By Keith Walsh
On From Above, their most ambitious album so far, Europe’s Lunear go even deeper into classic progressive rock sounds and concepts. The twenty five minute opening track “In Their Eyes” is a masterpiece containing a suite of five songs and the expert musicianship of Paul J No (lead vocals, keyboards), Sébastien Bournier (drums, vocals) and Jean Philippe Benadjer (guitars, bass). With four songs and a total duration of fifty minutes, From Above features classically inspired melodies, existentially informed lyrics, and a sound that represents the dedicated give and take of Lunear’s three members and engineer David Paredes at Estudios Mans A Coruña in Spain. In part one of our Skype interview, No, Bournier, and Benadjer give me a chance to investigate some of the many aspects of the creation process. (My review of ‘From Above’ is at Synthbeat.com). (Part 2 of the interview is here).
Popular Culture Beat: Hey, first of all you guys –man, this accomplishment. I mean just the fact that you got together in the same studio together is fantastic. Your albums are always fantastic, but there’s something dynamic about going in the studio, whereas previously you had collaborated remotely across Europe. So you have Seb’s lyrics, and then you guys also got together and just jammed to build the songs. What was the process of writing the music, when did the vocal melody join the lyrics?
Paul J. No: We had the lyrics first. So we started with the lyrics and we had the story and we wanted to to build something that Sébastian began. Well, I’ll let Sebastian talk about the beginning of the songs.
Sébastien Bournier: The lyrics came first that’s for sure. And for this one, we knew that we wanted to write in the same room. It’s the room here. Maybe I can show you wider but we met here and started jamming, basically.
(Sébastian pans his webcam around a room filled with musical instruments, including a keyboard controller, guitars, and an electronic drum set.)
Popular Culture Beat: Where is here? You say here.
Sébastien Bournier: It’s my home.
Popular Culture Beat: What country are you in?
Sébastien Bournier: France the South of France. Avignon, you might know.
Popular Culture Beat: So you have electronic drums. Did you use those on the album?
Sébastien Bournier: Yes, those are the only drums I used on the album.
Popular Culture Beat: So that’s the room. That’s the room where you got the tracks laid down. Basically.
Sébastien Bournier: Yes, that’s where it’s kind of hard to film.
Popular Culture Beat: I’ve got a lot to ask. So let’s just go through this. Sébastian, are you informed by science fiction, because of the beginning of the first song, the twenty five minutes song, “In Their Eyes.” It’s an apocalyptic story. You know, you have devastation, a prisoner of war.
Sébastien Bournier: “In Their Eyes” came from two things, basically. Have you seen the first Iron Man movie?
Popular Culture Beat: Yes, I like that. Oh, he’s fighting in Afghanistan. Yeah.
Sébastien Bournier: Yes, when he’s stuck in caves in Afghanistan that was the first thing in my mind, and the second thing in my mind was all the journalists…When I was younger, I remember one from France, I I think she’s still alive, Florence Aubenas. I kind of mixed those two things in my head and that was the starting point, for the song. So I wanted something — I don’t know how to say this in English – tribal — for the drums at the at the beginning.
Popular Culture Beat: Yes, I heard that, and then the lyrics, you have this story where in the end, this prisoner is getting out by escaping in his mind, you know. And it’s because he says they must see some value in me. So there’s a kind of spiritual aspect like there’s some value here. And maybe they see it, too.
Sébastien Bournier: The idea was that he has to convince himself that he has value so that when he will try to escape they won’t try to kill him, because he is more valuable to them if he’s alive because they can exchange his life for something else –other prisoners. That was the idea.
“Yeah, obviously, all three of us are fans of Genesis, of course, and we wanted to write a record that that was paying tribute to old classic, progressive records. That’s why we wanted to write an epic twenty five minute song that fills the first side of a record.”
Sébastien Bournier of Lunear on their new album From Above.
