Trystero interview….each other

5 Minute Read

Music

A discussion on origins, recording their second Album ‘Humming Fuzz’ an “acid-drenched, kraut-propelled energy that suggests Psychic TV commandeering a narrowboat” oysters, Italian exile anthems and fascist groove thangs.

The French canal system has birthed stranger things than psychedelic post-punk, but few as gloriously unhinged as Trystero’s second album Humming Fuzz. We let the band interview themselves about barge life, gangster pasta, and whether breathing underwater is overrated.

There’s something beautifully perverse about a band named after Thomas Pynchon’s fictional underground postal service – a conspiracy that may or may not exist – recording their music on a repurposed canal barge for the second time around, drifting through the fog-thick winters of northern France.

Trystero operate in the liminal spaces between cities, genres, waking life and fever dreams. They’re a scattered collective: a teacher in France, a boat captain, a graphic designer in Strasbourg juggling three other bands, and a sound artist stationed in Berlin. They converge sporadically, materialise long enough to conjure something raw and electric, then dissolve back into their separate lives.

Humming Fuzz, out now on Knekelhuis, is their second transmission – denser and more alive than their debut Sfumare e Vedere, crackling with the kind of acid-drenched, kraut-propelled energy that suggests Psychic TV commandeering a narrowboat and getting lost somewhere between Weatherall’s record collection and a Spacemen 3 practice session. Now expanded to include Nelly on bass and Alexia on vocals (the latter being the very captain of said barge), the band channel a wild, ceremonial energy that transforms each performance into what Alexia calls “invoking I don’t know what.”

<a href="https://trysteromusic.bandcamp.com/album/humming-fuzz">Humming Fuzz by Trystero</a>

We handed them the microphone – or rather, they handed it to each other – to discuss oysters, Italian exile anthems, fascist groove thangs, and the curious influence of cooking pasta while watching the sky change colour. What follows is equal parts band interview and collective psychogeographic diary, which feels entirely appropriate for a group who might not even exist.

Let’s gooooo…

Question from Thomas Clark aka Mr TC to all: An interesting thing about this band is that we all live in different cities and come together to make music, rehearse, and tour. But outside of those times we all have busy lives doing other stuff. Perhaps to start off we can introduce ourselves a bit and give people an idea of who we are individually?

Low Bat: I’m Low Bat, or Louis, a teacher in Highschool in friggin’ France. I was for some time involved in the band Jean-Luc, don’t know if the project is still alive, and I keep myself busy as well with helping Mutant Radio from Tbilissi with doing a part of the program.

Alexia: I’m Alexia , captain of the mobile project Urban Boat (a boat organising concerts and artistic residencies in the north of France, Belgium, sometime in the Netherlands…).

Kelly Placard: I’m a full-time graphic designer, and I dedicate most of my free time and holidays to the bands I play in (Easy Goat, Rumore Rumore, Yllek Dracalp, and of course Trystero), to DJing, and trying to remain involved in organising DIY concerts.

TC: I live in Berlin where I work and study at the University of the Arts. I’m a sound artist and am also involved in various musical projects (MR TC, Acid Drones, TC LK) and co-run a record label called Phase Group.

Q (Alex to all) : how did you all meet each other ?

A: I have known Louis for a few years , he became a very good friend and when we hosted Trystero for a residency , then a second, with great pleasure, I did a few voices on the two albums, then the band asked me to join the UK tour in February. It was great for me, who had never done such things before (even if I used to sing when I was living in Berlin).
I usually host artists , and I passed on the other side 🙂

KP: I met Louis very briefly when he was finishing his studies in Strasbourg about ten years ago. Then he came back to Strasbourg last year to teach for a few months — during that time, we kept running into each other at amazing concerts and became good friends! It was by letting myself get roped into Trystero that I met Thomas, and then Alexia!

TC: I met Louis in Berlin some years ago and we bonded instantly over music. During COVID I would go and visit him in France and it was then that we decided to start the band. I met Alex on that first residency on the boat as she was hosting us and contributing vocals to those first recordings. Then I first met Kelly in Strasbourg at a show that she was organising, I was drunkenly trying to put my jacket in the sound booth and she very politely turned me down! The next night at a New Years Eve party at Louis’ we met properly and started talking about her joining the band.

