemay’s timing, things went quiet. We knew it wouldn’t remain that way for long. He’d brandish another mind-melter soon. If you buy into numerology, the digits were comforting. Erosion to Obscura? Five years. Boom. From Wisdom to Negativa? Five years. Boom. Resurrecting Gorguts in 2008 to the release of Colored Sands in 2013?
Boom.
Let me adjust the volume: BOOM.
Something not so simple? Figuring out a way to tell him exactly that.
So, I fretted, wondering what he sounded like right up until I pressed accept on the Skype call.
“Hello, is this Ian? Hello, hello!”
He sounded amiable. His Québécois-inflected speaking voice was additively smooth, like a race car driver nonchalantly weaving in and out of rush hour traffic. You could listen to it for hours. The kind of voice, a friend of mine used to opine, you’d be content to hear read the dictionary. It wasn’t the nihilistic cold shower I heard on “Clouded.” It wasn’t harrowing, hairy, or made to mumble non sequitur haikus my pea brain would struggle to interpret.
He sounded nice. Normal. Kind. Caring. It was a voice designed to say big things without making you feel tiny.
So, like a moron, I forced it to make small talk. Our topic? The weather.
“Oh, how hot is it there?”
110, I told him.
“WOW!”
We laughed.
And, like that, Luc Lemay stuck his hand in the sand and wiped my apprehension away.
Tinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.
“Colored Sands” is set in motion with a single, chiming harmonic.
Tinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.
Then, it drops another. A few more trickle down, building into an off-kilter arpeggio, presaging a gargantuan onslaught of polyrhythms shifting under the listener as if one was trying to climb an ever-expanding dune. However, Longstreth’s feet are far steadier than ours. His constant kicks mark the boarders for the three other players to fill with shades of sound ranging from strangely logical and calming progressions to unhinged, hellbound solos. The song ends as it begins, revisiting the tone with an accompanying drone. It’s one final ohm before silence destroys the glory of what has been created.
Nevertheless, that’s seven minutes into your future. Until then, “Colored Sands” is but a few grains.
So, take a moment, clear your thoughts, and consider the note:
Tinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.
If you were thinking Tibetan prayer bowls or The Gyuto Monks, you’re not far off.
“Have you ever seen the monks drawing mandalas?” Lemay asked.
I had. Known to curious Western-centric seekers as an exercise in meditation and patience, the Hindu/Buddhist activity asks its practitioners to, more often than not, travel to specific locations so they may create geometrical symbols representing their conceptualization of a universe; either the one residing in the mind or the equally great expanse we can consider to be reality. These days, in the Buddhist tradition, the common media and style is sandpainting. The actual act is something to behold.
“They have a bronze funnel which they fill up with either red sand or yellow sand, white or whatever color they need to include into the construction. They have a little stick. They go tck tck tck tck. It rubs a funnel. They have little notches on the funnel. It vibrates and pours the sand. When I started writing [“Colored Sands”], I was actually trying to mimic the sound of the tool with my guitar pick on the string. I would go, like, tck tck tck tck tck tck to mimic the stick but it wasn’t convenient.”
“So, this brought me at the end of the day to end up choosing the harmonic. With a harmonic, you can’t have a more minimal, clear, transparent guitar sound than this: Tinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng. Metaphorically, I decided this would be like a single grain of sand that falls on the floor. That’s how it started. If you bring the construction down to its minimal essence, it’s a single grain of sand. That’s what I exposed. Then, the music slowly builds up and you have the pattern in five. It represents the five elements in their philosophy which will take place in the artwork, so to speak. And then, WHOOP, drums are in and you don’t really notice since the build-up is smooth. So, it’s like they’re building the whole artwork minimally and then, you know, it’s all finished.”
What’s left when Lemay and crew steps back is, without hyperbole, incredible. As soon as the stomp of the three minute mark charges in, loosening the muscles in your jaw so it can only hang slack, you can hardly believe it started in such an inauspicious way. Although, the more you listen to “Colored Sands,” you understand the harmonic never makes a true exit. It’s there throughout, providing appropriate balance when things threaten to get too big.
