Montreal’s Poirier is one of the latest to join the Mixpak family, releasing his jump-up Soca Road EP to much vuvuzela fanfare last month. Of course, he has a long musical history, having produced with Crookers, dj/rupture, Warrior Queen, MC Zulu and released numerous EPs across numerous genres, from ambient to soca. We asked him about playing 160bpm, producing in different languages and running his label, ALSO records.
Mixpak: How did you get into the music you produce & play?
It’s been a long curve, cos when I started making music I released a few ambient albums – so it’s quite different from where I am right now. It’s all related though so it was just a long and slow progression over about 10 years, so from ambient I went to abstract hip hop and from abstract hip hop I started doing more dancehall riddims and then I started to work with vocalists. Then I discovered soca music. So now I try to do a bit of everything…
So you’re changing genres all the time – but do you think you’ve found your spot now or in 10 years will you be making something different?
I’m always moving, always doing something different. At the moment I’m making super fast music, but I’m also making ambient and abstract hip hop at the same time. So I’m not really about trying to find anything, it’s just about making music. That’s what I’m like as a listener too. It’s not a big deal for me, but it’s quite shocking sometimes for people – they don’t see a progression or they don’t understand where it’s coming from but there’s always traces of where I’m going. I was making Soca Road at the same time that I was making music for a documentary that was very ambient, so I don’t have a problem making two different things at the same time. The easiest way to summarise what I’m doing is to say there’s 3 big genres of music that influence my work in general – that’s electronic, hip hop and reggae – and when they cross they can make all kinds of different music.
And you’ve made quite a lot of crossover tunes that you can’t easily categorize – what is it about crossover that is so good?
It’s not even necessarily about crossover, it’s just about my personal interpretation of something, and then at that point it becomes something particular to me. That’s my role as an artist and that’s what I like to do – push the envelope.
So what were you doing before you were able to produce full-time?
Working in a record store, being a music journalist, doing radio…it was always related to music. I was painting and drawing too, but music took over and it was really what I wanted to do deeply. I wasn’t making music as a teenager, I wasn’t even aware I was able to make a track and then when I worked it out I was like ‘fuck it, this is what I’m doing’. I jumped. Even if I don’t know where I’m gonna land, I jump. I took a risk but I was also very focussed.
But also, in my mind, if you’re making music and you’re Québécois, you sort of have a different support system in place for you as an artist?
Yeah. The Quebec music scene has their own star system, artists that aren’t heard of at all outside of Quebec make a good living, they can sell a load of CDs and tour across Quebec and be very popular. We have our own TV channels and radio too. There’s a support for that system, which doesn’t really happen in the rest of Canada. I do sometimes work with people related to that, I did a remix for Pierre Lapointe, he’s huge in Quebec and he tours France too. Sometimes some of the younger artists are open to a newer sort of music and they ask people like me to work with them or remix them, so I can play in very small towns where they have no electronic scene at all.
So are you doing a bunch of things that you don’t publicise?
I publicise it, but I won’t push it the same way to an international crowd, but what I’m doing in Montreal is the way I experiment, it’s my laboratory. When I tour everything’s been tested in Montreal, which is where I do my work on the frontline.
So do you think that Montreal influenced your leaning for global music?
As much as we support each other in the francophone community, we live 45 minutes from the border so for sure things from the US or from Europe come to us, we’re always either consuming it or confronted with it. And Montreal is a bilingual city too so there’s always a cross-cultural thing. When you’re interested in something different from Quebecois music, outside the pop rock French scene, there’s stuff coming at you from everywhere, I was listening to stuff from Europe, from the UK, from Africa, and American stuff growing up.
So how did you get to work with the vocalists you’re working with – in the UK it’s very easy to link up with someone nearby – but I imagine you don’t have that in Montreal?
I’ve DJed hundreds of times in Montreal, and in all those gigs, maybe twice an MC has come to me and asked me to grab the mic and spit some stuff. I’ve played maybe 10 times in London and it’s happened to me more times than it happened in Montreal.
So I have to look and develop something very unique and different with the MCs I meet. A lot of the MCs in Montreal were not doing anything related to the scene I’m in at all, so I had to show them what kind of music I was playing and DJing, and what that scene is, cos they’d never heard of it…so I had to develop a strong artistic relationship with them. Sometimes it took years before we were even able to figure out how they would sing or rap over my riddims.