Q. (KP to LB and TC) When I mention Trystero in French conversations, people often hear “triste héros” (which means “sad hero”). So I’ll ask you again the question I’m often asked: where does this name come from?

TC: I like that double meaning – but actually the name comes from a Thomas Pynchon book called ‘The Crying of Lot 49’. In it, the main character thinks that she has discovered an underground postal network called Trystero. She spends the whole novel running around chasing clues and trying to figure out who’s behind this organisation and as a reader you’re never quite sure if it’s real or if she’s going mad. So we liked the idea of naming the band after this underground secret society that nobody knows if they exist or not.

Q (Alex to Low Bat) : Why was the first album in Italian?

LB: It was like a token of love, respect, and acknowledgment of the history of the forced exile of so many families during the 20th century, who escaped fascism in order to survive, like you can feel and hear in the Suburra track. But the second album is written and “sung” in French and English.

Q. (TC – to all) We recorded this album (like the first one) on a re-purposed canal barge that our band member Alexia is the captain of. Can you explain more about the urban-boat. What kind of a space it is and how you feel it influenced the music we have made together?

A: The high season of urban boat is more in the summer, we navigate from cities to cities (or villages to villages, or cities to villages :), work with different kinds of partners, and we host artists in mobile residencies during the navigation . In the winter time the boat stays in its village (80 km from Paris) and remains open to the artists we are close to, as soon as they need a place to work in. It is how we have hosted Trystero the 2 times.

LB : I mean the boat, in wintertime, fog rising from the channel, round porthole windows, a log fire, and somehow a spirit of a beautiful madness hidden in every corner. Sounds like a particular basis to work and create such fuzzy madness.

Q. (LB – to all) What’s your favorite way of cooking pasta and does the colour of the sky influence the sauce you’re cooking with it ?

KP: I don’t like cooking that much, I much prefer it when you are cooking for all of us. Most likely your famous Spaghetti Puttanesca – which has now been immortalised in a song of ours!

A: I love the recipe my father used to do : just a tomato dipped in the boiled water of the pasta for one minute, then you remove the skin and smash it in your plate, you add garlic and olive oil , and you have a delicious pasta in 3 minutes. He called it the gangster’s pasta (in Italian, I don’t remember how to say it 🙁

TC: I agree with Kelly!

Q. (LB – to all) Do you ever wish you could breathe underwater?

A: I sometimes do it in my dreams actually.

L.B. : I knew it, Alexi! The way you enjoy eating oysters and how you look at the wild geese from your deck.

KP: I very rarely put my head under water, except in the bath. I don’t think I’d enjoy breathing soapy water !

Q. (LB – to all) What is the process like in your thoughts and feelings when you create for Trystero, whether before the recording session or while it unfolds?

A: difficult to answer for me, as I added my voice after, but what I love when I sing with the band, is that I’m free to do what I want, and each concert, even each song becomes a kind of ceremony we celebrate all together invoking I don’t know what.

TC: At times when we’re not together, I might be working on a new idea and suddenly think “this is something we could use for Trystero”. I save all those snippets and ideas for us to jam on when we’re recording which means we can be quite efficient with our time when we’re on the boat. At the other end, quite a bit of the stuff on the new album was things we came up with in the moment, just trying to find a groove or a pattern that we could imagine being fun to play live. I remember one of the beats (can’t remember which track?) was recorded in about 10 minutes with a drum machine app on Kelly’s phone. I think that sums up the kind of flowing but focused creative energy that we all had on the boat while recording the album.

KP: Before working on the second record, we also sent each other tons of music to share our “current vibes,” which ended up guiding us in directions sometimes quite different from the first record!

Q (TC To all): Oh yeah that’s right – I’m trying to remember what we were sending to each other. What are some of the artists or influence that you think we channeled into Humming Fuzz?

LB : A slowed up version of Heaven 17 – (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang.

KP: This album from Grotto Terraza
<a href="https://mapledeathrecords.bandcamp.com/album/kalte-k-stlichkeiten">Kalte Köstlichkeiten by Grotto Terrazza</a>

And this track from Jeanne Vomit-Terror & Ed Sunspot…