INTERV IEW: Foxtrott

The French-Canadian producer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist tells James Russell how her background in film helps her connect the real world with the musical world… with the help, she admits, of a few rather cool synths

The Canadian musician tells us about sculpting the sound of her debut LP

You never quite know what’s coming next from Foxtrott. Marie-Hélène L Delorme has spun yarns of varying colours: a background in film sound had a big influence on the Foxtrott sound. Marie-Hélène’s other previous work includes production for Cadenza, Random Recipe, Jean-Michel Blais and Pierre Kwenders, among others, and her first album, A Taller Us, saw its release London label One Little Indian in 2015.

This year’s Meditations releases are something of a triptych, the Meditations I EP offering up nostalgic production values, and Meditations II pushing the sonic envelope with more experiments in rhythm and sampling. With the release of the third Meditations EP in October, and the completion of the full work, the Foxtrott pallette is becoming ever more sonically complex.

2015’s work was bombastic and ‘fun’, for want of a better word, but it also came with a sinister undercurrent, as though something serious was waiting to reveal itself (check out Colors, Shields). This complexity is coming into full view as the

Meditations series appears piece by piece. Better With You, for example, shows Marie-Hélène having arrived at a deeper level of musical exploration, melding mechanical musicality with darker sounds, deeper arrangement techniques, and a deeper sense of meaning.

We’re told you started creating the Meditations series in an isolated Mexican retreat…

“That was something I did so I could… shift my creative brain a bit. My music has very personal subjects, and it’s necessary for me to spend a lot of time alone to find the right spirit. Get isolated, write a bit everyday, and just… not talk – see what’s there in my brain. I have friends in Guadalajara, and they told me, ‘You have to go to Oaxaca, it’s amazing.’ I found a really good place to stay. I brought a super-small setup: just little portable monitors, computer, controller, mic. It was more of a writing retreat, I guess. The way I work is to do a lot of things at once, so that kickstarted a lot of the songs. For me, it was a way of channeling a new creative spirit. I didn’t want to be at the same place where I wrote the first album.”

What was it about the place that helped you get things moving?

“The light is very special over there, it’s really warm, and the colours and the smells… I get more inspired by those types of things than listening to other music. When I write I don’t listen to music – it’s more about feelings: a smell, or a state you’re in. That inspires me more to create. I have friends who are visual artists and graphic designers, and they always put on music when they need inspiration… but we can’t do that! That’s why the environment is really important. That’s what’s cool about having such portable setups now – you can physically be in an environment that can inspire you more than a typical studio.”

Did you also isolate yourself for the first album?

“Yeah, but it was different because it was at home! It was more around the house. But you know what it’s like when it’s your own place… I felt like I needed something else.”

You’ve used that environment more literally, too – there a few field recordings from your time there mixed into the songs...

“I’ve always integrated a lot of real sounds. The way I build my drum sounds, for example – that’s always from mixed sources. I have banks of Foley recordings and I use that a lot. I guess it’s a natural sensitivity, because I worked for many years as a sound engineer for film. I think that also changes the way I listen to things and to spaces – you develop a way to listen that’s not as selective.

“The presence of the field recordings in the new album is more to capture a feeling that was there. In the album, I was trying to work conceptually and have a contrast between inner life and the outer world. All the subjects of the songs are about that dynamic: the relationship between the inner space and the external world – sometimes you want to open up to it, and sometimes you want to retreat.

“Sound-wise, that’s why all the textures I used get quite deep – at certain moments in the songs there might be birds that come in, or noises like cars, pumping, police sirens. Back here in Montreal I have a window in my studio, with a train track outside, and I was working on a synth pad for one of the songs when a train passed by – it was perfectly merged in with the synth sound. Luckily I had a mic set up, so I just recorded it, and it became the synth sound for one of the tracks – you might not even realise until I tell you which sound it is.”

Don’t tell us – we’re going to go looking for it and see if we can identify it!

