A place to be
Jean Montag is unquiet. He’s unquiet in the creative aspects but also in the social ones. He’s an observer of the current times and he wonders about the causes of all the social events of a world that is definitely falling down. All these questions make him create music which rhythms and sound textures need from us to rediscover our link with nature, with our fears, with our real needs. When I interviewed him his latest album was Unfinished memories (2011) but he was about release a new one. And its time has arrived. The title is Unquiet (2012) in his own words full of scenarios where to get lost or to be found.
Why are your memories unfinished?
Because there will always be a change in our personal relationships, that makes all memories we had fixed with a specific meaning could be unfinished.
The second track of your latest album is called Fear & Structure in which a mechanical sound goes in crescendo and get mixed later with other sounds that takes us to an urban and technological ambient. Are you afraid of order?
Fear & Structure is about the structure of our fears that goes implicit with our education, to structure our desires, our insecurities, our perceptions, that’s the way to make us become pieces of a clock to serve some specific interests.
The cover of the album surprises me because its blue sky peeks through the clouds meanwhile the tracks of the album are not very hopeful. What’s the reason of the cover?
The answer is very simple, the cover is made by the recording label which edited the ep, they use to do this part of the edition in order to keep a common aesthetic in their releases.
In fact, the final track is called Wired ground with a very metallic sound. Do you express a natural connection or an artificial one?
I try to express the link between the organic and the artificial.
How is your composition process?
It’s really slow. I use to start with some sound “alive” enough to me, a sound that doesn’t need another ones to work, and once I get it, I make it play with other sounds which must be able to evolve on their own, they show me the way of the piece, “Unquiet”, my latest album, is a very good example of that.
Are you open to improvisation?
Improvisation and composition in real time is one of the disciplines in which I’m more interested right now, fortunately I’m a member of a quite wide collective of improvisators, all under the acronym LOM. To improvise is one of the most enriching experiences for a musician.
Your previous work was Elegy under the name AQM. An elegy for who, or why?
Elegy is an exploration of the sense of loss, the starting point is the loss of a specific person, but the piece is about that feeling in general.
That piece seems to look for a harmony among a lot of confusion. Are we owners of our destiny?
I’m not a determinist, I think our destiny is changing all the time, and mainly I think our destiny is a concept we have invented in order to mitigate our vertigo in front the void.
Where do you think we are going to?
Maybe the problem is to want to go to a specific place instead to look, feel and participate in our present.
If I tell you about a naked ship, what does it suggest you?
It suggests me a cinematographic image, Nosferatu by Herzog, the vision of a ship that leads the Count to obsession.
JEAN MONTAG VIDEOS here
An interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Jean Montag website www.jeanmontag.bandcamp.com
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