eMusic Selects: Victoire
Featured Album
Victoire are technically the first “classical” eMusic Selects artist, but part of what makes them so special is how thoroughly inadequate this tag feels in summing them up. The best artists defy categories, and the five young women who comprise Victoire — composer Missy Mazzoli, violinist Olivia De Prato, clarinetist Eileen Mack, keyboardist Lorna Krier and bassist Eleonore Oppenheim — have made a life’s work of dodging classifications. Their roving musical lives all began in classical music, sure, but they have strayed far and wide from this path, soaking up Minimalism and punk rock and reggae and indie rock and electronic music and everything else imaginable. Mazzoli, who writes the music, did time in hardcore bands in high school and college, has written for orchestra and worked with Downtown legends like Meredith Monk as well as the revered European maverick Louis Andriessen. Eleonore Oppenheim, who performs with the Philip Glass Ensemble, seems to have a different band for every day of the week. The other members have similarly packed schedules.
All of their itinerant wanderings can be heard in the gorgeously elusive music they make. Not exactly modern classical, ambient electronic or chamber music, Victoire have decamped in a newly settled, sparsely populated inter-genre space, a space where shimmering electronics mingle with mournful violin and clarinet lines, where Philip Glass‘s icy repetitive figures find themselves melted by warm surges of keyboard. Theirs is a vivid, sometimes unsettlingly evocative sound world, one that feels as private and inscrutable as the unnamable emotions it recalls.
We sat down with them in bassist Eleonore’s apartment to talk about their enigmatic and fantastic new EP, Door Into the Dark, about what it means to be neither here nor there and about their brilliantly checkered musical pasts.
So, how did you guys get started?
Missy Mazzoli: Well, I’m a composer, but I’ve wanted to have a band forever. I really, really missed performing. More than that, I just missed being a part of this crazy New York scene — being able to play music in clubs and galleries and bars and whatever. I also didn’t like always having other people decide when my music was played. But I didn’t know what my band was going to look like, or how it would be special. You know, these days everyone has, like, a classical music/indie-rock hybrid…
Well, not everyone has one…
Missy: [laughs]
Eleonore Oppenheim: Everyone who is anyone!
Missy: It feels like everyone! There’s just this proliferation of these groups right now, so I was like, well, whatever I do has to be really different. And then I had this epiphany — I could clearly see the band and the instrumentation, and it was this vision of all girls. And it helps that all of my friends who are the best players happen to be girls.
Eleonore: We’re like the Heart of indie-classical! [Laughs]
How did you all originally meet?
Eileen Mack: Lorna, Missy and I met in 2002 at the very first Bang on a Can summer institute.
Yeah, you guys all spent time in that world, right?
Missy: Totally. All three of those composers [David Lang, Julie Wolfe and Michael Gordon, co-founders of Bang on a Can] are hugely influential to me. We’re not trying to be the next Bang on a Can or anything, because they’re very much of a different generation, of a time and place, and we’re doing something different. But I don’t know what my life would have been like without them! Because they really did pave the way, and I don’t know if we would even all have met if it weren’t for that summer institute and that scene for young people that they managed to create.
Eileen: I wouldn’t have come to this country without them! I moved to this country because I saw Bang on a Can on TV.
Missy: What!? I didn’t know that!
Eileen: I was at my parents ‘house in Australia, and my mom tells me there’s something cool on television, and they were airing some New York composers ‘documentary showing the Bang on a Can All-Stars rehearsing “Cheating, Lying, Stealing” in David Lang’s apartment. I just said, “Holy shit.” I got all their CDs and then learned about the summer institute from a friend, and that’s what decided it for me.
Eleonore: Those guys paved the way in so many ways for us. Personally, I never thought it was “okay” to be doing what I was doing. Like, I was doing so many different things, genre-wise — I came from a jazz background, and rock and roll had always been something I had been doing; I played upright, electric, I wrote songs — just whatever, you know? And I always thought I had to “select” something, because that’s what music school does to you: it tells you that you have to find a focus otherwise you’ll never “make it.” And what Bang on a Can does for young musicians and composers is to tell you that you don’t have to choose. You can make a career out of doing exactly what it is that you do, which is everything. You can play the saw, and washboard, and violin, and sing, or you can compose at night and play in a bad blues-rock fusion band by day if you want.
Do you ever think about where your music “fits”?
Missy: I think about it a lot. I always have the same thought pattern, and it’s like a circle. It starts when I’m trying to figure out where we’re going to play a gig, or trying to figure out who’s going to release our album. Even the next song, or piece, or whatever you want to call it, that I’m going to write, where to start from. I always have this question: “It would be a lot easier if we had this specific genre.” But then my next thought is: Wait, that would defeat the very purpose of writing music that exists in this crack, in this imagined world. It’s kind of like our very mission is to not be defined in one or two words. It’s fun being enigmatic. It’s fun not really being able to be pinned down.
There are so many bands like that, though! Whenever I get angsty about categories, I think about bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor! or the Dirty Projectors. It sounds like they just don’t give a shit, like they are totally free from having to stuff themselves in a genre.
Olivia De Prato: This is the first “band” I’d say I’ve been in. I’ve played contemporary music for years, but I’d never played in a group that didn’t have either a conductor, or wasn’t a more traditional chamber-music set up before this. If friends ask me to describe Victoire, I have a hard time knowing what to say. I just say, “OK, let me just play you something.”