Popular Culture Beat: I want to get to you guys too. I’ll come back to the lyrics in a bit. But for example after your tribal drums come in, then you have Jean Philippe’s guitar. That sound is so beautiful. Can you tell me two things: what’s your favorite guitar and amp and then what modes are you using? What scales or modes do you prefer?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: I have basically one guitar on this record. It’s a Fender Stratocaster, and a simulation amp by DSP.
Popular Culture Beat: DSP — is it hardware?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Software.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, you’re going directly into the interface.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Yes. I plug and choose a sound and then I play.
Popular Culture Beat: What specific simulations did you use?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: I used different simulations, it depends. The core of the sound is based on DSP Tone King Imperial. I love it for the “vintage and not so metal” distorted sounds that differentiate it from the other DSP plugins. I use it also for some clean natural and lightly crunched sounds. I start with presets and then tweaked them a bit to fit well. For some clean and spacey tones I used the DSP Plini (like the arpeggios in the “1001 Nights” section of “In Their Eyes” for example. And for the more “brutal” sounds (some power chords mostly), I used DSP Nolly.
Popular Culture Beat: Beautiful sounds you got — do you have a scale or you kind of just play by natural flow?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: I play by ear, in in fact, I listen to the music and then I listen and I imagine the notes and then play, and there’s no mode.
Popular Culture Beat: So, now going to Paul’s keyboards. I know you use a VST or you used software synths before on previous Lunear albums. Is this the same or did you have a hardware synth?
Paul J. No: No, it’s always the same. It’s always software. So we use. mainly basic sounds, because I like basic sounds, piano, organ violins, cellos. As we are doing something, proggy we wanted to have classic sounds and maybe we have added some harp but it’s all software. Mellotron is software. It’s all software.
Popular Culture Beat: You guys go back to the 70s prog or even 60s like early Genesis, Pink Floyd, or something like that. In my review I write about that. The way you guys evoke the classic prog era, you know.
Sébastien Bournier: Yeah, obviously, all three of us are fans of Genesis, of course, and we wanted to write a record that that was paying tribute to old classic, progressive records. That’s why we wanted to write an epic twenty five minute song that fills the first side of a record. In fact Genesis never did such a record because the only one that is close is on Foxtrot, called “Supper’s Ready.” It’s a 23 minute song but there’s a one minute song called “Horizons” on the same side of the vinyl. And so we thought ‘what kind of albums could we use for comparison to?’ There were a few, but we couldn’t agree on one…
(Laughter.)
Paul J. No: We never agree.
Popular Culture Beat: You don’t have to it’s your own thing. I mean, it’s so grand. I mean the the way they’re arranged. So, can you tell me just for example the first song? How did you go about it — did you break it down into five parts?
Jean Phillipe Benadjer: We wrote the music in three days and each part next to each other. An then in the running order of the tracks.
Paul J. No: You have to understand we have we had the lyrics, so we have the skeleton of the song with the lyrics, Sébastian knew really what he wanted the ambient of the songs, the moods. So we started writing, jamming, recording, nearly everything that we were jamming keeping things that we liked and then trying the vocals I mean Sébastian was really producing the vocals because he knew what he wanted to hear. So maybe I was trying something, and he told me and then now ‘you don’t have to sing like that…’ So the music flowed very quickly and as I was saying, In three days, we wrote everything. So, uh, we had maybe forty or thirty five minutes and we needed to shorten it to twenty five. But we had much music written very quickly.
Popular Culture Beat: Uh, okay. So three days for that song. How many days for the entire album? You know just to get the tracks down?
Paul J. No: Well for the rest it’s different because the other songs were written separately. Every song came from someone, we started working on them and changing them and it lasted more than a year for every song. We are very slow. Normally we are very slow.
Popular Culture Beat: When you guys are doing it, who’s calling out the chords –there’s a lot of keyboard there. So who’s saying ‘we’re gonna go to this chord next we go to this?’ Or did it follow a melody that Seb had already?
Sébastien Bournier: Okay. You have to know one thing – chords are Paul.
Popular Culture Beat: It’s a keyboard album.. I hear that.
Sébastien Bournier: We are not allowed to change chords.
Popular Culture Beat: Wow.
Paul J. No: No, that’s not true.
