Away - Cities

AWAY - Cities
2013
Utech Records

Michel "Away" Langevin, famous for his drumming in the avant-garde band Voivod and for his psychedelic sci-fi album art, has had many side projects over the years, some more surprising than others. Musically speaking, we should mention the superb electro-rock project Kosmos, and also Les Ékorchés, an acoustic-metal outfit, among others. He also designed many album covers, from the instrumental Humanoid to the technical progressive band Behold the Arctopus, Dave Grohl's Probot side-project, and most of Voivod's discography. A hard cover biography, "Worlds Away", was written about him by none other than Martin Popoff in 2009, offering for the first time a holistic portrait of the artist and his legacy.

At first glance, Cities comes as another UFO in Away's portfolio: it is experimental and artistic rather than being instrumental or musical. Consisting of a selection of recordings made between 2010 and 2012, the cd is a series of soundtracks from various locations across the world. From an extra-terrestrial point of view, the theme almost seems to be the visual and audible congregation of mankind in its daily habit. For you and me, however, it's hard to separate the spectacular events from the ordinary when we don't know the context of these recordings.

While listening to Cities, we end up trying to guess the backstory of each chapter: are we in Montréal's metro? Is this a bohemian musician in a public square in Europe? On another track, is it an intercultural celebration that we hear? Back to Montréal in 2012, is this one of the famous student demonstrations? Why do we hear a series of names in Mexico City in 2012? Is Away trying to show us excerpts of the cultural exchanges in each of these cities or is he just interested in music used in public spaces across the world? While we don't find answers to these questions in the booklet, it is clear that the individual events aren't the real subject of this album. Likewise, the track titles are both abstract and anonymous: "Europe 2011", "Chicago 2012", "Montréal 2010", etc. While the string of stories is somewhat obscure, all of these public spaces tell us that despite our different cultures, we share a common experience of the city.

Like the lives behind its walls, Cities has many different layers. The top skin is made of Michel "Away" Langevin's talented, eerie graphic art. The white cd (white on white) slips out of a plain black envelope, folded in a matte 4-page booklet. There are two drawings, printed in white and silver, depicting a single entity surrounded by a cityscape. It is simple, but powerful.

The artistic approach to this album is close to an audio novel: not a documentary, but a traveller's personal journal. This form of testimony has been popular throughout history, especially for explorers. In Away's case, it is unpretentious, abstract, and anonymous to a certain degree. It is not narrated, and there aren't any audio traces of the traveller. On Cities, we are a mute witness into what Away has been recording; but we are only experiencing glimpses of it.

The graphic art of Cities pays hommage to another graphic genre: the wordless novel. Mostly associated with engraving, these mostly black-and-white books used to be precursors to the comic strips. They emerged in the 20th Century, parallel to the idea of a Global Village, like universal translators that helped share personal stories from one continent to another. We can think of the dark realities of the Great Depression as depicted by Giacomo Patri and Laurence Hyde, or the dramatic figures of Lynd Ward (picture below).

 

Frans Masereel (1889-1972) is regarded as the first master of wordless novels. Between the two World Wars, at a time when cities were starting to change drastically and mankind was experiencing the good, the bad and the ugly of these new challenges, the wordless novel was a way to express the hopes, challenges, frustrations, and despair of many of these men and women.

There is a strong iconological link between Away's Cities and the wordless novels. Beyond the iconographic elements of the cover artwork of Cities, we become witnesses to this fast-paced, dynamic urban environment. Although it is an anonymous journey, the omnipresent mute presence behind the recording tells us we are single entities watching and listening, as this world turns. In other words, on Cities, we are ghosts wandering through places and time.

Away has a strong artistic background, and while his new project steps further in the avant-garde audio garden, it also follows a rich artistic heritage: one of graphic art and storytelling.