YVES JARVIS
"THE ZUG"
24.06.2022
Anti- Records
Der kanadische Songwriter YVES JARVIS ist ein Künstler dessen Output keine kreativen Grenzen kennt. Ob nun Artfolk, Jazz, Indie Pop, Psychedelia, Rockelemente.... kein Stil und kaum eine Klangfarbe, die es nicht lohnt eingebunden zu werden.
Yves Jarvis kündigt sein neues Album 'The Zug‘ an, das am 13. Mai über ANTI- / Flemish Eye erscheinen wird. Wie die vielen anderen Werke von Jarvis ist auch "The Zug" ein komplett selbst produziertes Projekt. Von der Instrumentierung über die Technik bis hin zum Artwork hat der Autodidakt eine Bastion für avantgardistische Erkundungen geschmiedet, in der keine Grenzen gesetzt sind. Diese kreativen Medien verschmelzen zu einer höheren Ordnung des Bewusstseins und stellen den kosmischen Tanz dar, den wir sowohl innerlich
repräsentieren als auch äußerlich mitmachen.
“Written from the soul in an inscrutable and endearing sonic language.” - The Fader
"Die erste Strophe beschreibt sowohl die Evolutionsbiologie als auch die Psychologie "für den Fall, dass es eine Gelegenheit gibt, zu einer höheren Form des Seins zu verschmelzen, sieh mir zu, wie ich aus dem Substrat darunter heraus stiefele", erklärt Jarvis, während er den Text aufschlüsselt. "Bootstrap Jubilee" ist das Gedenken an mein 25. Jahr auf der Erde, aber die gesamte Menschheit wird in Strophe 1 für die Errungenschaft des Seins gefeiert. Strophe 2 ist ein persönlicher Bericht über meine Kindheit: "Geboren 1996 mit einem unmittelbaren Widerwillen zu existieren" und einem Ausflug in die Künste: "Busking auf der Straße erwies sich als lukrativ - ich knüpfte Verbindungen im lokalen Umkreis" und "rieb mich mit den Künstlern, die wir verehrten, und kletterte die Sprossen einer Musikkarriere hinauf."
Als produktiver Künstler assoziierte Jarvis früher eine Farbe mit jeder Albumveröffentlichung: 'Good Will Come To You' von 2017 war morgentlicher gelber Optimismus, 'The Same But By Different Means' von 2019 eine mitternachtsblaue Kontemplation und 'Sundry Rock Song Stock' von 2020 ist durchdrungen vom natürlichen Zustand des Grüns. "Sundry Rock Song Stock' packt eine bemerkenswerte Vielfalt an Klängen in seine 33 Minuten, eröffnet mit den perlenden Becken und chime-artigen Rhodes-Patterns von Miles Davis um 'In A Silent Way' und schließt mit einer geflüsterten Doo-Wop-Andacht, die sich immer in einem Pool von biolumineszierenden Synth-Ambientes auflöst oder in einen Krach von scheppernden Samples ausbricht, gerade wenn man erwartet, dass sie sich für den nächsten Refrain aufraffen", rief Pitchfork zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung aus.
Mit seinem jugendlichen Überschwang und seiner Überheblichkeit erinnert der 25-jährige Jarvis an einen Bowie aus der Mitte der 1970er Jahre, wenn er mit spürbarer Überzeugung und Entschlossenheit opernhaft brüllt. The Zug" ist manchmal ein Stadionspektakel, manchmal ein Flüstern. Von der Geburt bis zum Tod feiern und trauern wir, hier wird diese Bandbreite an Gefühlen zu einem einzigen Motiv verdichtet. Die Schichten des Seins werden gespreizt, um die Beziehungsnetze zu verdeutlichen, in denen wir uns befinden. Jarvis appelliert gekonnt an unsere Sinne, ohne uns zu bevormunden.
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Band: Yves Jarvis
Album: Sundry Rock Song Stock
VÖ: 25.09.2020
Label/Vertieb: ANTI- / Indigo
Website: https://www.yvesjarvis.com/
On Sundry Rock Song Stock, Yves Jarvis continues to refine his creative approach to the core of his being, where music and life intertwine in harmonious fashion. The latest album from the Montreal-based musician fuses genre elements into a symbiotic relationship where wistful folk, tender R&B, pastoral prog, and musique concrète experiments feed into one another to grow lush new forms. Though he maintains an air of mystery with his lyrics, Jarvis’s whisper-soft words can be interpreted as both deeply personal and politically motivated in ways we haven’t heard from him before.
Resuming the practice of color theory that informed his 2017 album Good Will Come To You (morning yellow optimism) and 2019’s The Same But By Different Means (midnight blue contemplation), Sundry Rock Song Stock is infused with the natural state of green. As Jarvis explains, it’s the color he most closely connects to his personality, moving beyond an aesthetic attraction into feelings of wildness, boundless energy, and an anti-establishment streak permeating his 23 years on the planet.