It provides half of an intentional dualism.
“I wanted to do that from the beginning,” Luc confided, “to have a good side of the coin and bad side of the coin, with the orchestral piece in the middle dividing clearly both sides of the topic.”
Sonically, it’s a heck of a trick. On the other hand, if you previously peaked at the packaging, you may have unconsciously internalized that metaphysical conundrum upon your first look at Colored Sands‘ cover. On it, a headless monk constituted by converging sand-heavy gusts stretches two sets of arms out over a mandala. One hand is clasped in prayer. The other is bound.
I mentioned this and Luc lit up.
“The hand position, the tied hands and the praying hands. It’s a very strong statement. For instance, if you see a fist, you understand its message. Likewise, when you see an open hand waiting to receive something, you see a different message. [The hands] are a very strong iconographic statement. That’s the main thing I wanted for the cover. Praying hands equal the first four songs and the tied hands are the Tibetan people in their own land. That’s what it illustrates. And then, you get the geographical elements such as mountains.”
The mountains, the Himalayas, shoot up to the sky right when you press play.
“There’s many wonderful things there; just their geography. Okay, I’m going to take the listeners to where everything is going to take place. ‘Le Toit du Monde,’ which means roof of the world. So, I wanted to take the listener by the hand and say, ‘Come with me. We’ll go to this place and you’ll see it’s wonderful, but something very horrible will happen one day.'”
The date for that event is scheduled for “The Battle of Chamdo” and humanity unravels for the rest of the record.
“And then, boom, you have the Chinese invasion of 1950 which is represented by the string orchestra. And there’s more horrible things after. Monks immolating themselves in public. And this isn’t sci-fi, eh? It happens as we’re speaking today.”
It does indeed. Though, if this comes off as politically motivated or pedantic, it’s not meant to. Luc, as always, considered all sides and remained self-aware.
“I had no pretension of teaching people Buddhism. Like I say in every interview, I would have to read books for twenty-five years to really know what I’m talking about [laughs]. It’s so complex. So complex. But it’s so amazing at the same time. You know? What a human mind can bring to their life. They’re far from Googling and tweeting. It’s not like they just tweeted, ‘I just drew a mandala!'”
We both laughed.
“My first idea was to make each song a part of the step of drawing the whole mandala to its completion. Then, when I started to read books on it and everything I found it was more than I could chew. And maybe it would have not been this appealing to sing about because we still need to remember it’s a death metal record. You know, I don’t want to sing documentary narration [laughs] to a brutal soundtrack. It doesn’t really work.”
Be that as it may, it’s undeniable “Colored Sands” does work. Every spin, it works a little more, unveiling new timbres, riffs, and themes the longer you focus on it. Its potentiality is boundless. We adore music for its transportive properties, but rarely do you come across a composition where you’re given so much data to consider, so many wormholes to dive into. That said, you may find it more your style to pull back and take stock of the bigger picture. It’s flexible. Both approaches make sense. Either way, appreciate it before the sawing of bow-upon-string begins.
Tinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.
“The Battle of Chamdo” distills the Wagnerian menace of metal down to its original sinners, the O.G. instruments of the orchestra. The cello spells out a massing storm while the rest of the cat-gut in the quartet accentuates the terror preparing to unfold. Here’s the thing: Though it’s feverish with romantic period intent, it’s rather restrained, forgoing bombast for the well-defined structure of a classical Beethoven. It resolves its chord progressions. Its sense of dynamics sea-saws equally. Its flow lifts a spread hand signaling one to live long and prosper.
One thing it isn’t is peaceful. It guns you down with dissonance. Luc knows exactly from where that shot was fired.