“There’s a lot of coincidences like that, and for me it’s more about feeling. With electronic music, we create it out of nothing, so it’s more like sculpture.”

What are the synths we’re hearing? They have some real personality…

“I have a little collection of late ’70s analogue synths that were made for consumers back then. I find them really cute. The synths I used most for the

Mediations songs were the Korg M500 Micro Preset, the MiniKorg 700, and an Elka Rhapsody.

“If you listen to them on their own, you could feel a bit limited, but it all depends on what you pass them through. I like things for their character, and merging it with other things so you don’t really know what it is. It’s just texture that I’m after.”

So it’s almost like you’re using a synth or two as individual oscillators, in a way, and then putting the signal through processing…

“That’s really how I work. Sometimes for bass sounds, I’ll make a sound with one of the older Korgs synths – they have a really pretty, warm sound that you can’t reproduce digitally – but then I’ll double it with different octaves, sub oscillators, so it becomes really fat and nice, but still has that crunch.”

What software do you use to capture and program all of this?

“Ableton mostly, but then Pro Tools for when I go into ‘deep audio’. When I record vocals or if I really want to do some editing. There are programmed drums on the album, but I also programmed patterns and did sessions with a drummer then mixed it with my own stuff. Everything’s very hybrid, but still has a feeling that’s a bit more natural. When I do things like that, I use Pro Tools more for audio precision.”

Do you tend to use Ableton as the creative platform and then go over to Pro Tools to get onto the mixing stage?

“Yeah, it’s good, mentally, to do that. When you work alone, it’s really important to divide the steps. I can really get caught up in a half-finished thing – for me, the real work is in committing to a certain decision – it really forces you to think about what’s going on. You can get so pumped about what you’re making, and then you’re not sure, and then you’re pumped again, and I could stay at that moment forever. So needing to bounce the tracks and shift them into another session, it really forces you to think about your decisions.

“For this album, I made most of the decisions before I bounced groups of stems. This left some looseness and meant I could make some structural decisions in the mix, and I really like that way of working. While mixing, you might get some insight about the different sections of the song and move or take out some elements from a section.

“I also did a lot of manipulation using hardware. I’d pass a whole group through a Space Echo and then manipulate it. The mixing part becomes very physical at that point. I really, really enjoyed that way of working, and it made it a bit more relaxed for the composition because you know there’s another chance later. I guess people worked more like that in the hip-hop world too. You have all the stems and the engineer will often make a structure out of it.”

As a solo artist, sometimes the moment you play your music for someone else is when you realise everything that’s wrong with it.

“Yeah! But also vice versa – sometimes you take something you don’t quite like to another place, and you realise that it really works. When you work with likeminded people, it adds to the whole process.”

You mentioned the coincidences that happen in the studio. Has the new Ableton Capture function helped you with things like that?

“I think it’s great. I mean, sometimes I forget it’s there!… but it’s such a useful thing, especially if you’re playing with the first ideas for a song. It’s often annoying to start with a tempo. Sometimes I just want to play something how I feel it – but maybe we’ll make the wrong decisions when we set the metronome first. Sure, we can switch it after, but sometimes it’s best to just get your hands on something, play chords or drums in, and then Capture that. This really sets the tempo a bit later, and it works really well.”

What about when it comes to working on your own vocals? How do you separate yourself from yourself during the mixing process?

“For this album, I did more stem mixing. I mix my stuff myself mostly, but I didn’t want to get into mixing the vocals myself because it’s too personal for me – I get self-conscious. Some people might be able to do it, but for me, I don’t want to. I do want to be with the person who does it, but it’s the same for recording vocals too – I don’t record my own, because I want to be focused on performance..

“I went to a really good mixing engineer, to mix the vocals and the stems together. It was like a co-mixing situation, and it was a really nice process for me too, psychologically, because at some point you need to get out of your own head. As a solo artist, even if you make it all happen yourself and it’s all self-produced, there’s a moment where having the right person in the room with you makes you take a step back.”

“Because I do production for others, my production muscle has become stronger”