HOW DEEP FOREST
HARVESTED BOHEME

   
     ERIC MOUQUET AND MICHEL SANCHEZ, the two musicians who are the hear of Deep Forest, are hardly two peas in a pod. Sanchez is a classically trained musician whose first love was the pipe organ; Mouquet is self-taught and a veteran of the dance music scene.

As Sanchez admits, the two don't always think alike. "Sometimes, I'll say to Eric, 'This is a little bit strange for me.' For example, a lot of musicians in dance music are able to mix a bass part in a certain tune, and it's difficult for me to understand. This is the main difference between Eric and me. He's more involved in dance music and underground aspects, and I'm more involved in all the classical ways of music--the piano parts and the beautiful chords."

They do keep one thing in common, though--a passion for exotic voices. Boheme is built around vocal samples from around the world, drawing not just from the gypsy traditions of Hungary and Transylvania, but also the folk music of Russia, Mongolia and native American tribes, and Sanchez and Mouquet generally begin their work with a trip to the record store.

"We buy a lot of CDs from everywhere," says Sanchez. "For example, for 'Boheme,' we found an incredible Gypsy singer who was Hungarian, and it was difficult to make a song with his voice. It was a very sad song, and at the same time, it was a very low voice. But the singer had a very big emotional power, so we did a lot of work on that song to find the right mood, the right atmosphere."

"We always begin with the voices," he adds. "As you know, a big part of the work of Deep Forest is about sampling, so we buy the rights for reusing the voices. A lot of the singers we use are not professional singers, but they have their own way to sing, their own sound. We put the voices on the sampler, and edit the voices so maybe, sometimes, the lyrics don't mean anything. But that's not very important to us, because we want to [present] this beautiful chant that people have never heard before."

Once they've shaped the vocal melody, the rest follows naturally. "We spend a lot of time adjusting chords, the moods and the rhythms," he says. "We want the song to put the lead vocals to [the best] advantage. If we have a sad song, we just try to make something very beautiful, to choose the right sounds. That's why we often use very soft sounds. The rhythms, too, are very soft, most of the time. We try to forget what we learned, and to just be slaves of the singer."

--J.D. Considine