If the idea of a Montreal artist brings anything to mind it’s out pourings of bleak post rock drone and lo-fi indie noise, and certainly not Ghislain Poirier’s bombastic bass heavy productions. Montreal’s Poirier pioneers a tweaked take on production that uses musical echoes from the global south, alongside the best elements of the dark side of raves decade long come down.
He hits Dublin in promotion of his latest album No Ground Under, out on Ninja Tune who he just signed to. What he’ll be bringing with him is a style of DJ-ing crafted at his notorious Bounce Le Gros parties in Montreal. It’s a method that encourages dance floors to shake their ass first, trusting that their minds will eventually follow on his rampages through tasty morsels of soca, grime, dubstep, crunked up US hip hop and whatever else the global ghetto jumps to.
You just signed to Ninja Tune, how did you hook up with them? I understand they have an office in Montreal?
Yeah, they have their North American office in Montreal. And I know a couple of people on the label already. I mean, it’s interesting Montreal is little in a sense, so we bump into each other at the parties or concerts and stuff like that, and they knew I was looking for another label. So it was just natural, they invited me to some of their parties and gigs, to play and stuff so it was just a matter of time to set it up properly. So I signed in May 2007 and the album came out in Canada in October, so when I signed it was almost done.
Was Ninja Tune a label that influenced you in the past?
Well yeah, maybe mid 1990’s until 2000, it was a label that I was following a lot. Those were the years where I was mostly listening to a lot of music. Early 2000, I started to do music. I’m pretty happy with the direction they are taking. They signed The Bug too, and the fact they have the Bug and me is a good thing. I share a stage with the Bug and we have a lot of things in common, and we are good friends too.
Wayne and Wax talks about this idea of “global ghettotech” – does this apply to you or is it something that you’d resist?
Ah global ghettotech yes! It’s funny because I know Wayne and Wax personally, so that term is, I don’t know, an inside joke? An attempt to define something for fun – I don’t know if we can define, or if there is a theme about ‘us’ – or who ‘us’ is! I just know there’s some musical brothers who are interested in the same thing, and tonight Maga Bo is playing in Montreal and he’s a good friend too. And we share some interest in music and each one has a particular angle depending on their past. So the term global ghettotech, I know exactly what Wayne is referring to – but is it a movement or something, I don’t know yet. I don’t know if we should apply a term to it, if it’s that strong yet or whether we need a term. We are just a couple of people that are really interested in it. We are in the middle, we don’t fit the house club environment though we can play there, we’re not rock, we’re not hip hop exactly but we play it. We are not into the sound system stuff but we play it too, we are a little bit of everything. Wherever it is coming from, if it is good, it is good.
In Montreal you organised the Bounce le Gros parties, can you tell me about them?
I did it for two years, the last one was in June 2007. When I started the main goal of the party was to play whatever I wanted, it wasn’t to just stick on one style but to play what I feel is good to play, to play some music with bass wherever it’s coming from. And play it in an environment where there is no club attitude, but more ‘lets go dancing, go crazy’. It wasn’t about showing off, more about doing a proper party. Most of the people that came to the night were superamazed, because it was really little – it’s not like there was a thousand people there man. When I’m Djing I just replicate what I learnt over there.
You called it a day on Bounce Le Gros, what brought that about?
Well I wanted to end it on a peak! Also I was real interested in touring with my live project, with the drummer Christopher Olsen. By having a monthly it’s pretty hard sometimes to set up a schedule to tour with Bounce Le Gros. If I wanted I could still run it today and it would be full. I proved what I need to prove, other nights started from the Bounce Le Gros night when other people realized they could do it.
What does your live drummer bring to the show? Some of your tracks are pretty frantically paced like Doi Festival, how does he manage?
It’s really cool. We’ve been playing together for like three years, and the past year we really improved together. We’re kind of like a massive rhythm section, I didn’t= have to create a place for him. I kept my drums, I kept my bass and my sounds and he’s just like on it, he’s such a good drummer and loud. It’s really fun, because we are both playing beats, so it’s pretty massive.
Going back to Montreal for a moment, you organised some pretty big one off raves under some bridge over the summer, can you tell me about that?
It was an idea by Sixtoo, he’s part of the Megazoid project. We did it for the first time in May 2007, and he did the second one in June which happened to be on the national day in Quebec, it’s called St Jean Baptiste. That day is crazy in Quebec, it’s a celebration day. He had some sort of a van sound system and a generator, we decided to go under an underpass in Montreal and it’s pretty central. We set up the soundsystem over there and we were lucky that the police let us play for two hours, as it was the national day in Quebec. If it was elsewhere in Canada the police wouldn’t have let it happen.
And how did you start to move away from making what was seen as down tempo and ambient hip hop to what you are doing today? Your first two albums sound drastically different to your latest release. Was that a conscious thing?
I started right at the beginning but I didn’t release it. It was more like a public change but wasn’t a personal change. I was trying to find my way and be sure of what I was doing with the beat stuff. When I started to release more of the heavy down tempo fat beats, slowly I was more interested in switching tempos. I don’t want to do music at only one tempo or BPM, I’d find that a little bit ridiculous. As when you touch faster or slower speed you can play with more variety of style. By Djing and having the Bounce Le Gros night, I got more interested in the faster tempo and No Ground Under is a clear reflection of that interest.. But I’m still interested in tracks like War War War, they paint a link with the past too.
Do you bring a politics into your music? I’m thinking of the track Go Ballistic where the MC, I think he’s called Ardominal, talks about ‘fighting oppression with the bass and the treble.’ Do you see yourself doing something similar with your productions, or is the politics something that more that the MCs might bring in? Well that MC is called Zulu on that album. Go Ballistic will be the third single off the album. We are just about to release No More Blood as the second single, and now we are collecting remixes for Go Ballistic. I’ve always been a little bit political, I don’t want to be like into morals or stuff like that, but I do believe you can be really deep and funny on the same album, sometimes even on the same track. And ‘Go Ballistic’ is like a party anthem, but if you listen closely to the verses as you said, there’s some more deeper stuff in there. The sound is like party, but there is some deep stuff in there. And I really like that opposition on the same track and the same album.
DJ Rupture brings a pretty sharp eye to any discussion around ‘global ghettotech’. He often makes points about the sensitivities of people using music from the global south, and misusing it – do you ever have any considerations of that in your work? Or do you think people are putting borders on music where really the music struggles to over come such a stifling of human relationships?
Ah no, I think you… it’ll sound a little bit cheesy what I’m going to say, but when you do it with honesty and not trying to show off but do it with good reason then it will show. Like this track on No More Blood, I put this exclusive new track called Ignadjossi on the single, and its featuring this rapper from Niger, called Jhonel and we collaborated on that track and I think it’s awesome. And he’s still in Africa and never travelled outside of Africa. It just happened that I had a friend over there that recorded him for me. I feel really comfortable in my position of doing music, I feel everything is possible. Even when I do soca music, Trinidad people come to me and they are really feeling it. So it depends on how you are doing it, I don’t know why it is good for me and not good for other people. I just know that it’s okay for me, and I’m not in a position to judge.
Can you give people in Dublin some idea of what to expect from a Ghislain set?
Well it’s going to be a DJ set, so all over the place. It always depends, I don’t set it ahead. I play ragga, heavy ragga. Heavy hip hop, I can play dubstep, soca, and grime. It just depends on the feeling of the party, it depends on the crowd and it depends on me. It’s just trying to do something that is logical and bringing my own sound in at the same time and playing exclusive remixes. It’s always like that. It’ll be a surprise.
