Born with a strong identity and genuine interest to create music that can be both cheerful and summery as well as intensely mysterious at times, Les Affaires Spectrales is a band that craft a perfect hybrid of light and darkness that with ease create their own peculiar kind of sound, never neglecting to pay hommage to their influences be they in music or literature.
Starting out as a duo and then branching out to a quartet, Les Attitudes Spectrales based in Riga (Latvia) maintain a strong sense of identity and coherent eclecticism all along their discography composed of 3 records, Floral Wreck (2014), Where's my Ghost Milk? (2015) and their latest record Vampire in the Summer (2019) that will be released in vinyl on the 27th of March through Specific Recordings.
"The changes in the band’s aesthetics are obviously better performed songs, it is way steadier and less sloppy than it used to be. Also, we can now all really focus on our own instrument so we can afford to add more details and variations in the songs, which is a very important thing. Some people I know already miss our chaotic and messy gigs as a duo, but we are still occasionally playing under this shape. Also, sometimes we play all acoustic as a two piece or with other musicians."
"The changes in the band’s aesthetics are obviously better performed songs, it is way steadier and less sloppy than it used to be. Also, we can now all really focus on our own instrument so we can afford to add more details and variations in the songs, which is a very important thing. Some people I know already miss our chaotic and messy gigs as a duo, but we are still occasionally playing under this shape. Also, sometimes we play all acoustic as a two piece or with other musicians."
- Les Attitudes Spectrales started out as a duo and later became a quartet. How was that transition like and what did you feel were the major changes in the band’s aesthetics?
- We started as a duo in the old “let’s do it anyway” spirit, meaning none of us had any idea how to play the drums, we had close to zero contacts with the local scene, but we didn’t want to wait for someone to magically appear and join us… With this in mind, we recorded our first two albums and played quite a number of concerts in the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) and started to be in touch with more and more people/bands. Eventually we grew a bit tired of this formula and felt limited, and as we don’t want to be a one trick pony, we were thinking of having a “real” drummer. We knew that Jānis’s previous band was over, and when we were about to buy his old drumkit we just asked him “maybe you want to join the band as well?”, and that was it. The fourth member Adrians (guitar) joined us about a year later, I already knew him as we used to play in a noise band together for a short while. He first joined us on bass for a one gig only event where we covered songs from the first 5 Black Sabbath albums, and as we share the same questionable sense of humor and it felt we needed more guitars, we asked him on the same night if he wanted to be in and here we are.
So, everything happened quite naturally, that’s my point.
The changes in the band’s aesthetics are obviously better performed songs, it is way steadier and less sloppy than it used to be. Also, we can now all really focus on our own instrument so we can afford to add more details and variations in the songs, which is a very important thing. Some people I know already miss our chaotic and messy gigs as a duo, but we are still occasionally playing under this shape. Also, sometimes we play all acoustic as a two piece or with other musicians. I want to insist on the fact that Vampire in the Summer reflects how we sound TODAY and we are 100% focused on this now, but in the future the line up and music might be slightly different. It doesn’t mean we will sound like another band and have no identity, but this is our goal: keeping our vibe but not repeating ourselves, as much as we can of course…
- You are based in Riga (Latvia). How is the music scene in Riga and how do you identify with it?
- The music scene in Riga, at least the Underground, can appear as a closed circle, seen from the outside. In fact it is not really the case: everybody knows each other, and almost every time people are super nice and help you if your music is decent, whatever your style is (lending equipment, get you a practice space, get you a spot on a gig, etc.). It is very DIY, and, as far as I know, there are no state funds nor a lot of infrastructures for that. So, you end up playing in old abandoned factories, bike shops… We even once played in the basement of a secondary school or in a treehouse aha.
But there are of course “normal” clubs and bars as well, quite a lot of them actually.
The not so good side is that for a lot of events and bands, you “have to know”. Latvians are people of few words: it often happens that they got an album or some music out, share it once on their page saying, “new album out, concert here” (if you are lucky), play one or two gigs God knows where in Riga and that’s it. It sometimes creates this feeling of exclusivity that we don’t really associate ourselves with, I don’t know if it is on purpose or because people are just generally introvert.
About the main styles, as far as I’ve seen, it is a lot of dark and solemn music, with a few notable exceptions of course. Again, we don’t really fit there, but I can’t complain about the people, most of them are top notch and some of them really helped us out big time. Although some bands are not really my cup of tea, it is impossible to deny their quality and passion.
Aside from that you have some very young people releasing super weird bedroom noisy stuff on tapes, and this is truly great.
The more mainstream music got some good bands in rock, indie, folk, experimental or electronics, and the rest is the usual boring abomination you can find in any other country!