Eileen: I have another group that combines pop music and classical music. And we were doing a gig last night and our cellist is like, “You know, I feel a little bit uncomfortable doing a gig because it’s like we’re not really a chamber ensemble and we’re not really a rock ensemble. It’s like we’re living in some space between.” I was like, “Yeah. That’s the point.” [Laughs.] “You obviously haven’t read our mission statement!”
So let’s talk about the EP! What really struck me when listening to it is that there’s something determinedly small-scale, something intimate, about the music, something that feels specific to intensely personal memories.
Missy: Yeah! It’s more about nostalgia than memories. Because I’m not specifically writing songs about things that happened to me, and the recordings that I use, like for example, “I am coming to get my things” uses that recording on an answering machine. It’s not like my aunt or something, it’s just something I found. But that it evoked such a strong emotion in me, hearing that recording, it’s so sad, and so creepy and so…alone. To hear this woman, and imagining what this woman had to — the position that she was in, to leave that desperate message on this answering machine. It just got me thinking, it’s really about creating false memories, creating this world that doesn’t really exist.
Olivia: Because Missy knows us all so well, she writes with us specifically in mind, as people. We discuss everything. And that ‘s part of what makes it sound so intimate. Because it is!
Missy: I want our music to be at once very familiar and personal, but also something that you’ve obviously never heard before. So that’s where we exist, on that line, between things that are comfortable and beats that you’ve heard a million times, but overlapped with a violin line that’s totally strange and from another planet.
Eleonore: And that’s kind of like the point of a good rock song. It should be something that seems vaguely familiar or nostalgic but without being something specific. You know what I mean?
It evokes nostalgia for something you can’t quite put your finger on, yeah. Speaking of “I am coming for my things” — did that piece start with the piece of sampled speech that you use there? Does the slightly disturbed instrumental interlude that follows elaborate on that?
Missy: Sure. I imagine this band kind of emerging from the static of the answering machine. The interesting thing about that piece is that in the middle is this total poppy, repetitive, even happy-sounding section. And then at the end it becomes a little more disturbed again and the harmonies kind of fall apart.
“Like A Miracle” feels very — and this is a term that basically I want to shoot myself in the face whenever I use — but it feels very IDM to me. The electronics have that same sort of incredibly precise, almost painterly attention to sonic detail and thought about what every little flicker of sound might do.
Missy: It’s so interesting to hear you say that, because for me, “Like a Miracle” comes out of my obsession with gamelan music, but for much of the same reasons you were talking about — the attention to detail, these weird forms, this repetition that repeats until it doesn’t repeat and there’s a cut-off phrase of seven bars or something, no one plays for a little bit and then everyone comes in with these weird times. That’s all from gamelan, but it’s also from Aphex Twin, you know? We were totally coming from a different place but ending up at the same place.
And with the same effects. But the sounds to me, that twittering little sound that pans back and forth to me is very…it just feels like that headphone space that you only get when you’re really locked into an electronic record. What kind of electronic music influences you?
Lorna: I’m really into Add N to X. I’m a huge Aphex Twin fan, too. But I also like seeing all these new bands that have the “normal” band set-up; they have the guitarist, the drummer, the bassist. But then, they also have the electronics dude. That’s new, and I think that’s a really great development I think all the bands that we’re all into have that element too. You know, you have High Places on eMusic. Like that sort of usage of electronics with bands is amazing. I like the combination of both the acoustic and the synthetic all in one.
Who are some of your other influences?
Missy: I love Meredith Monk and Philip Glass. They both taught me so much about timbre. Their bands and ensembles always sound so good, you know? The way they voice things and combine instruments.
Eleonore: I am — and Missy is, too — obsessed with Beach House. And we’re talking about electronics and how they fit in and also the element of nostalgia. For me the thing that’s usually lacking from electronic music is that nostalgic element. I mean I like Autechre, Aphex Twin, of course. But the thing that Beach House does amazingly well is that they take these weird, soundscapey things — when they’re onstage they basically have a drum machine, one keyboard maybe, a synthesizer and some sampling stuff that they just loop — and somehow with that they manage to have this completely nostalgic experience. The electronics are there, and they’re really cool, but there’s also this Serge Gainsbourg thing going on and it’s kind of like that perfect balance of nostalgia and innovation. If we could achieve that in our music, that’d be amazing.
That is actually one of the things I think your music does in spades — the way the electronic elements both mesh with and completely change your perception of the acoustic sounds. In “A Door in the Dark,” there’s a point where the violin goes a little flat and starts sawing, and it feels like everything is melting. It reminds me of slowing tape, and it made me feel like your music exists in this really fascinating liminal space between electronic and analogue. You’re talking about electronic music that can evoke the feelings of acoustic music, and so much of this feels somewhere in between what electronic music does and what acoustic music does.
Missy: Yeah, in “Like a Miracle”, the electronics are probably more present than in any other song. That electronic backing track is kind of like a disembodied lead singer. And then at the end, there is a very romantic moment, and then the electronics kind of eat the acoustic instruments and it’s purely electronic at the end. Then the MIDI piano comes in, and it starts feeding back and everything just really falls apart. There’s this idea of kind of mashing everything together. Like there’s the singer but he is subsumed into the electronics along with everything else. It’s about creating this weird world in between everything but still existing its own space.