Like who?
Face-T and Boogat are two examples of that. Face T was in a francophone duo who’ve had a lot of success in Quebec and in France and when I started giving riddims to Face T, he’d never even heard anything like that, or knew that there was a scene like that. We travelled together, we played in the UK and Europe together, and he was just discovering something new that he’d never heard. Both him and Boogat had like 10-year careers in their own scene and Boogat was rhyming in French too and started bringing in Spanish influences but he was part of the Quebecois rap scene and when I gave him my first riddim it took him like 6 months to figure out what to do with it cos it was so unusual for him. Then he started to come to shows and we went to New York to play and he was just like ‘fuck yeah, I never knew there was this whole other network and whole other scene that existed’ and now he’s totally in it, but it took a lot of time to show them that there was another world.
So why did you decide to spend your time working with them when you could have used vocalists that were already in that scene?
There were no MCs in Montreal that were in tune with what I wanted to do. It’s nice to collaborate with MCs from abroad and I did it a lot, but it’s nice to have support in your own city, because you develop together. I’ve done 12 tracks with Face T and maybe 6 with Boogat, so we’re kind of building a catalogue together and the more and more you do tracks with them, they get where you want to go, and they’re trying to push the envelope now too. When you create not just a one-night relationship with the MC, as it were, and you develop a relationship over the years, artistically speaking you get to a very nice point where you’re in harmony.
If you could work with any vocalist alive or dead who would you choose?
For Jamaicans then Barrington Levy, Mr Vegas, Busy Signal, I love what they’re doing. I’ve always wanted to do something with Roots Manuva and Dizzee Rascal. I’d like to do something with Busta Rhymes…
But you’re also working with people over the internet too, so how do you go about choosing your vocalists?
It’s quite random, it’s just my personal tastes. I’ve toured a lot and travelled, so I’ve met a lot of people I did a track with Serocee and that happened cos I was gigging in Germany and he was there too gigging with Toddla T and I knew Toddla cos he did a remix for one of my tracks, so I met Serocee and after a week we linked up and I sent him a riddim. With EJ Von Lyrik from the Soca Road EP, I was in South Africa and my friend was working with her so i met her and showed her the riddim I wanted her to voice and she really liked it but it was something she’d never done before, that kind of tempo, that kind of vibe. She came really strong on it, but I had to explain where I was going with the project. Imposs, who’s also on the Soca Road EP, he was a part of the biggest hip hop group in Quebec called Muzion, I’d been wanting to do something with them, or him for ages, in Creole. It took two years; I gave him the riddim, he was really feeling it, and then after that was the earthquake in Haiti and the whole artistic scene was put on hold. Sometimes I do tracks with people I’ve never met, that was the case with YT, and MC Zulu.
Do you feel there are more obstacles when you’re making tunes with people who don’t vocal in English or Patois, like Imposs?
I’m interested in other languages and also with other accents. There’s so much diversity in the world, why do we always focus on English? I find it a little bit restrictive. You can have a nice flavour in other languages, so why not try it. I can play in different crowds and sometimes they don’t even know what language it is but they still dance and react positively. The meaning of a track is just one eleventh; there’s the texture of the voice, the delivery, the flow, the melody of it, so there’s many things that as somebody who can’t understand the language, you can still rely on. When i was growing up i didn’t speak english but i was feeling english music, I didn’t even know what they were saying…
I find it stupid to ignore where you’re coming from. I’m not saying I’d like to do a French album, but why ignore the context of where you’re coming from. If you want to make things evolve, you gotta do it first hand. I worked with a lot of french MCs in
I liked the power soca first, it was the fast stuff that got me into it. But there’s a whole other scene with the groovy soca stuff that is very popular too. I’m into Bunji Garlin and Mr Slaughter, they have ragga dancehall delivery but in a soca context. For me that was making the link from all the Caribbean music I like.