I can name a few great bands/artists we are in touch with and I apologize in advance for the ones I will forget: Židrūns, Nikto, Donēts, Elssa, Sv. Bērtuļa Nakts, Tesa, Vienkāris, Plastic Dummy, Illa, Gené Kruppa, Johnny and the Burnouts, Polifauna, Ivars-F, just to name a few. Each of them have their very own unique sound.
Also, 80%, if not more of the bands, sing exclusively in Latvian (note that almost everyone speaks perfect English), and it seems to be very important. So, the language could be a huge part of most of the scene, maybe more than the music itself sometimes. I’ll leave it to the interpretation. We are asked from time to time why we don’t sing in Latvian or even in French and I get the idea, it is important and it must exist, but on our side, we just feel like singing in English, sorry if we are involuntary agents of the evil Anglo-Saxons soft power! Almost all my favorite bands are singing in English, it just feels right to do so with this type of music. We want all people to understand us, and as our Chinese and Hindi leave a lot to be desired, English it is.
This is not some bashing against bands singing in Latvian of course, on the contrary, we are just not doing it.
- Your first album, Floral Wreck, is an album that for us melody-wise felt like a mix between heavy and summery lightness, like a psychedelic combo of light and darkness. Lirically wise, what are the themes that most inspired you?
- Thank you very much for this short description, when we started the band, we decided it should sound like some sort of rainbow. It sounds naïve and cheesy, but it was, and still is the main idea, so it feels good that it reached you!
Writing lyrics is very, very difficult for me, because I rarely write them with a theme in mind, I just let it happen, and this is uncontrollable, it happens when it happens and it can be very frustrating. Some words or pieces of verse appear to me, especially very late at night and then I try to shape them according to their mood and the atmosphere of the song, at random moments of the day. It is especially the case for this album. Ruta is having the same kind of issues with that, and it is funny how awkward we always are when it comes to show each other our lyrics. A few songs were inspired by poets, Yves Bonnefoy, Paul Valery, Henri Michaux or René Char (well, on my humble level, we are just a silly rock and roll band of course). Some are inspired by the teachings of professor Lux Interior, some are just automatic writings about horrifying nightmare scenes, and When the Sun is a love song written in the simplest way possible. So I agree with you.
- The second album, Where’s my Ghost Milk? is a bit more doomy and bluesy influenced. For us, it felt like you were exploring your heavier side with a bonus of a surreal and haunting atmosphere. It’s an album that has an edge of mystery to it. What can you tell us about the composition process?
- The cover and its title were supposed to be a dark lo-fi spoof of Safe as Milk from Captain Beefheart, one of my favorite albums in the whole world by the way, and the inside picture/text somehow resembles the one from Mayhem's Live in Leipzig, at least to my eyes. The music on this record has nothing to do whatsoever with those two beautiful oddities but you get my point…
I honestly can’t really remember the composition process, as it was just after Floral Wreck or even during, so it’s a bit blurry. A lot of practices, tries and arguments as always, and eventually it all came together...
Though I vividly remember losing my mind mixing/mastering it because I spend a lot of time fixing issues, adding some small details and subliminal messages!
And then us folding and gluing each copy together.
- Vampire in the Summer is your latest record and the first recorded as a quartet. How do you feel the reception to the album has been so far?
- The reception is, so far, only positive! For the first time ever, we were on the radio, people (that we don’t know, aha) are writing nice reviews and we only got good feedbacks after our concerts. We were so bummed out after the never-ending, full of problems recording/mixing process, it was awful. I still can’t believe we managed to release it, and now to see people liking it, even if we are doing this for ourselves, it feels great, I can’t deny. It was really hard though.
"Regarding home-recording/producing, it takes forever, and it is really hard to get the sound you want with rudimentary equipment and skills, but in another hand, I love mistakes in music, happy accidents, technical issues and things that should not be. For example, on some 60s/70s afrobeat records when a guitar solo kicks in, and it is 10 times louder than the whole band and squishes the whole volume, it is beautiful…"
- You opted to self-distribute and to record at home your first two albums, do you feel more independent that way and do you feel that’s the way for Les Attitudes Spectrales in the future?
- Let’s be honest, if we did so, it was simply because we started all of this from scratch! If we hadn’t done it by ourselves, no one else would have.
We would only be happy to reach more people with our music because we truly believe in what we do, we worked hard on it when no one was asking anything from us, so I’ll allow myself to say it’s worth checking out!
Everybody is welcome, we don’t belong to any secret elite club.