“I always said it openly, I’m totally in love with the Russian 20th century music like Shostakovich, Prokofiev. And, Penderecki on the Polish side. I’ve always been influenced. Even back in school—ten, fifteen years ago—I was writing around it there. Like the flute concerto I have on my MySpace page. I’ve always been influenced. For some reason, this aesthetic in classical music—the Slavic sound—has always been close to my heart. I have Slavic roots myself, you know. My grandmother and mother, Russian and Polish blood. So, for some reason, when I heard Shostakovich, it hit me like a stone to the face. It was like when I heard Scream Bloody Gore, the death metal sound. It really affected my writing. That’s why, to me, I find I’m more influenced by this sound, writing orchestral music.”
The old guard would be proud. Dmitri Shostakovich, composing from behind the Iron Curtain, became a titan of modern classical by upending the communist musical ideal, anthemic simplicity, with everything in his arsenal. This included loud, violent repetition and wrenching, depressive discord. It wasn’t until far later down the line that Shosty received a slap on the wrist, though. Initially, he skated free by playing his cards close to the vest. He sneaked in his uprising almost subliminally, hiding the avant-garde in acceptable musical models. He’s, sort of, the center of the 20th century, positioning himself between the populist penny operas and the powerful leaf blower of surrealism and serialism.
Luc’s link surprised me at first. Then, it made perfect sense.
So, of course, I had to know more. Classical dorks like us hold on to the moment when the form first clicked like it’s an AA chip. It’s an ice breaker, akin to shooting the shit in the breakroom regarding the trials and tribulations of whatever sport is currently in season. It’s an easily traceable singularity.
I spun the atoms: Luc, what was your Big Bang?
“Me, I discovered Shostakovich with 3, 7, and 8th [string quartets]. And the 8th was like WOW. It’s very dark. Even the string piece on our new record would be a nod to this work. But I like the later ones. They’re very sad and dark. Like the 13th. With the solo viola marching all the way through.”
Shostakovich’s “String Quartet No. 13 in B flat minor” is a single nineteen minute movement. It’s devastating, composed just five years before he’d die.
“Maybe, uh, Penderecki’s Requiem. And I heard this before the Shostakovich string quartet. I heard this and I was like WHOA there’s classical that could be this dark and melancholy. I think that’s the one. Yeah. And maybe Bartok’s 4th. The quartet. This one is very dissonant too. Oh, and Ligeti. If you have Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1, “Métamorphoses nocturnes,” which is very Bartokish in a way. That’s very dissonant too. It pushed me to want to understand and know how to write orchestral music. Those are the works that pushed me to study, you know?”
The push, then, has paid off. “The Battle of Chamdo” doesn’t come off as tossed off, a lazy beardo requiem to symphonic Casio-lead breathers. It’s accomplished, adeptly juggling a tricky topic without causing ADD-afflicted headbangers to hit skip. It sounds like a string quartet which is no small feat for a metal album.
It sneaks in classical right under our metal noses.
It’s the result of Luc trusting his instincts.
Lemay’s trust often brings about the best results.
“You never hitchhiked?”
Hell no, I said. I saw too many doomsayer slashers when I was growing up. Luc chuckled. Hitchhiking for him? No big deal. He was a vet. It was one of the sacrifices he decided to make for his art. A nice car or a TV? No thanks. “That’s a fifteen minute rush,” he says. Can’t say I disagreed. However, hitchhiking seems extreme. I ask if things got nuts. I mean, gosh, what was the worst part?
“Freezing my butt on the highway in sneakers in, let’s say, late November and you just hope, you know, it’s not going to be the first snow today. And being stuck there for hours and hours. Some crazy people, you know. They stop and they want to pick you up for sexual favors and stuff like that. I’ve seen that often. ‘No thanks, I’ll pass on that.’ But, you know, I was luckier. I hitchhiked all of the years I played a violin and viola. Hitchhiking with a violin and viola on my shoulder. And people would stop and say, ‘Oh, hitchhiking with a violin? You should be a good person.’ They found that more appealing, you know, than just hitchhiking without a backpack. But, dude, you meet very interesting people.”
I immediately queried if he was ever recognized.
“It happened. Some people would say, ‘Oh, what do you do? Yeah, you play in a band? What band?’ Well, I play in Gorguts. ‘AH! Get out! I have a friend that digs you guys! Wait until I tell him! Man, he’s going to shit.’ And he’s all tripping out, you know. And I’m like bumming for a ride to go to practice.”