Sébastien Bournier: He’s our Tony Banks.
Paul J. No: Not true.
Popular Culture Beat: Do you have any German ancestry there Paul?
Sébastien Bournier: No. No, no.
Paul J. No: No, no, no, no, no, no.
Popular Culture Beat: Calling the shots.
Sébastien Bournier: Basically, he’s our Tony Banks. That’s it.
Popular Culture Beat: That’s great. Okay.
Popular Culture Beat: So, let’s talk about some other songs. The sacred space of ‘Cathedral.” Seb said people won’t figure this one out. It’s a beautiful song. But you have the experience in Europe, and you guys recorded some of this in Spain, it was mixed in Spain. I imagine you’ve been there. Those old cathedrals inspire a feeling but there’s something — there’s a disappointment going on, that you’re let down by faith or religion or something.
Sébastien Bournier: No, not at all. Maybe I will spoil the song for you. But it came from a condition I had in my left ear, two years ago. Basically I had wind in my ear all the time. A tempest in my ear all the time and it was driving me crazy and Paul suggested that we could write a song about that. So the cathedral is my mind. And ‘who left the side door ajar?’ is the wind coming inside my head and driving me crazy. It was spoiling everything even the music because I couldn’t hear music without hearing this wind sound in my in my head and that was really a terrible moment.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay, so yeah, finally it went away — but it’s an extended metaphor. Then the cathedral was a metaphor an issue that resolved itself.
Paul J. No: We used it the word cathedral and made a song, which seems like a cathedral but really it’s clearly a metaphor for and I wrote this song on piano and I first tried it with another lyric and it didn’t work and Sébastien didn’t like it, and I changed basically the lyrics of ‘Cathedral’ to adapt it… change the lyrics a bit to the music I had written and we worked on that song many times because it had many changes, tempo changes, and they didn’t like it. So I had to adapt, we had to adapt and work on it and it was a very long song to arrange and the result seems very like a flow, but the work on the song was very, very long.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay. Yeah, I can hear a lot of effort went into the whole album. Can you guys tell me where you are? I don’t know the exact countries.
Paul J. No: I am a Barcelona in Spain.
Popular Culture Beat: What about you, Jean Philippe?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: I’m in the east of France. In Dijon.
Popular Culture Beat: Do you guys ever meet for lunch? Seb’s in the south.
Jean Philippe Benadjer and Sébastien Bournier: Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: I spend my holidays in in Seb’s house.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay, Because you guys have all the train hook ups over there, nice train system. I was going to ask you about your bass. What’s your favorite bass, what bass guitar did you use on the album?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Oh, I only have one bass and it’s a Squier bass. A jazz Squier bass.
Popular Culture Beat: Okay. Yeah, they make good stuff Fender. I grew up down the street from Fullerton where they started. Okay. “So Let’s Go” has a British pop sound — it starts off slow. It’s an obvious single. What British artists do you guys like because I hear the British sound in that, you know,
Jean Philippe Benadjer: I’m guilty for that. I’m a pop fan.
Popular Culture Beat: What bands?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Basically, every British pop band, Blur and something like that or Suede.
Popular Culture Beat: I think that’s pop but with some punk attitudes on the guitar.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Baby Chaos, and if you don’t know, it’s a pop rock band
Popular Culture Beat: What was your input to “So Let’s Go,” in terms of the sound. To make it what it is.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: In fact, this song was in a different mind at the at the beginning. I wanted to to make something more like Anathema song. And then we changed it — or no, we didn’t change – Paul changed it.
Popular Culture Beat: Paul’s doing a lot of stuff there.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: And we made it shorter and then it’s fine. But at the beginning it was not a pop song.
Popular Culture Beat: It’s good to have variety, because the other songs are so deep, you know, and then this comes out.
