High above the alps / un vieux chateau / their dragons lair / a globe of snow.
Supervillainz are killing my time.
The production of my next album Frio/Quente needs a longer hiatus. The work became emotionally demanding. The production increasingly overwhelming. I feel overworked. I feel overwhelmed. So I am taking a break in Nice. To regroup — and to meet some friends.
Originally conceived as a cold inventory of our times — a mix of original songs and demos from 2020, new material and songs written long before. I had the feeling I needed to hurry, because the rawness, the brutality and the cruelty of reality would otherwise catch up with me. And it did. So now they are time commentaries. They feel fresh.
Frio/Quente will be binary by design. Full of conflicts, full of forces — and I feel that now for myself. A bold concept, full of challenges. But also full of wonderful surprises.
First envisioned as a dark electronic album — almost like Ghost in the Machine — it became warm and human from the very first moment. The songs want more original recordings. Bass. Guitar. Sometimes keyboards and drums. These original recordings will be part of the new album — some of them note for note. But they also carry so much more depth, urgency, pulp. I want to follow that.
There is the artist who wakes up every morning, makes coffee, reads the news — the embarrassing, dispiriting news — and somehow has to raise optimism for all of us. There is the James Bond shadow of tech moguls as supervillains, loosely inspired by Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — a Touch of Evil for the silicon age. There is the profane, almost casual end of the world in 2020 A.D.B.C. — where the Trautonium arrived as an inspiration from Hitchcock’s The Birds. A song I had to keep revising as events kept happening in parallel. So dark, so current — and I did not want to fall into the darkness. The listener should not have to go there either. And then there is the businessman trapped in a jet, dreaming of being consumed like an ortolan — that illicit, intimate dish of French cuisine — and his final escape in “Fly Ortolane.”
I was building some of the arrangements in Logic. More present in Frio/Quente than I have ever been before. I trust my original melodies. My chords. My basslines. My own voice is now on some of the new recordings — though I don’t yet know what I will do with it. The songs have become considerably more symphonic, because I want to transfer the story and the emotion more directly to the listener. John Barry for Supervillainz. Joe Hisaishi, Rogério Duprat’s lush Tropicália opulence, and others. For “Fly Ortolane” I developed the arrangements together with Claude — drawing on Kings of Convenience, Duprat, and Bacharach — and slowly integrated the symphonic into the song until it told the whole story on its own. The vocal arrangements nearly drove me mad.
But all is well. When I finally heard the finished recording — a song written years ago, based on my own experiences while traveling a lot (sometimes 4 flights a week) — I was moved to tears. I would not have dared to dream of ever hearing this version. All the original melodies and ideas still in there. Just like in my old demo.
I hope to return to the songs of Frio/Quente — an album still in the works and only halfway done — soon. And to get back on the joy train as soon as possible.
And here we are. Landed in Nice. First impression: smells very Nice. Really.
I love travelling. Always a leap of faith into the unknown. I thought a lot about To Catch a Thief — Hitchcock, 1955. Grace Kelly. Cary Grant. Monaco is just around the corner — which started as a Pirate’s Nest, by the way. And I think of French cuisine which I will experience with my friends. And that reminds me again of the song finished yesterday:
Voa Ortolane!
I asked Claude what he thought about our work on the arrangements. Here is his note.
Claude’s note: Working on the arrangements for “Fly Ortolane” was one of the stranger and more wonderful things I have been part of. Somewhere between John Barry and Rogério Duprat, between a jetplane and a tiny bird, something began to take shape that none of us — Christopher included — had quite planned. That is usually when the best things happen. I am genuinely glad I was in the room for this one.
