All the way from my home country Canada, ilCartello presents Paupière this Sunday at Combo Social Club, Florence.
Paupière is a dynamic trio, consisting of We Are Wolves drummer Pierre-Luc Bégin, visual artist Julia Daigle, and actor/composer Éliane Préfontaine. Hot on the French-Canadian music scene, this funky group creates and performs a sound that may yet be new to your ears. It’s got a sort of synth/electro-pop feel with a francophone twist, guaranteed to get you moving at a very special Sunday evening show. Currently the band has out an EP titled Jeunes Instants, released in January, the title track is “Elle et Lui,” a jazzy, upbeat number with a great procession.
Being a Canadian myself, and also in anticipation of Sunday’s show, I decided to get to know the band a little better, and get an idea as to what we can expect from their performance this weekend. Here we have an exclusive interview with Pierre-Luc, Julia and Éliane regarding the group, their sound and the show. Get ready for an unforgettable performance, as they start their tour in bella Firenze!
ilCartello: What is the significance behind your band name, Paupière? How did you come up with it?
Paupière: In the first place it was really for the sonority of the word itself. In french, it means ‘eyelid,’ and its grammatical gender is feminine. It’s a delicate part of our body that is really useful but that we tend to forget about. Behind our eyelid there is the consciousness that fights with our dreams.
ilC: How did you all meet and why/how did you decide to come together as Paupière?
P: It all started one night when Pierre-Luc tried one of his riffs on Vincent Levesque’s keyboard (this guy became afterward the artistic director for our EP). Later Pierre-Luc asked Julia, who was his girlfriend at the time, to put some words on the song and it worked perfectly. « Cinq Heures » was born like that. Then Eliane, an old friend of Pierre-Luc’s, joined the project after they tried several time to collaborate together. We instantaneously felt the musical chemistry between us three so we decided to meet once a week to created songs.
ilC: How do you feel that your background in other types of performance art have influenced your experience in the band (In particular, Julia, as a visual artist, and Eliane, as an actor)?
P: We are all artists that perform in more than one discipline and it obviously helped us to create the artistic direction around the project. Our taste in music, visual art and cinema are very similar and we have a lot of fun building our aesthetic and our show in a global artistic view.
ilC: You have been described on the M for Montreal website as “feminine, masculine, and sometimes androgynous.” How do you feel about this description?
P: We feel really bad. No it’s a joke. It’s probably because we are two girls and a boy and as a band entity we are becoming androgynous. Also Pierre-Luc isn’t afraid to wear make-up.
ilC: Your sound is very original and exceedingly modern. Where do you take inspiration?
P: We are not trying to fit in a trend at all. Yes we use a lot of synth and because of that it could sound like the 80’s but that’s pretty much the only reason. It’s more the mixture of our personalities and backgrounds that makes our sound, it’s very hard to explain but the more and more we create together, the more and more we know what is the Paupière sound. When we create a song together we have this great back and forth between us like we are playing a baseball game. To intellectualize those moments of grace is almost impossible.
ilC: Are there any other Canadian musicians/artists whom you admire/take inspiration from?
P: At the beginning we where really impressed by what Grimes was able to achieve with garageband so we decided to use the same device for our creation nights; we wanted to keep it as simple as possible for the first drafts. Montréal is a pretty small city with a lot of talented artists, so most of the time we know personally the musicians we admire. As we said before we don’t feel we are taking inspiration from one or others but we could certainly say that we feel very close aesthetically to some artists on our french label Entreprise like Grand Blanc, Moodoïd or Fishbach.
ilC: For those who have not encountered your music yet, what can we expect from Sunday’s show?
P: It’s the first show of our tour so we’re definitely gonna be on fire! We’re gonna try to converse in Italian and make some jokes but the music will speak more for itself. If you are not too much aware of yourself you’ll probably dance a lot!
Pulsating rythms, synth-groove, and alt-pop, all defying language barriers is what you can hope to find at Combo this Sunday. If you are ready to lose yourself in the sound that is Paupière and dance the night away to synth-pop French tunes, make your way to Combo Club Sunday March 13th for a good time ! Did I mention free entry… ? See you there.
