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 Strictly underground and strictly about music, hailing from Lyon in France, High Tone have always been about spreading their message through music.
Nilly caught up with two of the five man dub band in Bangkok, Thailand during their tour of South East Asia.
Nilly: Tell us a little about yourselves. We always just hear about High Tone and that there are five guys, but no one really knows who you are as individuals. Fabrice: We are HighTone, we use both classical and electronic instruments to create music. For example, I play bass, but also use a synthesizer for the bass sounds. Dominic, he plays both acoustic drum and electronic drum.
Dominic: I use drums for a rock and roll rhythm and pads for a jungle rhythm. Just for different effects.
Fabrice: The guitarist, Julien, does the same, uses a guitar while the sampler as well. There's is one DJ, Lionel, who scratches and uses a sampler. We also have a guy, Antona, on the keyboards pr the synthesizer for drum and bass and techno effects.
Nilly: What brought you guys together in the first place? Were you all friends from before? Dominic: We have known each other since we were sixteen! All five of us musicians.
Fabrice: There is a great energy between us, which can be felt through a lot of parties we did together. We even stopped our studies and our focus was just music and music. After five years we created our first vinyl and then afterwards the first album. It was new music and we really wanted to focus. I mean there's classic music that guitar, rock and roll and new music with DJ's, live sounds etc. We decided to fuse the two movements together to create the music of High Tone.
Nilly: Is there a front man within High Tone? Dominic: No not at all!
Fabrice: This is the story of High Tone. We want to create a musical language. No bands, no lyrics, no big words. The language is simply just musical...
Dominc: But we also speak visually using a video mix that we have projected behind us with one guy who is a live VJ. We all work together in sync.
Nilly: So is the live VJ-ing improvised or planned ahead of the show? Fabrice: A combination of both. We have a structure ahead of a show as you can't really play in a totally free mode...I mean of course there was jazz in the 50's, but it's better to have a structure.
Nilly: Going back to what you said before, there were collectives such as Brain Damage System, Zenzile, Peuple de l'herbes who were also prevalent in France at the same time that your music was getting recognition. Was there a reason behind this sudden emergence of a dub/ band sound or did it just happen co-incidentally? Dominic: This sound all happened at the same time. Here we were in France with this dub sound, whereas in England there were artists like Talvin Singh and Asian Dub Foundation who tried to mix hip hop, jungle rhythm with a distinct sound.
Fabrice: It's quite interesting, when we started we thought there were no dub bands in France. Then in another town, there's Zenzile...for three to four years we played in the region and in different towns there were bands playing similar music which we had no idea abut. When we met the first band it was like "Wow! You make dub...like me!"
Dominc: It was almost as if there was a need for this type of music and it was happening so independently.
Fabrice: It's like in London, Jamaican’s arrived and created new reggae and in Holland the Dutch sound is a greater use of machines and its more down tempo...no live...it's a really nice machine sound...and for us in France it was the opposite. Dub is made of machines and we wanted the opposite, to play dub with many different instruments.
Nilly: There are a lot of references made to you being similar to Asian Dub Foundation. What are your thoughts on being compared, both as artists and within genres? Dominic: Well, it's part of the same movement, a combination of instruments and electronic sounds. What we love is the fusing element. They love to mix sounds from Asia, India or more traditional sounds in our music. This is the sound of Asian Dub, a combination of Indian sounds with instruments.
Fabrice: This is their sound, they want to do something different and speak about what their people believe.
Dominic: It's not pop...like 'world', but electronic with a difference.
Nilly: What are your thoughts about being categorised as artists within a 'World' genre. If there is an element of an ethic sound in music these days it gets chucked into a 'World' category. Fabrice: Well for us 'World' music is Madonna, you know! Everyone in the world knows Madonna. This sound is still underground music for me. It's a very particular kind of sound.
Dominc: It's a musical way, you have to understand the music to understand its way.
Nilly: If, hypothetically speaking, you were to become mainstream one day how would you feel about been placed in a store under this broad genre? Fabrice: You mean like Beyonce? Well we love Beyonce and so do many people. So if people are going to buy our records then fine. But the thing is there are no lyrics or vocals in our sound. It's not easy for mainstream radio stations to play our music along with chart music, so I guess it's hard to put us in any genre! I mean look at Massive Attack, he sound is similar, but there are lyrics, so it's easier to become popular with more people. In the 50's there was jazz and it was popular, but people's changes and commercial factors have changed all this.
