“L’ivresse et le froid” can now legally drink but still can’t buy weed legally here in Québec…

I feel like I live 23 lifes since… But it is cool as I didn’t expect that listening to this one two decades later would be so fun… It doesn’t bring nostalgia much, but I felt proud of the whole path between this recording from my early months living in Montréal and now, 20 years later…

So, as it is a long recording, here is a long text reflecting this release…
One thing I love about all these years of making noise, playing live and such is the longtime relationship with people I developed, sometimes from all around the world. Jorge Castro Ramos of Cornucopia and Clon’s fame is totally one of those that I felt lucky to have met in the early days of Wapstan/Foutredieu!!!. We used to chat a lot and trade some recordings and discussed a lot about noise online. He had a very positive impact on my path as we discussed a lot on some process of recordings, of releasing stuff and about artists we like, such discussions when you are young can have a really big impact on you. I had the fortunate pleasure meet him and to witness in person that he is totally a gentleman. We did a Clon/Wapstan collab that I think is still to this day one of my favorite early Wapstan (AKA the drone/dark ambient era) recordings. I planned a couple of times to fly him over here to do some gigs but I was too dumb maybe and a little resource-less to try such things.

Why talking about Jorge… To make a story short, Jorge texted me in 2022 with a picture of his copy of the CDR of Wapstan’s “L’ivresse et le froid…”, the second release I ever made as Wapstan, after the (MIGHTY!) split with Never Presence Forever. He also had in the picture the enclosed message I sent him with this CDR which was very dumb… Heh… My first question was if it does still work followed by the request to send me a WAV copy of it if possible. A couple of days after, Jorge sent the WAV you are playing (I assume). I lost track on the digital files of my early stuff long ago and I don’t have physical copies of most of the Brise-Cul Releases or they are very far somewhere in boxes. So, the present recording you are currently listening to is the WAV from Jorge’s. It aged well in his Puerto Rico’s house and maybe fermented with some sound parasites from oxidation of the CDR, to our own pleasure.

L’ivresse et le froid is one of my first release after I moved to Montréal. I barely remember how I used to make these sounds back then… If I remember well, I used to do these droney sounds by slowing down sounds I made with whatever I can find, mix them with some 2004-era cheap ass programs and possibly never listen to them in their entirety as my (diagnosed way later) ADHD head was not made to jam stuff like this 55-minutes track. This and my inexperience with recording explain the tons of clipping in the early stuff. These very high-pitched crystalline sounds may have been produced by blowing on a pencil or on a small bottle and then slowed down. The other recordings were more “worked” (AKA with tons of layers), but I think I made this one very quick due to its romantic origins.

That story stuck me a lot… This recording was kind of influenced by the story of a kid that got lost getting back from the university I used to study some years before (UQAC in Chicoutimi) while getting back home in the same city I grew up and lived before moving to Montréal in 2003, La Baie, and died in a field of snow. It stuck my because I used to participate in these drinking contests and I felt it could have been me, being too drunk to figure where I was, getting out of the bus in the middle of nowhere, drunk, and die in the cold…

Still a sad story to me… But I feel bad after all these years of having used this tragedy from my hometown to record some music, especially some very abstract music like this recording. With time, I went to give less and less references in names and titles in my noise production. I now mostly want to let the sound speak itself, hence very abstract concept around it. The book I read last week or a sad tragedy like this that would never bring a son back to his parent has nothing to do with it with my noise music. That is why I have very I have many mixed feelings now toward the use of this tragedy for this re-release, but back then, as I just mentioned it shocked me a lot and I felt that the only way I could channel it was to record some noise about it. That said, I should not much have mentioned the whole story in the release and just have released it that way, that is why this new artwork have no mention of this story outside these small paragraphs…

So, I romantically sat down back then in 2004 and recorded this one-track release as Wapstan, my then solely “dark ambient” projec. So, this one is a very instinctive recording with a somewhat romantic drive.

I think, back then, I was not fully immersed in the lo-fi underground noise scene and had very different influences and, let’s say, pretentions. I was quite influenced for example by what was around that Quebec City label named No Type, especially their Freest of Radicals comp and that Morceaux de Machine CD they released. It is funny since it took me actually 15-20 years to finally met these people and are really good friend, notably Erick from Morceaux de Machine who is a common collaborator. I also had some influence by “old school avant-garde” stuff like Stockhausen, Ligeti and Boulez, which made me think at the time that I was doing “experimental” music or “avant-garde” music, which is OK to pretend when you are young. Why I mention that, it is because it may have had an influence on the very high pitch sound of this recording and on the length of it. I think there was a very sincere ambition to reach that kind of public. Back then I just moved from my small town in the north of Quebec, not much aware of how to integrate the local scene. Before moving, I used to do noise from the basement of my parents’ house, the sole live experience of experimental music in Saguenay I could get was a festival named “Festival de Musiques de Création” that were much in the type of jams that the Ambiance Magnétique record label were releasing, so I took what I could find that sounds weird and was influenced by that. I also started to trade with some people around, Jorge of course, and these people had a serious influence on my sounds. But I was still into multiple source of influence on experimental music and was less influence by the live performing of it, which is maybe a big thing on this recording compared to the following Wapstan releases in some ways.

