Alcest: Dawn Chorus
Since 2007’s pioneering Souvenirs d’un autre monde, French duo ALCEST have been at the forefront of what became blackgaze; marrying the wintery fury of black metal with major keys and beautiful, often yearning melodies to create something both extreme and uplifting. With this year’s Les Chants de l’Aurore, their seventh album, ALCEST have knowingly stepped back from the darkness of their previous two albums, Shelter and Kodama, to reaffirm their true intent; to make music that provides succour and comfort, particularly when the modern world is full of darkness. That’s partly why it took five years to make; that, plus mainman Neige’s self-confessed increasing perfectionism.
“It’s a very strange feeling,” he admits over Zoom as we catch up after he finishes band rehearsals. “It took us a bit more time to write these songs so maybe we do have a bit extra pressure. We’re super excited to get it out into the world, though.” This time, rather than having limited studio time, Neige and drummer Winterhalter opted to decamp to a house owned by Winterhalter’s family to immerse themselves fully in the recording process and take their time. “We don’t want to be the kind of band that takes less care about releasing good albums,” he smiles. “In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite.”
Moving their recording process to this house ultimately proved to be the best choice; instead of paying for limited studio time, the duo invested in a not-insignificant amount of recording gear that in some ways, harks back to how their first album came about. As Neige explains, “I actually recorded that in my parent’s basement… I had the shittiest equipment, but I guess we managed to do something with it.” From that learning experience, plus Winterhalter being, as Neige puts it, “a gear nerd” they had the foundations of their own studio.
The downside? “It’s a bit risky, neither of us are professionals.” But with Winterhalter spending “a lot of time on music forums and YouTube” plus Neige’s own experiments those years ago, along with the knowledge gained over six previous albums meant they could balance experimentation with experience as they wanted. In some ways, it’s a very ambitious album for the first time properly recording their own work. Where their two previous albums pared back to bass, guitar, drums, and vocals, this is a multi-layered album with multiple voices and orchestrations, with a greater emphasis on synthesisers.
From there, Neige explains that their approach this time was to allow those multiple layers as much breathing room as they could, and make the most organic-sounding album with the tools they had. “You can hear every dynamic, like every drum hit is different for instance. It lets everything live and breathe. It was about how to translate the emotions in the best way possible.” Sonically that’s a success, with the likes of Komorebi living up to its name (it translates roughly to “the scattered light that filters through when sunlight shines through trees”), or Flamme Jumelle that offer lush, bright takes on their transcendent blackgaze.
As with every ALCEST album, Les Chants de l’Aurore attempts to piece together and convey an experience Neige had as a child; a vision of another place, one infinitely more perfect and beautiful than our world he instinctively knew was not ours. “I had this urge to express my vision about spirituality, because of this strange and special experience that changed my life forever,” he explains. Where words failed to convey, music offered him the chance to convey emotions and his spirituality with far more nuance.
In that beginning, “music felt like such a place of freedom,” and as Neige smiles wanly, “nobody was waiting for me to release anything, they weren’t expecting anything of me.” But the more time passes, he’s “much more aware of what I write now” from melodies to chord progressions or tonality, but he feels a certain tension that makes him wonder if such early spontaneity can be recaptured. That’s what they’ve attempted to do with Les Chants…, and arguably they’ve succeeded, as there’s a certain childlike naivete that flows through its seven tracks.
That’s deliberate; given the darkness inherent in both Shelter and Kodama, which were particularly influenced, as Neige describes it, by the darkness in the world outside intruding into his creative life. In some ways they’re “the least ALCEST albums we’ve made” as they were less focused on his spiritual vision and “bringing people to a place of harmony,” but Les Chants… stands as a reaction to both those albums, as well as the darker world on his doorstep. “I really needed to go back to the sound of Souvenirs d’un autre monde,” Neige explains of the decision to create a much brighter album, though not one that directly echoes it.
“It’s a reaction to the extreme darkness we face every day. I didn’t want to go further into the darkness, I don’t need that in my creative life because it would make me feel worse. It’s a reaction to that and a way to cheer myself up, and hopefully, people will see that music can still bring you a bit of hope and serenity,” Neige says of the call to a more positive place that Les Chants de l’Aurore paints. With that said, he takes pains to indicate that it isn’t all light, despite the warm colours of the art and lush melodies.
The tension between harmony and underlying darkness is still very much present; rather than ascribing this to the outside world, Neige says it’s a tension he’s felt his whole life following his experience of this otherworldly, almost heavenly place. “It’s an everyday conflict between my spiritual self, which is the true essence of myself, and the part of myself that has experienced life here.” Life, for all its highs, also contains lows and negatives, and it’s the experience of those that Neige paints as in tension with his true self.
In part, this reprisal of ALCEST’s original purpose is why he called the album Les Chants de l’Aurore, or the Songs of Dawn. “This album feels like a rebirth for a few reasons. Partly because when COVID happened I didn’t have any inspiration, I didn’t write anything for about a year. I didn’t even know if I still wanted to do this, or if I still had things to say.” After that year off, the dam broke and music poured forth; Neige realised he did have this inner world as part of his life and still had more to say about it. “That’s why we have this concept of dawn and rebirth,” he explains.
The end result, after a year of no writing, then several years of honing the album in this house along with new equipment they bought, is Les Chants de l’Aurore. A triumphant reawakening of Neige’s purpose and inner world, as well as the first album they’ve recorded and mixed themselves, something he’s adamant they’ll continue to do now they’ve done it once and realised its benefits. More than ever, Neige has questions he wants to explore and with the world sinking ever deeper into the black, he wants to give people a hope they can cling onto.
Les Chants De L’Aurore is set for release on June 21st via Nuclear Blast Records.
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