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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Turzi
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 19 October 2009
Hailing from France, Turzi are a five-piece rock band led by Romain Turzi. Signing to the Air-founded Record Makers label in 2005, they released their debut EP, ‘Made Under Authority’, written and recorded by Romain in his kitchen, the same year. The debut album, ‘A’, followed in 2007. Turzi define their sound as ‘rock disciplinaire’, with their most noticeable influences situated in krautrock and progressive rock. Their second album, ‘B’, is out on 26 Oct and features vocal cameos from Bobby Gillespie and Brigitte Fontaine, as well as remixes by Sebastian Tellier. The band are set to play the Borderline in London on 20 Oct along with Teeth Of The Sea and Don’t Wait Animate. We spoke to Romain to find out more.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
When we were kids, my friend Sky took the drums, Arthur took the bass, and Judah the keyboards, so I was left with playing guitar. My first guitar heroes were Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore, because they would not use a guitar like it’s supposed to sound, but with a personal approach. For a beginner, it’s more interesting to bang a guitar with a drumstick than to learn your craft, trying to emulate solos by Slash. The other turning point was My Bloody Valentine, a guitar band on whose album nothing sounded like guitars at all. We generally listen to bands that try to create their music by starting from scratch instead of jumping on someone else’s train. There are masters, and followers.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Voyage. Travelling with your mind. Each track is named after a city (starting with the letter B), so that the listener will be in a certain mood, we’re guiding their ears to a geographical place they’ve likely never been to. We didn’t want to ghettoize our music in one genre. Our first album, ‘A’, was widely described as krautrock when it was more than that, so we tried to open up the scope, because what matters to us is not the destination but how you get there. The most important thing for us is our personal approach, even if the tracks end up being different genres of music, they’re made with the same approach, and sound like nothing but ourselves, thanks to our savoir faire. Call it as you want, we call it ‘Camembert Rock’.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
The most important thing is spontaneity. We’re not about being technical or structured, but about mood, about how it makes you feel, levitate, travel.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
There are masters and followers. Perrotin le Grand, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Ravi Shankar, the Stooges, Hawkwind, Manuel Göttsching, Peter Baumann, Joel Vandroogenbroek, Ennio Morricone, Jean-Michel Jarre, John Cale and his former band, are masters. But our music is guided more by feelings than by trying to reproduce something we like. We play for our own pleasure, if it works it ends up on the album, otherwise we throw it in the garbage can (or on MySpace).
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Play this record as loud as possible, as stoned as impossible, and thank you everybody. Warning: only play this record once a day or your brain might be destroyed. Record Makers take no responsibility if you don’t follow these orders.
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
To reach out to a wider audience – without compromise. We wanna get out of the circle of people who like us because they share our references or collect analog synths, we wanna open up the minds of others. The album must be played in full, not individual tracks, because the different styles explored only make sense in the context of the whole album. Sorry, iTunes.
MORE>> www.myspace.com/turzi