It's such a good anniversary that we received a whole new album as a gift, "Music Detected"! Already ten years in existence, in total six albums including a live album, and one movie soundtrack, several world tours, and yet not a single concert in their own territory. And here on this occasion we make the first assessment with them.

Did you realize the ensemble of the album at home or did you go to studios?
Michel Sanchez: The principle recordings and all mixes were realized in my studio at my house. On the other hand certain other takes, those concerning different ethnic songs were made first in Tokyo Japan, and Bombay India. Mixing was done on a Euphonix console with which Eric and I are very much in love, and which we find extremely hot, with a unique sound that defines the era: it lends itself better than other consoles to our new CD. In fact the only thing we didn't do at home is the mastering. That took place in London at "Exchange" studios.

Eric Mouquet: The local musicians didn't have any sound constraints. They recorded exactly like they wanted to with their own material. We only imposed on them when it came to sound quality, in order to permit us to simply rework the tracks in my studio.


Do you call on outside sound engineers?
EM: Since there aren't any well defined stages of composition and recording, if we needed to call upon sound engineers with whom we wanted to work, we would have to reserve too long a period of time. You have to understand, in one day it often what happens is that we take a single song to its completion. With these sorts of working habits, the CD budget would explode way too fast. It's therefore impossible for us to do anything else but take care of our music ourselves, even if now and then Pierre Jacot gives us a serious helping hand for certain takes...

MS: ...Specially for takes with guitars and drum sets. It's exactly in this kind of precise situation that bringing in a sound engineer could reveal something important to us. The rest of the time we can easily do it ourselves.


Have you discovered new synthesizers that have inspired you?
EM: We have worked a lot with Motif 7 Yamaha which I have appreciated enormously. Otherwise I've essentially used Pro Tools plugins from Logic Audio. This last one gave us the sounds we were looking for in this production, which is also the case with the reverb which I found to be superb.

MS: I very recently stuck my nose into these machines, and unfortunately only after we finished our album. Nevertheless we are going to think about including them on the next one. I bought myself a G4, on which I installed Reactor, Absynth, FM 7, the drum set module and a few programs that make it possible to do dance stretch, for example Time Factory. This is an area that I am really passionate about... It gives rich textures which we are having more and more trouble obtaining from a traditional synthesizer.


Do you use virtual synths and samplers on a PC, and if yes which ones?
EM: No not really. For Deep Forest we mostly used Akai 3000 on which we already have a well furnished sound bank. On the other hand I'm using an ESB 24 with Logic Audio a little bit for the new project on that I'm currently working on.


Which other machines have you used on “Music Detected”?
EM: Respectively the approach to our work is practically identical to our past albums except without being wired in the same way. And our two configurations are not 100% compatible. My initial keyboard for the project was the Motif 7 which accounts for 90% of what you here on the disc. I also used VLA, which I love. We've chosen a little Oberheim. We also researched the sounds of Roland JP-8000. All the drum sounds were recorded acoustically by David, and we then sampled what he played to make loops. No acoustic piano, no Hammond organ, which I still like just as much (laughs).

MS: We also enormously relied on Logic Audio and Pro Tools, which form our foundation material. We get a kick out of mixing old machines with the very latest synthesizers to come up with new sounds. Each machine has its specific sound quality and in mixing them we sometimes obtain some very interesting results. Both of us love Lexicon. It permits us to hijack existing melodies and make new ones out of them. In the past we managed to do this with less expression by sampling, but with the new technology today we are able to discover new editing possibilities.


How did you work on the compositions of this new album?
EM: For two years we listened and listened again to the sounds available on our Akai 3000. Since we made a library of all the sounds that we have kept, we can weigh the ingredients that we're interested in using to compose our music. Sometimes this goes very quickly, but other times we struggle to make up our minds, but unfortunately we haven't yet discovered a recipe for saving time. What we like best of all is to start with an ethnic instrument, and usually even a voice. For ' India ', the first title of “Music Detected”, we started with the voice of Mahalakshmi Iyer and a sitar riff which we compressed to death and ran through the plugins; we built the song around this configuration.

MS: This album discloses more than just Deep Forest 's music. It displays a certain emotion of moroseness, or sadness, or a certain discontent of our society...the lack of humility and of wisdom of our society.

EM: As kids we used to imagine that the year 2000 would crystallize into a wonderful turning point of the world... We've passed that famous date and there is no sign of it... On the contrary it's not happening... Our ecological side: 'The Earth is beautiful'... Yes it's true, but it also has a rotten side. We're hoping to express it on this disc through the lyrics, without being militant. I want us to take a stand on the issues of our world.

MS: ...We wanted our music in itself to reflect it, to be more somber and stretched out, like life. Our world is not as we would like it to be.

EM: For the third title, 'Soul Elevator', we were in the process of working on the guitar riffs a little bit in the style of Kashmir from Led Zeppelin, when my mom called up in the afternoon, saying: "go quick turn on the TV!" We saw at that moment airplanes crashing into the Twin Towers !!! That evening after returning to the studio, we realized we were in the middle of composing an Anglo-Saxon rock song with Turkish voices... All of a sudden we had the desire to reconcile the two cultures through our music, and to assess with these terrible images that these same cultures were attacking each other so violently in reality, that really made us think. Our album reflects all this: the sad reflection on the conflicts and inequalities of our world.