“I experienced a musical breakthrough with that bright, easy sound of my last two albums,” says Jarvis. “It felt good to make at the time, but it counters my essence. People think I’m calm, but I’m very not calm, and I’m happy to elaborate on it now. This album came together exceptionally easy in reaction to that nighttime shit. This green is epitomized. This album is reduced.”
While The Same But By Different Means stretches out across 22 sonic sketches ranging in length from 14 seconds to eight minutes, Sundry Rock Song Stocks takes a more traditional approach with its 10 concise tunes. Jarvis’s preferred self-contained process found him recording every instrument, mixing the album, and even painting the portrait on its cover. The only outside contribution came from engineer Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire, Basia Bulat, Peter Gabriel), who helped roll tape while Jarvis played drums.
As a pre-teen street corner busker, some of Jarvis’s earliest performances took place outside. He returned to an open-air environment for this album’s creation, setting up a makeshift studio to lay down its foundation of guitar, Nord synth, and Rhodes electric piano. Recording on a reel-to-reel tape machine, he experimented with various off-kilter techniques including a softly tapped steel drum drenched in effects, or melodies played on a wine glass meant to mimic a flute. “I want my recordings to be naturalist, so from that sense I am ideally making them outside,” says Jarvis. “More than a musician or a singer, I’m a producer, and any studio I’m in will become my bedroom. Creation is my life and I don’t compartmentalize it at all.”
Since his earliest home recordings, Jarvis has taken a Sun Ra inspired attitude with windows left wide open so every sound that filters into his songs becomes part of them. However, he also approached this album with a newfound sense of intention, drawing on the meticulous methods of progressive rock groups King Crimson and Yes, whose epic compositions conjure the vast landscapes of the British countryside. “Their music is not really songwriting,” says Jarvis. “It’s cycling motifs and vignettes. I think of it like a room that you can walk into and then out of.”
Other influences on Sundry Rock Song Stock include Miles Davis, Italian avant-pop composer Franco Battiato, and Dutch post-punk band The Ex, who fuse radical politics with melodic, body-moving grooves. Jarvis may be less direct in his lyrics, but makes his feelings implicit through the use of vivid metaphors. Recording vocals in a free-associative, phonetic stream of consciousness that he compares to Lil Wayne, Jarvis says the meanings behind his songs are revealed when a poetic turn of phrase tumbles off his tongue.
“Victim” alludes to intergenerational racism and violence, as he sings, “I’m a victim of the same old stuff my father was,” before warning, “I’m a vitriolic mass of dynamite just bound to ignite.” On “For Props,” Jarvis fires back at a wealthy class that “can’t empathize or reciprocate,” alongside others in his social circles “pandering for props.” Jealousy and judgemental behaviour earn his ire on “Semula,” with its exhausted opening lines: “It’s your aim to shame me / just please spare me your sanctimony.” Happily, the album closes on a note of contentment with the softly swaying love song “Fact Almighty,” paying tribute to the romantic partner with whom Jarvis shares an ongoing evolution: “I depend on you and you on me / from insular growth one will bloom.”
“When you better yourself, you better the world,” Jarvis concludes. “Even if you only interact with one person in your life, the effect of trying to see things for what they are is vast. Change can feel like a fantasy, but I’m not fatalistic about it. I make music because I get results that way. It’s why I promote creativity, whatever that means for anyone.”
– Jesse Locke
Weitere Infos zur vorherigen VÖ:
Band: Yves Jarvis
Album: The Same But By Different Means
VÖ: 01.03.2019
Label/Vertrieb: Anti / Indigo
Bandwebsite: https://www.yvesjarvis.com/
Idiosyncrasies are both blessing and curse. In a certain light, they’re the purest expression of our existences: chaotic, marred by imperfections, irrational, beautiful and resilient all the same. Yves Jarvis knows this. His music is idiosyncratic neither by design or by chance; it just is. It mutates and shifts, as he does, through cycles and phases. Yves Jarvis’ new record, The Same But By Different Means, is a new cycle.
Yves Jarvis is itself a clean slate, a recasting of Montreal-based musician Jean-Sebastian Audet. Audet previously created under the name Un Blonde, a name which he says was, at one point, all he wanted. “I felt like I had found, finally, phonetically, the perfect project name with Un Blonde,” he says. “I thought it evoked the proper imagery for all the shit I wanted to do.”
But of course, things change. “Now I’m at a place where I feel like when I hear it, I don’t like it because I don’t identify with it at all,” he continues. “I knew I needed something that I could identify with.” Each aspect of Audet’s work is immensely personal, and Yves Jarvis reflects this literally. Yves is Audet’s middle name, while Jarvis is his mother’s last name.