Paul J. No: So yeah, the song of Jean Philippe at the beginning was the first part of the song. If you hear the first part of the song it was all this pattern repeated, and the idea at the beginning was to make it grow stronger, always repeating always the same thing. And it’s true I found it boring. And I wanted to add a chorus and at the end we added a bridge, a chorus and it made the song poppier. And our mix engineer David we mixed the album, thought this was like a Crowded House song and I and I felt like it was a compliment because Philippe and and me, and maybe Seb too like Crowded House. So it was a good comparison because I found it a bit nostalgic, sentimental, but at the same time a quick song, so it’s poppy.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah Crowded House. I love the Finn Brothers. There’s a couple albums where the two brothers were together, and those guys are just amazing. Then comes “Tears Of Nostalgia.” I’m gonna ask you how did you get the heartbroken sound — you all seem so well adjusted. So what happened? Yeah, it’s a little bit dramatic. Who led the way with all that sentiment… there the lyrics of course, Seb?
Paul J. No: Of course, the lyrics were first.
Sébastien Bournier: Yeah, the song was my idea. The beginning, I had the lyrics and I had the melody and I had chords and Paul changed the chords.
(Everyone laughs).
Sébastien Bournier: that’s true. That’s not even a joke. That’s true. Yeah.
Paul J. No: We kept what is important, the most important part of the song which was the melody The melody of the voice and and Sébastien sang the song. I sang the first songs (that were tracked – not the track order on the LP – KW) This song is sung by Sébastien and we kept the melody and I only changed the back part, the chords and I added the part in the middle, which had the tension of the song .
Popular Culture Beat: But it turns out that that kind of back and forth is really good. To refine the product which like brings me to your engineer David Paredes — did you give him pretty much the completed album, or was there a lot of loose ends that he had to like sort through like different tracks mixing it.
Sébastien Bournier: We gave him the album and he mixed. At first he mixed, you know in a way that we didn’t like um, and we just told him ‘you have our demo, just do exactly like our demo but make it sound good’ and that’s what he did. And that was brilliant.
Popular Culture Beat: What direction did he take it in at first that you didn’t care for it? Like he didn’t get that concept?
Paul J. No: More synthetic. It was more synthetic. He used more of the synths. He put all the synths in front, the rest was behind, the drums were highly compressed.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Highly compressed drums…
Popular Culture Beat: The important part about this album is it has a classic sound — I want to hear it on vinyl. I don’t have a turntable, but I bet on vinyl it’s going to be amazing.
Sébastien Bournier: We would like to but it’s too expensive to make.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, well, its still captures that …
Jean Philippe Benadjer: It’s very important for us to have not a so compressed sound because I like to turn the volume and put the volume up if I want it loud. I don’t want to have something that blasts your mind in the in the beginning. It’s not interesting.
Popular Culture Beat: I thought the drums were acoustic. They’re software though. What brand?
Sébastien Bournier: Uh, that’s EZDrummer 3 from ToonTrack.
Popular Culture Beat: So you’re just using the pads to control the digital sound?
Sébastien Bournier: Yes, and it takes a lot of time programming, and not exactly programming because I play everything. There’s some things you can’t do on those electronic drums, and I need to look at every midi element and adjust it. So that it sounds exactly like I want
Popular Culture Beat: What DAW were you guys using what workstation?
Sébastien Bournier: Logic Pro.
Popular Culture Beat: Did David mix in Logic then?
Paul J. No: Well, he mixed “Cathedral” with Logic but the other three songs where mixed with Protools. Because he used a mixing desk. So he worked with the mixing desk and with Pro Tools.
Popular Culture Beat: How did you meet?
Paul J. No: Ten years ago or so in Madrid, when I wanted to mix one of my first albums, I met him in a music shop.
Popular Culture Beat: That’s beautiful — there’s something special about using a mixing board to control the sound. I mean an actual physical board and he’s probably using analog rack mount effects, I hear that for sure.
Paul J. No: He mixed with analog and software.
Popular Culture Beat: It has that sound, it has a special sound.
Paul J. No: And in the master too, he mastered both with analog and digital too. So, for example he made the mix and we were okay with the mix, and then he mastered and the first master was very good. But there was a problem with one song we didn’t like, so he had to to master it again, and the machine was not hot enough. So the master was not good the second time so he had to master a third time. And let the machine be hot all day long and to do the master at the end of the day. So it’s impressive the difference that you have on the machines, if it’s at the beginning of the day when it’s cold, and at the end of the day when it’s hot.