Part of this naïve ambitious thing I just talked about is in the mention “no overdubs, synths, or samples” on the CDR. I may think that this I was taken from Gerogerigegege’s None Friendly CD. This album may also be the biggest influence of this one, as it is a very long high-pitched droney track. (The Gerogerigegege are still on top of my big influences...) That might be where I stole this idea of the “no overdubs, synths, or samples” thing just to look cool. But it is mostly true, save for the overdub part which I may not have known what does it means back then…

But if I remember well, this recording vas very impulsively recorded, possibly on a day or two. I used to produce some copies (it says 38 copies on the original CDR, I am pretty sure I haven’t done that much of this one) and tried to trade it or send copies for review and hear very few about.

Back then I heard very few about it. Aversionline reviewed it this way:
“This massive one-track release runs 55 minutes of cold, minimal dark ambient that was recorded without the use of overdubs, synths, or samples. The track is a concept piece based on and dedicated to a 19-year-old boy who died of hypothermia while wandering home drunk in La Baie, Quebec just a few months ago. The composition consists largely of minimal drones and hums that rest in the middle to upper range of the spectrum, almost like melodic wisps of feedback harmonies mingling with the occasional low-end wave that spans across the background. The first shift causes more of a ringing sort of sustain with the tones, so the structure remains the same, and very minimal, but there's more brightness and resonance - at times to a really painful degree on the ears! (And I don't view that as a bad thing at all, it's really quite unusual.) Later things strip down a bit more and become softer and increasingly spacious. This minimal softness carries the arrangement to its close, so throughout the nearly 60-minute ordeal there are only a few subtle shifts. The recording is very clear and full, I enjoy that a lot. I would be quite curious to know the circumstances under which this piece was captured, and what materials were used. The CD-R comes in a plain xeroxed sleeve that's gray with minimal text. A bit of information appears on the disc face and that's that. Very minimal. It's not very exciting, but it could indeed look far worse, so I'm fairly alright with it. The disc is also hand-numbered out of a mere 38 copies. Very nice. I do believe it could've been a tad shorter, but its consistency works in its favor in regards to the running time. This would actually be a very nice piece for live performances if the surroundings were appropriately quiet. Thus far I've enjoyed Wapstan far more than sole member Martin Sasseville's Foutredieu!!! project, so I hope work on this front continues in this vein. Hopefully some other labels will take note soon for a proper release.”

Cool to see that I had some sort of followers back then. I don’t think it was some sort of a standard mid-2000s noise kind of jam. That said, I mentioned it many times elsewhere but I shifted from this kind of dark ambient sound mostly due to the fact that I started playing live and got more and more into other ways to play live. I was too ADHD (and unexperienced) to play that kind of stuff live. Playing live completely got me out of the pretention to do some dark ambient music, mostly because I never felt like my music is romantically ambient (save for this release) and mostly because I am not a “dark person”.

That said, I think I kept that vibe in Wapstan’s recording to this day. I just open the sound range of the project through the years while keeping some sort of that “Nordic vibe” I ended up calling “Hypothermic Drone” that I still use to this day. It is maybe half a joke, half a statement, I am personally not sure. I wouldn’t have kept on doing that kind of jams for over 20 years if it was a simple joke anyway. After all these years, considering also that I use the same technique to record for years, I think using the “Hypothermic Drone” tag to describe the Wapstan sound is some sort of a standard to follow… Like some sort of standard that I am the only person who care about…

And while these sounds were made with some computer processing and sounds very squared, I think, when I got more into playing with instruments and live devices, I tried to reach that kind of sound. It may have taken me years but I feel like in the last years I not only can perform noise that sounds like this but I am really into returning to this kind of sounds. For example, ironically, listening to this recording something like 20 years later was a very fun experience since it kind of sounds like the feedback zone I developed in the last years that you can hear on some of my rock band En Fer recordings (listen to the end of Le Sacre Fils). (I also tried to start a black metal band some years ago with some friends and it didn’t work as I was doing too much feedback for their taste…) And listening to this even gave me the idea of maybe trying to play it live or something…

So, this is a long run, a 20 years old time capsule getting back at me. What I think are sound parasites from Jorge’s copy is also very cool since it gives some push at the middle of the recording. Let’s call it a remix…

It is a special document I guess and as I am celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Wapstan KVLT in Montréal, I felt it was a great occasion to share this release…

Enjoy!

Long live the Hypothermic Drone KVLT

Martin Sasseville, Montréal, April 2022.