Bill Adams vs. Michel "Away" Langevin, drummer of Voivod
ML: Hello?
BA: Hello, may I speak to Michel please?
ML: Speaking.
BA: Hey Michel, it's Bill Adams calling from Ground Control.
ML: Hey! How are you?
BA: Pretty well thanks, how about you?
ML: Good thank you.
BA: Excellent. Where are you at right now? I assume you're probably at home….
ML: Yup, in Montreal.
BA: That's cool, is it snowing yet there?
ML: Not yet. We've gotten a little bit of snow this morning, but it's already gone.
BA: Oh really?
ML: Yeah, we have been lucky so far.
BA: I guess so – I live just outside of Toronto, and it's unusual for us to have snow which is actually staying before Montreal does.
ML: Wow – it's been mostly rain for the last couple of days here.
BA: You're lucky. So how're things? You just put a new set of old demos out.
ML: Yup – they were our first demos that the recorded in January of '84 and we sent out to a bunch of labels and fanzines and ended up getting us signed with Metal Blade. After that, history was made [laughing]!
BA: [laughing] It's gotta be kind of weird – I mean, this stuff was recorded in 1984 – did you find it unusual to go bsck and look at them again after so much time has passed? What was the impetus for this release? What prompted it?
ML: Well, the first time I heard the master tapes was not long ago because they were long lost. In 2008 when Blackie rejoined the band, he had been away for about seventeen years and showed up with a box of master tapes which were the Iron Gang cassette that we used to sell through our PO Box. I'd had copies of copies before, but I was really happy to be able to finally have copies of the masters that I could hand to Jello Biafra – who had asked me quite a few times if I had anything that he could release. After I'd handed it over to him though, I was kind of scared that the tape would break during the digital transfer process, but it didn't so now we're releasing the Iron Gang demos as well as those for three other releases: Rrröööaaarrr, Killing Technology and Dimension Hatröss. Early next year.
BA: Oh wow! So you're pretty much going through the whole early catalogue.
ML: Yeah! We had already made some of the Iron Gang demos available when Metal Blade re-released War And Pain in 2004 for the album's twentieth anniversary; we had demos on there, and both DVDs we've put out since 2005, DVOD1 and Tatsumaki, have Iron Gang demos on them so we're slowly making them available.
BA: That's cool, and I've heard whispers about a possible new album too….
ML: We are writing new material and we hope to record in January so we'll be able to release a new record before we hit the road next year. That's the plan right now. I was just thinking – going back to the To The Death '84 demo – because I hadn't heard the music for such a long time, I was surprised at the evolution which happened between this demo that happened in 1984 and, let's say, Dimension Hatröss which was made in 1988. The mutation which happened in just those three or four years was pretty incredible.
BA: Well, I'm not going to lie to you, I was listening to the '84 demos and – don't get me wrong, there's quality in them – I noticed the jumps that the band made in the early years.
ML: Yeah – in those demos, you could already tell we were a little bit weird, but a lot of that has to do with the fact that we were working really hard back then. Between '83 and '88, we were rehearsing every night and we were very disciplined. It sort of helped too that, when we moved to Montreal in the mid-Eighties – around 1985 – we were all living together in one really big apartment so we were constantly in contact and constantly playing and constantly working on new ideas.
BA: Really? That's cool, and it begs the obvious question of how going back, as you have, and re-discovering what you'd done before may play a role in the new music you start writing in January.
ML: Well, we've already written about eight songs and we're being careful to make sure that all the different aspects of Voivod are represented in the music. That includes the old thrash punk side of our sound which was pretty important to us in the earliest days of the band and I've now rediscovered as I've been hearing these demos. '84 was a really great transitional year for thrash metal and hardcore and, soon after that, a lot of those musics began to cross back and forth and influence each other. It's fun for us to be reminded of those roots and we really never want to forget about that on the next album, but that isn't said to discount the psychedelia and progressive metal angles that we've explored over the years too.
BA: So it's safe to say that whatever you record next will take pains to reflect everything that has happened in the last thirty years.
ML: Yes, absolutely – all the ingredients will be there.
BA: Cool. Now, as far as touring goes, have those plans already started to come together for the record you're planning to have out next year?
ML: Oh yes! We've already toured quite a lot since we reformed in 2008, but we're projecting that the next one will be a world tour – we already know we're being asked to come back to Chile, Mexico, Japan, the Caribbean and a lot of the eastern European countries. We've also done a lot of festivals since 2008 which we plan on continuing to do; I know we've been asked to curate one day of Roadburn – a kind of drone-y, doom and noise fest – in Holland so, for one day, it will be music that either inspired Voivod over the years – like Killing Joke and Doom and some other bands that we really love – or was inspired BY Voivod.