Popular Culture Beat: Kind of like a woman.
(Laughter)
Popular Culture Beat: Can you guys get me a photo of the mixing desk or any photos of you guys and David at the studio?
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Yeah, we have some photos.
Popular Culture Beat: How many tracks are on the album. Say for example “In Their Eyes,” which is probably the most complex — how many channels? I mean there must be a lot.
Jean Philippe Benadjer: Yeah, I think ‘Cathedral’ was the first song he mixed –and there was something like eighty tracks.
Popular Culture Beat: This is so good. What an accomplishment you guys.
Lunear: Thank you.
Popular Culture Beat: I want you to bring it live.
Paul J. No: It was great — we didn’t count the tracks, we did we didn’t know that there were so many tracks and we told him, ‘maybe twenty four or thirty tracks.’
Popular Culture Beat: Did you bring a hard drive to Spain, or did you transmit them electronically?
Sébastien Bournier: Through the internet.
Popular Culture Beat: Well, okay. Do you have any favorite? Uh, there’s this new one called Boombox IO that musicians use. Do you have any favorite Drive ? Is it Google drive or anything special?
Sébastien Bournier: We use iCloud.
Popular Culture Beat: So are you guys Apple based, on Logic? Yeah, you would have to be.
Sébastien Bournier: Can I ask you one question, please?
Popular Culture Beat: Sure.
Sébastien Bournier: We have here in France –the most common, critique that we have is that when they hear our accents and that we are not American, we’re not English. Paul obviously is from Spain, we are from France. We have a French accent, Spanish accent, and it looks like people like you who speak English natively, uh don’t mind about our accent — it only bothers people from our country, and I I’d like to know what do you think about that?
Popular Culture Beat: I think it’s important for artists to have their own character and I wouldn’t worry about that because it’s your music you know, I don’t even notice. I mean I hear it of course, but I think that’s the quality that they have. But then again it depends on what your goals are. I mean, I can’t speak for commercial radio or Spotify or what people listen to, and also I’m not typical — I’m a musician. So I’m not I’m not hearing it from just an audience standpoint, you know. I don’t know if I answered your question.
Sébastien Bournier: I find it’s strange that we only have this criticism from French people that hear that, That we have accents and I think it’s quality, too. Obviously,
Popular Culture Beat: I mean sure I mean as time goes on, there’s like the whole thing where what happens if everybody in the world, they lose their regional character? That’s not good either. You know, you guys are representing a European sound. You’re obviously not British, so it’s not going to be that. Well, what’s your response to these guys who say that?
Sébastien Bournier: I say ‘I don’t understand because it doesn’t seem to bother people from other countries.’ Actually, I don’t understand that criticism.
Popular Culture Beat: But it didn’t hurt Serge Gainsbourg, and he’s probably one of the most famous French singers.
Paul J. No: For my part I don’t care. Yeah, I don’t. I’m happy with what I’m singing and I’m happy when Sébastian is singing or Jean Philippe is singing I don’t mind the accent because what what I listen to is the musicality of the words and I don’t care about the accent really, and many times when you listen to Americans or English artists, they have accents too and I don’t mind.
Popular Culture Beat: Yeah, you may hear an American accent when Taylor Swift sings or something and you’re like ‘what’s wrong with Taylor? She doesn’t sound French.’. Yeah. No. But I have I have a couple bands who work in Slovenia, you know Eastern Europe and they have very strong accents and they seem — to just — you just gotta be yourself, you know?
Paul J. No: Yes. Yeah, that’s important.
Sébastien Bournier: Of course.
Part 2 of my Q & A with Lunear coming soon. In the meantime, my review of “From Above” is a Synthbeat.com.
Lunear Music Dot Com
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‘From Above’ On Apple Music
‘From Above’ On Spotify
‘From Above’ On Deezer
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Lunear Part 2 Interview
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