Twenty years spent sticking out a thumb or positioning a violin like a leggy blonde in a Cary Grant flick. Inconceivable for me. I’d be too petrified. Lemay, though, clearly has a way of finding the right people.
“I need to be inspired by the people I play with too. It’s not a one man band thing. Yeah, okay, I’m the leader and everything, but I have big trust in what Kevin, Colin, and John can bring to the music. That’s important. Otherwise, I’ll do everything at home on the computer.”
And, not surprisingly, the new blood has changed his process for the better. He explained the shift thusly:
“Let’s say you ask three artists, ‘Okay, you guys each have a pad. Draw me a table.’ They’ll draw you an object with four legs, but they won’t draw you the same table. So, if I ask Kevin and Colin for a Gorguts riff, they’re going to go with the strong musical ingredients of the band and they’re going to write their OWN Gorguts riff. They’re going to dress it up. You’re still in well known ground, but there’s something you can’t put your finger on. It’s their own identity.”
The longer Luc and I chatted about the nuts and bolts of the record, I realized he’s something of a dream boss. He empowers through collaboration, not micromanagement. He knows what you can bring to the table. Whether it’s a dinner or coffee table doesn’t matter as long as you’re on his same wavelength when it comes to the integrity of the tunes. With Kevin, Colin, and John, he made a connection that appeared to run deeper than Riff A and Riff B.
“I would provide them the visual documents [tablature and song analysis graphs] and an MP3. That’s it. Then a month later, they would send me my song back with a guitar track over it and I’d be like, ‘Holy shit.’ It’d be me panned to the right and Kevin to the left. It was very polyphonic. Sometimes, he would slightly play the same riff, but omit this note here or there or recolor it. Sometimes he would play something totally different. And Colin would pretty much play his own thing all the way through. It was like a three voice counterpoint, that’s how I would hear it string-wise.
“Then, when I had three songs completed I went to jam with John one on one so I could share my vision of the drums. So, within a weekend, we did two songs and half. All of it. All of the drum writing. It was super effective. And then I left, he finished a song on his side. When all of the drums were written, maybe two or three months later, we got together as a four piece and ran through all of the arrangements. It clicked, all of us together in the same room. This [same] weekend, we did a demo with three songs. Completely recorded and mixed. That was ‘Ocean of Wisdom,’ ‘Enemies of Compassion,’ and ‘Ember’s Voice.'”
Three home runs in a weekend? That’s Wrecking Crew type shit.
“It had to be constructive and not spending time, three hours, on a beat or something. You can tell everyone has craft and experience. That makes it a different game.”
It’s like a game of blackjack when everyone on the table knows the count, when everyone is working together. At that point, the game is different. It becomes less about the individual and more about the common cause.
It becomes a game of trust.
Even forty-five minutes into our conversation, I’m still taken aback by Luc Lemay’s selflessness. I’ve always held on to a theory the true groundbreakers are untethered from reality and that helps to make their vision singular. The problem, then, is in regular ol’ boring society they appear aloof or hung up on their own sagacity. Think Russell Crowe and his beautiful chalkboard. Yet, Lemay is unaffected by this wizardly side-effect. He just seemed to get it, that the world is bigger than what’s between his ears. For instance, he held no reservations regarding the possibility of putting on a concert of his classical-leaning work.
“I would love to, but it’s so out of reach for—how can I say—day-to-day people. Of course, you can have ideas and write music down in your house. But it’s not easy to have your work performed. You need to be in circles of people and have connections and know a conductor. Even then, those works cost so much money to be rehearsed and performed unless you have a commission, you know? It’s not easy. I tried myself a few times. They’re not going to write you back for grants or, you know, commissions. You gotta be asked for it. You can’t impose yourself within a music ensemble and say, ‘You want to play this?’ A lot of administration goes before art. It’s not an easy place to get performed, but I would love to have music performed for those ensembles, you know. I would like to write concertos when I have more time.”