BA: Wow – that's a pretty big deal. Like, look at the breadth of the music being included.
ML: Oh yeah! You know, when we first started, there were really only a couple of branches of metal, but we'd regularly end up touring together. Now though, there are a tremendous number of different off-shoots from metal, as well as many promotional tools that just weren't available years ago; that's really great to see, but it also forces bands to work much harder because they want to be remembered, but there are just so many bands now that the hard work goes into just distinguishing yourself. Like the difference is this: in the Eighties, there was us, Slayer, Metallica, Destruction, Celtic Frost, Creator and that was about it – there were a few others I know I'm missing, but the community was pretty small at a certain level, you know? Now it's just insane – there are just so many bands. A friend of mine was cursing the other day because he was starting a new band, but had no idea what to call it because he didn't want to accidentally take someone else's.
BA: [chuckles] I've said this before to other bands with the same problem: whatever you think the coolest name in the world might be, just call your band the exact opposite because at least that way you'll be memorable. Look at bands like Carebears On Fire.
ML: [laughing] For sure! It's like our very first review of War And Pain called us the worst band in the world. No – that's not right, “The worst band on the planet.” We were really proud of that, because it meant we weren't just going to get lost in the middle; we were worse than Venom.
BA: Now, see, as sort of an off-shoot of that, Voivod has been called a lot of things and a lot of that has to do with the sounds you've intermingled with metal over the last thirty years.
ML: Yeah – it was not a conscious decision to do things the way we have, it was just a matter of isolation, really. We come from three hundred miles north of Montreal and we were convinced that mixing black metal with hardcore punk and progressive rock was fairly normal; it was only after we moved to Montreal – after the release of War And Pain – that we discovered it wasn't. In Montreal at that time, we found that a lot of bands were just playing covers in clubs and most of the thrash metal bands from around the planet didn't include the elements we thought were so normal; because of that, in a lot of minds, we were pretty weird from the start but at that time progressive rock was really popular in Quebec so we sort of fit in because of that. Then we left Quebec and were weird again because not many other places were listening to progressive rock outside of the big names like Pink Floyd and Yes and Genesis; even King Crimson was sort of underground in its own way for the rest of the world outside Quebec.
BA: So, in effect, Voivod ended up becoming innovative by accident.
ML: Yeah – pretty much. Piggy played a big part in that because he was into a lot of obscure Kraut-rock and German progressive music and avant garde music too. He really taught us to be open-minded, that's for sure.
BA: I don't doubt that. Now, I was hesitant to ask about Piggy, because I didn't want to stir up a lot of sadness, but has his passing effected the band's function now?
ML: Uhm, not exactly. It was a bit confusing in 2009 because we were touring – Blackie, Snake, Dan Mongrain and I – and playing the Eighties material that we wrote with Blackie, but we also had a new album out, Infini, which had a completely different line-up that included Piggy and Jason Newsted. That was confusing for just about everyone but, other than that, the transition has been great because we're getting a new start after closing a great chapter with Jason when we got to record Katorz and Infini. We had started those albums in 2004 – prior to when Piggy had taken ill. That was a smooth transition, but the mourning process was very, very long; now things are back, up and running smoothly again though, and it's really exciting again too!
BA: I was hesitant to ask about that, because I know the passing of a band member can be really hard….
ML: No, no! It's all fine! It's been tough to read some comments about the releases of Infini and Katorz being like a cash-grab, but people have to understand that we really just wanted to make those recordings available as a tribute to Piggy and also just to get them out there; Voivod being Voivod and having the cult/underground status that it does, I don't think anyone could reasonably believe that anything we've ever done is a cash-grab, because there has never been a lot of cash TO grab [chuckling]; in terms of man-hours of work, I'm pretty sure I'm deep in the red.
BA: I'd never begrudge anyone for at least trying to re-coup cost….
ML: That's a lot of it too. I mean, we had signed deals and started recordings which got cut in the middle, so we took a hiatus before finally getting ourselves back together to finish the albums. It was tough; hearing Piggy in the headphones and not seeing him through the glass as we had for twenty-five years was really difficult. We did it though, and I'm happy we did; the circumstances were such that we were not able to take the blueprints and make them epic like we used to, but that was an interesting challenge and we were lucky that Piggy had recorded his parts professionally with ProTools, so all we had to do was add our own parts to what he'd done and finish them up.