Then once at a party I was DJing and the energy was crazy and I wanted something crazier, and I started to play soca just to see what could happen, and it was wild. I didn’t know about the whole culture or anything but I started to investigate and see what I could do. Fast music is not something new, or unusual, so there’s a way to play it, you just have to be very clever and drop it at a good moment, but I’ve played my soca tracks in front of very very different crowds and I’ve developed a sense of good timing. I remember I was playing with Face T in a small town in Germany, and I’m playing all the big hits I have, everything possible, and the people were reacting ok, but it wasn’t like awesome and at some point I got a bit upset and I was like ‘fuck it, I’m gonna drop some soca stuff I produced cos nothing is really happening right now, so I’ve got nothing to lose’. So I dropped soca tracks and people went wild and I was just in the middle of Germany, they’d probably never heard anything like that…so there’s always a way to play things. I’m not saying there’s always a window to drop soca, but there’s certainly always a window to go faster. You just need to be very careful of the energy on the dancefloor to take it to another level.
So the first installment of soca came on Ninja Tunes, why was there a gap in between and why did you decide to release on Mixpak?
I have a lot of music right now. I’m preparing more of an abstract album for Ninja Tunes, beat stuff, not Caribbean stuff, so I wanted to focus more on that with them, but then I was looking through the Mixpak catalogue and thought it would be a good idea.
Have you got a big bank of unreleased tracks?
I wouldn’t say that. I have a big bank of ideas. I just gotta finish them. I’m working on my album and then on a bunch of EPs and remixes too.
What do you use produce?
Just my computer. Fruity Loops. That’s pretty much it.
How long would it take you to produce a track?
It can be very fast or it can take forever. I can do one in a week, but if there’s vocals, it can take six months. You have to find the MC, give it to them, wait for them to record. I have some stuff that’s been watiing around for years and I haven’t found a solution for how to finish it. It’s not like I do one track by one, I do a lot of things at the same time, some will get finished properly, some will not.
And in between all that you’ve been releasing other people’s music on your own label too?
Yeah I’d just been hearing music that wasn’t getting released and I thought ‘damn it’s good music’, I want to share that with the people, I want it official and get it out either to my network…or beyond. It’s funny cos the first track I released was a track in French called ‘ZiggyZa ZiggyZi’ by a rapper who decided to adapt a folk song – it’s so much part of our folklore that we don’t even know who wrote the lyrics and the melody, it’s super old and super quebecois, and he changed the lyrics but kept the same melody. People in Quebec would never think that that track would be sold to non-francophone people, but you just need to think outside the box sometimes…there could be something universal in it that can be shared…and sold.
Did you establish it so as to fill a gap – as in no-one else was releasing that stuff?
Yeah, it’s kind of that, but I’m not doing it because nobody’s doing it, I’m doing it because I like it, and I believe in it. Another goal behind it was also to bring non-francophone music to francophone people in Quebec, and show them that first and second generation immigrants are as much Quebecois as the people that have been there for generations, they can dig stuff in Spanish as much as they can dig stuff in French, and they can feel it’s coming from them still.
Do you think that since you started out that that attitude is changing?
I would say yes, in a certain way, cos I have a network and I’ve been touring and I know where to go. It doesn’t make sense commercially speaking, but people do it cos they’re passionate and they believe in it, and at some point it might go really well…for example a track I did with Face T, ‘Wha-la-la-leng’, we performed that on French national radio in Canada, on a show where you would never think you would have that kind of music. I said let’s perform ‘Wha-la-la-leng’ and [Face T] was like ‘damn they’re all like 60 year olds, listening to pop rock and french singers, why would we do that?’. I said they asked us to come so we’re gonna do what we wanna do and when we did it they loved it. So in the music business there’s bad prejudice from the crowd but also from the performers who think sometimes that the crowd cannot handle what they’re doing, so they won’t do it. You need to say let’s just put that down and see what happens.
So you think you should just introduce everyone to it?
Certainly. It’s about non-ghettoisation of the music, it’s about saying maybe you never heard that music or know how to speak that language or know even what langauge they’re speaking but just take a break for a moment and not think about what’s defining the music and just play it and see what happens.
Where do you think is the best place to play in terms of being open to all that?
There’s no bad places. I have a personal link with the crowd in Montreal, and some people keep coming to all my gigs to support. Playing in the UK is quite nice cos of the understanding of soundsystem culture and Jamaican culture, so it feels like home to me, but it’s just my job as a DJ to figure out what to do to push them to the limit. I might bring the same ingredients but I’ll put it on the table in a different way.
Watch out for Poirier’s remix of ‘Get Gyal Easy’ coming soon on Mixpak
Interview by Suze Webb