A lot of 'featuring' on this album? Beverly Jo Scott, Anggun... How did these different encounters come about?
EM: It is these encounters and their friendships that followed that dictated our decision to work with these people. I discovered Beverly Jo Scott, by listening to a radio broadcast with Jose Arthur. She totally seduced me by singing Mouloudji's ‘Gentil Coquelicot' (Nice Chick). I wanted to meet her immediately but because I didn't want to get lost in the crowd in the entry of the studio registration, I went directly home and the next day I contacted my manager to get me in touch with her. And by chance it turned out well: we had the same manager! When I had her on the telephone she retorted "What do you want with an old rock singer like me in your music?!" I replied to her with a smile that I had no idea, but that I wanted to work with her and we had to give it a try...attempt succeeded.

MS: We shouldn't leave out the trips to India and Japan that we made a year and a half ago. These led to encounters just as enriching at a moments notice. The guides we had, led us to totally stunning local artists. Eric had me listen to the voice of Angela McCluskey, the singer of Telephone Music: her type of voice, very precise and fragile, corresponded very well to what we were looking for, for some of our songs, with the idea of off-setting the very low voices of the Turkish singers. Towards the end we realized that our musical structures were turning out to be very often, the structures of songs: couplets, refrains, etc. That's why the idea of using other singers like Beverly Jo, Anggun or Angela couldn't help but occur to us at some point. And since we wanted to describe something more meaningful (revendicateur) than the others, these featured artists were essential to the success of “Music Detected”.


Each disc is composed, played and recorded differently... What are the major differences between music Detected and your previous realizations?
EM: Two big differences: we started off the compositions with guitar sounds, and David Fall a real drummer, came to replace all the loops that we usually record. These two changes carried us logically to different harmonies. Before beginning the work on music detected, we really wanted to direct ourselves towards researching new riffs instead of reproducing the synthesizer gimmicks which we were used to and which we were excessively fond of.

How do you split up the parts to play on your different keyboards?
MS: On occasion Eric takes care of samples grooves and vocoders, while I prefer playing the accordion and handling the traditional keyboards, or the more technical passages in terms of dexterity, because of my personal history. Since Deep Forest 's music isn't centered on virtuosity, in the end we divide the roles according to what we prefer to interpret.

EM: In the studio on the other hand there is absolutely no rule. Both of us switch very easily from the console to the synthesizer. Each of us relies on his own keyboard for his own ideas and we are very fond of bouncing our ideas off each other. Sometimes on one disc I've recorded the beginning of a song and he's recorded the end, or vise versa. Sometimes I keep takes that he's not always satisfied with. I find him sometimes to be too hard on himself: he's not satisfied to go over certain small sections he has composed, he tends to go back and change the whole thing, that is if he doesn't throw out the whole thing in the first place, so extreme is his pickiness.

MS: ...The hardest thing is after we play it no one has "the" correct vision of what we are interpreting. Sometimes we get too caught up in the musical layers which we are trying to exploit or in a technical issue which we are trying to surmount, to have a sufficiently objective view of our work. The one who is listening is frequently more objective than the one who's playing. Sometimes I tend to make lots of versions of one single song, where as it would be better to have just one version carefully worked out. By acting this way sometimes I miss things. I find that Eric on the other hand always likes things to go faster, too fast for my taste. Never the less he is an excellent visionary, which I'm not. Don't you believe it... Our team is perfectly balanced like this (laughs)!


What do you think about these new home project studios, since you are pioneers in this area?
EM: I think it's great. Musicians today have lots at their disposal. When I started composing I had to save for I don't know how long to buy a two track Revox. When I wanted a polyphonic synthesizer like a Prophet 5, or a PPG, it was wishful thinking: the price made it inaccessible. Modestly priced technology allows everyone to create sounds fairly quickly without ruining themselves financially. Hence forth, a musician's talent will not be measured by the means at his disposal: you can have the best technological setup possible and still never compose significant music, but some like the Chemical Brothers for example, have proved that with fairly basic materials at the beginning of their career they were able to achieve masterpieces.

MS: These types of studios represent a passionate tool that has developed in each musician a spirit of orchestration and composition that he didn't have before. In the old days, a drummer for example, could only see the music in front of his face, but now he can see how his part fits into the musical context. The arrival and development of home studios were in any case an inevitable occurrence. Back in the day, on location studios were really expensive. Musicians were too often frustrated by not being able to express the music the way they heard it because of a clock that clicked too fast for their tastes. I'm really thrilled by the boom of technology. Large studios have no use for anything but very precise projects, large scale film scores or for big budget albums.


What do you see as the limits of this kind of structure?
EM: It's good to stay shut up in your home studio but you can't ever forget to go out and jam the blues in bars with your friends. Capturing acoustic sound is just as important as being able to reproduce samples, or compress sounds, or add reverb afterwards. I find it too bad that musicians forget to go into real studios to learn correct techniques for recording all the instruments: if shutting them up in their home studios doesn't leave gaps in certain areas, still they're cruelly missing out on the splendid chance for some acoustic recordings. You have to know how to create a perfect balance among all the technologies... You don't record a string quartet the same way you record Fat Boy Slim.

MS: I don't see any limits. Discs made at home often seem more perfect than those recorded at professional studios: the musicians have more time to spend on creation and research.


thanks to C-Real for providing us a copy of this interview