Being DIY and “underground” sure is romantic but at the end of the day, it sometimes feels like a tap on the shoulder and a nod of approval is pretty much the best you can get. So, when it comes to the distribution and promotion side of things, we wouldn’t mind if somebody else did! Taking care of those aspects all by yourself is quite a hassle on many levels to be honest… We are not the best at “promoting ourselves”, it feels weird, let’s put it this way… Every time we play a gig, we have some people seeing us for the first time asking, “how come I never heard of you before?”, in such a small community, it just goes to show…
As a matter of fact, Vampire in the Summer will be available on vinyl around March or April on a proper label, let’s hope more people will hear our unpronounceable band name then…
But even if not, it’s alright, our main goal is to write, perform and record songs we think are good, and if at the end it will be for our mums only, so be it, we won’t stop anytime soon…
Regarding home-recording/producing, it takes forever, and it is really hard to get the sound you want with rudimentary equipment and skills, but in another hand, I love mistakes in music, happy accidents, technical issues and things that should not be. For example, on some 60s/70s afrobeat records when a guitar solo kicks in, and it is 10 times louder than the whole band and squishes the whole volume, it is beautiful … You can’t get that in a modern professional studio with a guy who studied how to respect the norms and makes you sound according to the current standard, unless you know the right person of course. Still, we deliberately chose to sound a bit more “pro” and “clean” for the last record (just a bit!), but we didn’t hide the mistakes and we worked with the right people, so at least it won’t ruin your speakers!
"But the philosophy of the band is to keep the songs relatively short with a simple structure, that remains our rule today: no technical demonstration, but proper songs. We want to reach other people, not just other musicians."
- Vampire in the Summer has a unique sound and 9 songs with their own charismatic identity, however, the sound has a huge field of music fusions. Punk, garage and psychedelic just to name a few. How did that fusion come to be? Is it a result of an eclectic taste in music? And if so, what bands first inspired you to create the band.
- Thank you! I guess it is the “result of a relatively eclectic taste in music” even if we don’t really play what we are listening to, I think this is important. We never sit down and decide what the next song will sound like, and even if we decide something in the first place, it changes so much after we practice it and modify it and add this and remove that… A lot of songs on the album were really different when we started working on them.
The album might sound spontaneous and fresh, but I can tell you it is the result of a long work and a lot of thinking, arguing and experimenting, it was an obsession, I personally got really depressed because of it. And even now that it just got released, some songs are already a bit different when performed live.
But the philosophy of the band is to keep the songs relatively short with a simple structure, that remains our rule today: no technical demonstration, but proper songs. We want to reach other people, not just other musicians.
We are not trying to sound like our idols, but we are inspired by their approach, for example (and especially when we started the band): Ween, the Cramps, Guided by Voices, Unwound, Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson/13th Floor Elevator, The Seeds, Love, Stooges, Beck, Neil Young, Butthole Surfers, The Sonics, Beefheart, Zappa, Earth, Devo, A New type of Nun (thing), etc… We are of course also listening to new bands, and we certainly don’t want to sound retro (I don’t think we do), but we like to go more or less to the source when it comes to inspiration… Newer bands inspire us for the production/technical side of things though. Also, the drummer and guitar player Jānis and Adrians are playing in loads of other projects (especially Adrians who is an excellent drummer as well) usually far away from the rock spectrum (like jazz, free jazz, experimental, atonal music, noise, acoustic, improvisation of all sorts…), so even if we choose to keep that pop format for our songs structures, there is always “something more” behind it.
- We especially liked the artwork for Vampire in the Summer, what is the concept behind it?
- This is the work of my friend Tristan Neu from Cosmic Beam, we grew up in the same area and have known each other for ages, so he was the man. I think the artwork is as important as the music, especially the main colors you chose. The concept and the album name are the expression of discomfort, of not being at the right place wherever you go. Hence the picture of a poor dead palm tree on the beach. It was supposed to be a collage first but after many failed attempts and days of reflection, it all came clear that this was the thing to do. It reflects the mood surrounding the recording of the album and pretty much all last summer: feeling constantly down. If ever you are worried, know that it’s all good now.
- Do you have any planned tours or concerts set for 2020 that you wish to divulge?
- We are supposed to have a little Baltic tour in winter 2020 with our friends from Donēts, a few gigs here and there soon, and if all the stars align, we might tour France next spring, let’s see how it turns out. In parallel we are starting to write new songs so it won’t take forever again to release a new record. Of course, playing in Portugal would be fantastic, I only heard good things from friends playing there!
- Thank you!
- Thank you very much, long live Acordes de Quinta!
Text & Interview: Cláudia Zafre
Band: Les Attitudes Spectrales
lesattitudesspectrales.bandcamp