His response on comeback albums was cut from the same cloth. I quizzed him on Grantland scribe Steven Hyden’s theory we only really accept an artist’s return if it comes close to matching their big break. Once more, the answer I received was uniquely unostentatious.
“…when we put From Wisdom out in 2001, some people were like, ‘Aw, it’s not like Erosion or Obscura, it sucks.’ Or, if you do Obscura Part II you’re going to pointed at like you haven’t reinvented yourself and you’re just stuck doing your old formula. It’s like, ‘Bah, they went away from the style I like, I don’t like it anymore.’ There’s always a catch-22. But to me, personally, I need to enjoy playing the music myself. And I need to be surprised. And I think, if this works [for me], it’ll work with the fans. That’s what I’ve trusted in since the first record. I’ve never been interested in writing the same song twice in the sense that, even on the record and on the smaller scale within the record, I put a lot of hard work in finding very different and strong identities in the song’s beginnings. You’re a writer. An author. Say you’re writing a book and every chapter starts the same way. It’s like, where are we now? Will you [find a direction] in a few pages? A few paragraphs? Same goes for the music. Will you get it the first five riffs? No. So, it’s like a story. It’s the same thing on a larger scale. I never wanted to write the same record two times. And, you know, you wrote the one before so there’s a good chance people are going to notice you wrote the new one because you have a vocabulary as a composer. But, it can play against you in that sense. In a criticism point of view, you know?”
I drilled down a little further and inquired if he believed art had a static message or if the message was malleable in the minds of the listener.
“You can look at it from a very intellectual point of view and that will feed your enjoyment. For example, some people in school were very interested in analysis class and they wanted to know how things worked and stuck together. That helped them to appreciate the work on that level. And some people said, ‘Ooo, I find it very poetic,’ and this and that. It’s case by case.
“But, that’s what art is all about. You and I could be sitting in front of a painting and I would be crying and you would be like, ‘Yeah okay, are we going now?’ And with art, you don’t have to understand every bit of it for it to touch you. If it brings out an emotion for you? That’s good. If not, so what.”
And then he nailed it.
“It’s not for yourself to keep in a closet. It needs to rebound off people. It’s very interesting. I love to see how the work touches people.”
Colored Sands, the complete package, will touch you. It’s a rare work of multimedia in an age when we’re used to 500×500 pixelated photoshop art included as a jpeg in our Bandcamp download bundle. The booklet Lemay has constructed is bold, yet again providing a fresh template for the metal world to follow. Each song is represented by a painting and a key quote, giving the impact of the tracks a, literal, new dimension.
It’s a big statement. Nonetheless, Lemay started small.
“I was inspired by La Fontaine’s Fables. You know those stories? You have the fox and the crow and you have virtues through these stories [running] through those animals. They seem like childish stories, but it’s true for adults.”
Metal in a nutshell, really.
Once the topic was breached, you could tell how energized he was to share the last five years of his life with those who patiently waited. His voice raised an octave, rattling off details that must have been agonized over for hours. Here is a guy who almost swore off music forever so he could become a wood carver. Now, his passion for art boiled over with every breath.
It was infectious.
So much so, I was struck by how unfair it was for a once-in-a-brutal-moon brain to be relegated to just a jewel case. If the concertos were out of reach, I asked, would he be interested in an exhibit?
“I want to do a listening party in Montreal. I want to bring all of the artwork, the originals, so I can talk with the fans about concept. This record was not just about, ‘Oh dude, this riff is so brutal.’ Yes, there’s this, BUT: There’s the story, the concept, the illustration.”
Plus, there’s the man at the center of it all, one who believes, wholeheartedly, it does not revolve around him. He is the single grain of sand amongst many other grains. When one steps back and sees what he’s started, one can only say…
…well, “WOW!”
Lastly, before we signed off, I decided to see if he was satisfied with how things had gone so far.
“We have a saying in French, I don’t feel like I’m standing next to my shoes. I feel like I’m in the right shoes. It’s a great feeling.”
I can’t think of anything sounding better.
