Diagonale des Yeux on tape, distance and singing off-key together

You move between a lot of projects – Parasite Jazz, Panoptique, De Klok. When you and Laurène started making this record together, did it feel like a new mode of working, or did it slot into something familiar?

Théo : It was a new mode, as it always is. There were things I would do alone that I dreamt of doing with someone. Like writing a song, choosing what’s next and how to make it weird and nice. Not being afraid of emotions and trying new characters, new voices.

EYE has its own very defined world. When you started building Diagonale des Yeux with Théo, were you protective of keeping the two projects separate, or were you curious to see what would leak through?

Laurène: I really wanted to distance myself from EYE, which is a frugal project, both intentionally and unintentionally. A bit claustrophobic and self-centred, 100% bedroom emo music. These past few years, I’ve been enjoying shouting on stage. I gained confidence, sharpened my vocal cords, enriched my hat collection. I guess I was ready to sing differently, compose differently. Maybe it’s the same for Théo? Sometimes it’s crystal clear what comes from which one of us; sometimes it’s not, which is good.

What was the first thing you made together that made you think this could actually be a record?

Laurène: We recorded our first 3 songs in a row. Until then, we were kind of stuck with fixed roles: Théo on drums and me on synths and/or vocals. Once we moved beyond these static roles, everything got better.

Théo: And it kept on happening every time we set up a studio somewhere for a week… At some point it was enough tracks and excitation to send to Mark.

The production on Madeleine is very particular – tape, living rooms, that deliberate roughness. How much of that was a decision you came in with, Théo, and how much did it come out of the sessions themselves?

Théo: Machines and people can sound perfect, but only people can sound as bad and funny as humans. Also, older machines are closer to humans in that sense. We live 1000km away from each other, which is not a deliberate thing, but it was good to do the songs with what we had in each environment, sometimes not much, sometimes a hard rock band’s backline. The recipe was different every time. Then it was summer, and we squatted in our friend Martin’s studio for final triangle and vocal overdubs, and mixing. It was like a new playground with old, still-functioning music tools. We thought it would never end.

The languages shift across the album. Is that a way of making the lyrics harder to fix in place, or does it come from somewhere more instinctive?

Laurène: Definitely instinctive. With Nana Nina, for example, I had this Nino Rotta track in mind, “Ninna Nanna”, that Théo had me listen to. After that, I had nothing in mind but words ending in an A! Spanish came naturally.

With the lyric-writing – the exquisite corpse approach – was there a line you wrote that landed somewhere you genuinely didn’t expect? One that made you want to change the rules?

Théo: Actually, our game already has more rules than cadavre exquis. You can’t fail if you want to play it, and it always lands in places you don’t expect. You have a moving factor and a fixed factor for each poem, so the lines are all connected even though written by a different, half-amnesic person. The fixed rules shape the poem, and you decide new fixed rules every time you start one, and the moving factor shapes the line. It changes every line.