With The Same But By Different Means, Audet continues to create music that is at once warm, haunting, and unfamiliar while remaining singularly inviting and kind—a mélange that reflects both comfort and its counterpart. Un Blonde’s 2017 LP Good Will Come To You was celebrated universally for those things that make Audet’s work compelling: careful folk noir, tender R&B flourishes, pillowy vocal beds that somehow seem to neither begin nor end, and a punkish ambivalence towards saccharine melodics that traditionally dominate the previous three structures.
These same qualities are present across The Same But By Different Means, a record that builds a delightful, imaginative framework from which to explore what it means to be Yves Jarvis. Songs on the record range from 14 seconds long to over eight minutes. The record’s title is itself a step further: with each new project, Audet adds a word to the title. “This year is my transition into Yves Jarvis where I’m not only widening the scope, but deepening the picture altogether.”
Each of his releases is informed and driven by a colour. It is both a visual and thematic leitmotif, a palette that reflects and refracts intentions. Good Will Come To You was yellow, which Audet cites as his favourite colour. It is, for him, the colour of the daytime. “I find the day so beautiful and something that I want to participate in,” he says.
Blue, the colour of The Same But By Different Means, is less endearing. “Blue is more so the colour that I think is imposed on me,” he remarks quietly. “Where the last record was the joy of the morning, and optimism, this record is the pain of the night before sleep. I find it so painful before sleep, and this midnight blue is what this whole world is. The night is just completely imposed and weighing so heavy, and this is a much more difficult realm to walk around in, texturally.”
“Fruits of Disillusion,” the record’s 12th track, inhabits this aura totally. “It still weighs so heavy on me/Still unfurling, ever unfurling,” he coos in a beautiful, breathy rasp before shakers and organ arrive like the promise of morning light. Audet says it’s the track that revealed what he was trying to get at. “That feeling exactly was really articulated when that track came together,” he says. “What it was, was just sweeping away that everything: getting rid of everything, and leaving that palette open, completely open, cycling.”
Meanwhile, “That Don’t Make It So,” offers an alternative. It starts to life with a stuttering bass
groove and cheeky keys, over which Audet challenges in layered, slightly-staggered vocal harmonies, “Society has set that tone but that don’t make it so/Despite how it appears to you, that don’t make it true.” These are the only words in the song—it runs less than two minutes yet still manages to burst with beautiful horn melodies, mirrored by Audet’s voice and laced with record scratches. “What is comfortably hesitant in ‘Fruits of Disillusion’ is then really more enthusiastically leaned into,” he explains.
The second half of the record, he says, is unrest. “It’s unrest, but it’s that spectrum of unrest so there is meditation there. It’s not always chaos, but sometimes it is.”
This tonal discord extended to the physical process of creating the record, which spanned three years of stop-and-start capturing of sound, relinquishing of possible career paths, and demos both scrapped and salvaged. Audet’s gear is essential to his vision—they are the means. But his most prized equipment broke down frequently while he was recording. ”Everything falling apart, all the time,” he deadpans. This included a quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape machine which he used to capture and manipulate samples with the built-in echo. (Audet specifically sampled music so as to avoid working with other artists.) Audet’s attempts to fix it ended in him dropping a lighter in the machine, which is still there to this day. “It jingles around every time I turn it on,” he laughs. Idiosyncrasies reign supreme.
These constraints rear their heads on the record in various ways. “Time And Place” is a 40second chant-and-stomp to shakers and a thumping drum. “Two things that’s here to say/Time and place,” Audet howls. He explains, “Where these constraints may weigh negatively on one’s sense of freedom, they’re also super significant in terms of allowing our aspirations to manifest. Time and place is just so significant in everything we do. This is such an important consideration and acknowledgment. These constraints allow for certain paths to be laid.”
“Talking Or Listening” comes near the end of The Same But By Different Means, a contemplative track that captures the dichotomy Audet hopes the record conveys. “You can’t take the wheel just to prove something,” he croons. Later he queries, “Where is what I’m missing?/And which way there: is it talking or listening?” The track, like much of the record, is at once minimalist and maximalist: Audet’s voice, massive and layered, occupies the space above an ambient hum of organ and noise. The track closes with the sounds of a vehicle idling and accelerating alongside a cicada’s buzz.
Asked for a message he hopes his listeners receive, Audet simply says, “I really have to ask: talking or listening? That’s all I want to ask with anything I do now, I think. It’s this spectrum and it’s this dichotomy that I’m interested in exploring. Both sides of everything, and everything in between.”
Jean-Sebastian Audet presents Yves Jarvis. The same, but by different means