Nilly: Was jazz an early influence for you? Fabrice: Yes, this is the concept...more for the ambiance not necessarily for the songs as we don't use jazz technique. I mean we use live instruments, its underground music to an extent that jazz was.
Dominic: Jazz a bit like rebel music...with no barrier to conform to. I mean of course with Jazz a lot of it was about African artists speaking about their experiences at home and abroad through lyrics and music, almost an international sound. In modern day to compare the sounds would be to look at artists such as Sunra, who are all sending such messages while sticking to traditions of sound and story telling.
This is different from High Tone's music, but I guess what is similar is the fact that it can be related to universally, with sounds from so many places and our collaborations with so many artists.
Nilly: You have collaborated with artists from various parts of the world. What is it that you look for when you collaborate on projects? Fabrice: We played in China once and collaborated with Wang Lei, a Chinese electronic musician. We had a concert where we played with his band. After this he came to France where we mixed and made an album 'WangTone"...in the same way that we had "ZenTone" when we collaborated with Zenzile...
Dominic: When were worked together, we weren't speaking as he doesn't speak English and we can't speak Chinese and even our English...it's not exactly great, but we communicated just with eyes and sign language. But we managed to put together our sound in one week for the album. I mean he's from China, no one knew what his style of making music would be, but ultimately its just sound and the harmony of it helped us create, despite not being able to speak!
Nilly: And with regards to sound samples in our studio productions...where do they come from? Dominc: Man old and new movies, some vinyl’s..
Nilly: What about travelling around the world, both as a band or independently to collect samples? Dominic: I was in Thailand for 3 months, Julien was in China for 1 month, Fabrice in Mexico and Guatemala for 3 months. Whenever we can, we go away and collect sounds and meet new artists.
Nilly: Do you have any specific collaboration plans? Dominic: No as we just finished out new album and we are preparing our next show and tours. This time it was all about High Tone. I mean Lionel, or DJ Twelve, had his own projects as well...but all five of us focused on the production of the new album. It took us one year to complete the album and then we started the Asian tour.
Nilly: When is the new album out and what is it called? Fabrice: First in France followed with a tour across France and then in the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg).
Dominc: It's called 'Underground Wobble' with no collaborations. It's different from 'Wave Digger', our last album in that it is more mature, more finished. We started off playing dub, but with time we have evolved and this album shows where we are now through the progression. It's definitely more 'High Tone' over 'Wave Digger', but it has the same ingredients...two years later!
Nilly: Do you think that technology will help shorten the time between each album you produce? Dominic: Not really as our minds are not electronic to move with this speed.
Nilly: What medium do you use to spread the High Tone name? Fabrice: Well we are part of an independent label, Jarring Effects. So there is never any media or publicity surrounding us. However, we have a lot of concerts. In one year it can be up to 70...and it's all word of mouth after that. I mean many people who come to our shows don't even know who we are, but if they enjoy themselves at our concert, they talk about it and others find out!
Nilly: What are your thoughts on music on the internet and piracy issues? Dominic: Well it's the reality of the times that people downloads everything. We have our tunes, along with artists form ten other independent labels, on a website called www.cd1d.com . It's like i-tunes in concept, but cheaper and better quality.
Nilly: As part of your Asian tour, having been to so many cities, Vietnam, Cambodia and now Bangkok are there certain things you have picked up about the crowd to shape your music, or is it something special for Bangkok? Dominic: Well we aren't like DJs who can just take their vinyl’s and spin so there is some preparation. This is also a show so there has been planning involved. Normally when we improvise we might go to our 'local' and work on new material. We are also totally unaware of what people in these countries like. So we almost just come and have fun and everyone seems to be having fun with us! The crowd so far in every place has been great and we were really happy to see that it was a lot of locals, not just the French who live in those countries!
Fabrice: We have been and will be playing a lot of stuff from old albums, the last one and our up and coming release. Some of the music the people will recognise and some are new sounds.
Interview: Nilly Chaudhuri
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