Five For Friday with Gaëtan C. of BRUME

Pink Floyd – Careful With That Axe Eugene

I was quite young when I became interested in the darker, more experimental works of Pink Floyd. This track still blows me away with its slightly disturbing ambience, the swaying effect brought about by the bass, the jazzy groove of the cymbal playing, Richard Wright’s dark keyboard and the progressiveness of the whole, with Roger Waters moving from whispers to howls. It’s a far cry from Pink Floyd’s most “approachable” work, with this piece of “rock in opposition”, unconventional rock in mood, structure and length. It reminds me of Godspeed You! Black Emperor would do later, or A Silver Mt Zion and the track “One Million Died to Make This Sound”, whose structure is comparable to that of Pink Floyd’s here. A clear source of inspiration for the generations that followed…

The Cure – Prayers For Rain

The Cure is the band that got me into music in the first place. So it was unthinkable not to choose a song from their discography. But it’s no easy task, as their discography is so extensive, with so many remarkable albums. Like “Pornography” and, later, “Wish”, the album “Disintegration” made a big impression on me. For me, it’s perhaps their best album in that it perfectly encapsulates everything Cure do best. The balance between cold, dark post-punk tracks, in the vein of “Pornography”, “Faith”, “Seventeen Seconds”, and “pop” tracks, which Robert Smith seems to try to do on every album to satisfy the band’s different audiences, is perfect here. The darkness, poetry and melody are sublime. It’s hard not to talk about the album as a whole, because it’s such a masterpiece. It’s also hard to choose just one track. I could just as easily have chosen “Plainsong”, “Pictures of You” or “Fascination Street”…

Slowdive – 40 days

The exercise of choosing five songs is a complicated one… I’ve already had to choose five bands, which isn’t easy. I remember listening to “40 Days” a lot after a break-up. My first girlfriend, with whom I’d spent a good part of my teenage years, had left me, and I think I found a lot of comfort in that song, which I identified with. Music has the power to make us feel less alone. It was a bit like therapy for me. It made me feel less sad to understand, through music, that other people could be going through the same thing, and also to be able to make the best of this suffering by transforming it into music, as a way of getting a grip on it. On the other hand, the band’s sound, and more generally the “shoegaze” aesthetic, especially the “reverb” ingredient, is something that means a lot to me, in my approach to the guitar and the sound developed in my music.

Mogwai – Hunted By a Freak

When I was younger, I’d sometimes go on vacation in the summer with some musician uncles who lived with me. They had a small music studio and always had lots of records for me to listen to. Each time, I had a sort of “rock vacation”, after which I grew in my musical culture. One summer, I brought back Mogwai’s “Happy Songs For Happy People” album. I was discovering Sigur Ros around the same time. I saw similarities in their approach and sound, and I was soon to fall into what seemed to be called “post-rock”. This was in the mid-2000s. When I first listened to “Hunted By a Freak”, something big happened. I realized that I wanted to compose this kind of thing. I realized I wanted to create music that was atmospheric, deeply immersive, often melodic, progressive, melancholy, even intimate, sometimes bright, sometimes dark, sometimes noisy and disturbing. That’s how I discovered Mogwai, and got a slap in the face. Since then, they’ve become one of the most important bands for me, perhaps the band I’ve seen most live, along with Mono, no doubt.

Explosions in the Sky – First Breath After Coma

Following in the footsteps of Mogwai and the “post-rock” effect that felt like a revelation, I had a stunning aesthetic experience with this band, the kind of experience that changes you forever. A friend had given me the album “The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place”, which I still consider to be one of the most important of its kind. The first track, “First Breath After Coma”, reveals very fine, meticulous writing, moving melodies, unparalleled emotion, power, with soaring guitars and drums, an epic, fabulous dimension deployed throughout the album. The poetry of the highly evocative tracks plunges listeners into a universe of unfolding shapes and colors, as if the themes sketched out in the highly suggestive tracks were coming to life to explode in our ears. Explosions in the Sky, with this album, is one of the bands that have made the biggest impression on me, and whom I still admire today. It’s possible that if I had to choose just one album, it would be this one, as an absolute masterpiece, the ultimate album I would have wanted to write.