Rodolphe Coster and Band have shared their new single, ‘Gilles Memory’.
Recorded at studio G in Brooklyn, it’s the latest teaser from the band’s upcoming debut album ‘High With The People’, out 25th November via Capitane Records.
“Gilles L was a friend I met during my art studies in Brussels,” they explain. “We were both outsiders from the south of the country. Both of us had come to art late in life. He had first been a cook, I had first thought that I could become a philosopher. Gilles studied sound, I studied theatre, and we got to know each other thanks to our respective research on the possible encounters between dramaturgy and sound creation. After graduation, we almost lost sight of each other. I later learned that he had met a Japanese woman and moved there to live with her. He was there working on the production of a documentary. It was a happy coincidence because in the meantime I had woven links with Japan myself touring there and collaborating with Japanese artists. The last time I met him was in Brussels though. He was passing through Belgium to say hi to family and friends. On March 22, 2016 he took the metro and died suddenly in the attack at Maelbeek station with 15 other people. I wrote the song for his wife and daughter, and for the other victims. A souvenir song that I had to write about Gilles, about me and about our friendship.
“My instinct pushed me to dramatize the song in a rage and a punk energy. I felt it had to be carried by a progressive loop, with a voice bordering on trance and hip- hop. The song was truly born out of rhythm and is fueled by my love for Andrew Wheaterall’s productions, including My Bloody Valentine’s EP GLIDER, and of course Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. I realized during the writing work that this line could turn until it became a trance. While evoking wilderness, love and rage, I wanted to feed the energy of the song with a deep and saturated tribal accent. For the lyrics, I was constantly drawn to memories of images that came to me from reading Georg Trakl, a poet I love so much. Mixing natural elements, gothic visions and creatures, my idea was to evoke the feeling of mourning and loss through eerie allegories and the hallucinated images of a bunch of kids sleeping in the forest and facing a mixture of excitement and fear. I also wanted to say how genderless the depth of a friendship was: a mixture of love, longing, loss, death and life.”
Check it out below.
