Paris Combo Interview

paris combo

We talked about their new album and the next projects before the Istanbul concert.

 

Can you please talk about the musical progress and changes in Paris Combo music since the first release until now?

We released our first four studio albums between 1997 and 2004 – the first couple of albums  drew very much on Belle’s songwriting as a basis, with each group-member contributing to the arrangments .  Later albums contained more originals from other group-members. When we resumed working together in 2011, we decided to entirely co-write the music for “5”. The latest album, “Tako Tsubo” is really more in the model of the first two, with most songs by Belle and David and an approach to arrangment more like the cinematic approach of songs such as Living Room or Istanbul …

It’s hard to be a group and many groups cannot survive. What’s your secret in your music?

Paris Combo is a group, but Belle du Berry’s song-writing and charismatic stage-presence is definitely an important, central factor in that it gives us an identifiable voice and a strong basis on which to build our repertoire and our sound. The fact that we had a five-year break has also enabled us to continue our career with a fresh approach. Also, when we resumed in 2011, the internet had begun to be really effective in helping us reach out to our fan-base all over the world.

You released your latest album “Tako Tsubo” February in 2017. Could you please tell us about the preparation process of this album? How can you compare the sound of this album with the previous releases?

There was  quite a long and thorough pre-production phase for this album – including working out arrangment ideas  before we even played the songs as a group. The idea was to try and achieve distinct, almost cinematic settings for each song and then adapt the group’s interpretation to those pre-conceived ideas. Maybe it’s closer in that way to songs on the first couple of albums.

 

You are making very interesting video clip for your songs. What do you pay attention when you shoot your video clips? Do you think that video clip sector is like before? How do you choose the songs can you tell about the properetion process?

Thank you! We are just about to complete a new video clip for the song “Tako Tsubo” with Emilee Seymour, an Australian director with whom we worked on the two previous clips. The main thing for us is to try and create something new by working with creative and imaginative artists like Emilee and Acim Vasic so that the clip takes on a life of it’s own and hopefully becomes an artistic creation in it’s own right. Now there is more scope for showing clips on the internet and video clips have become the principal means of promoting our music on the net. We choose the songs  which we think will convey a feeling of our work as a whole and also songs which will work well with images – I’d love to do a video on the song “Orageuse” for instance!

You have seen many different countries and different cultures. Which one impressed you and your music the most?

This is hard to answer because there are influences from many countries in our music – one of the reasons for this the role that jazz, and particularly gypsy music has played in our development.  These are musical styles which are not limited to any one country and which are really about the meeting and fusing of different musical styles and traditions.

You wrote down a song about İstanbul for the debut album of Paris Combo using only the imaginations you had about İstanbul before visiting the city, What does Turkish music mean to you?

Actually the song “Istanbul” was inspired by a visit I made to Istanbul in the early nineties and hearing a 9/8 rythm in a discothèque of all places (!) – and  also the sounds of the city: the fog-horms from boats coming through the Bosphorous strait ,  the chanting from the mosques, and a particularly violent storm where I found myself near the Hagia Sophia without an umbrella.

Is there a special project you have been working on?

We’re working on an album of remixes of our songswhich we hope to release early next year in digital and vinyl formats.

What awaits the people who’ll be attending your performance on the 13th of November in Turkey?

We have just created a new show for the French tour which is about to start in September, so people in Istanbul have the chance to see it too. There will be new songs for the “Tako Tsubo” album but also our old favourites like “Living Room “ and “Senor”.