Part 1

Name: Roxane Métayer
Nationality: French
Occupation: Composer, producer, sound artist, violinist, visual artist, sculptor
Recent release: Roxane Métayer teams up with Pefkin for a split LP via Morc. Her new solo full-length Perlée de sève is out February 15th 2023 via Marionette.
Recommendations: https://ksiezyc2.bandcamp.com/album/ksi-yc; https://mikhailmineral.bandcamp.com/album/mikhail-mineral

If you enjoyed this interview with Roxane Métayer and would like to find out more about her, visit her on Instagram, and Soundcloud. She also has a personal website.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started playing music at the age of seven. I loved listening to a violinist named Hilary Hahn. For Christmas I received a CD of her playing Bach. My family was listening to different kinds of music, especially a mix between medieval, folk and rock music. We went to see Lisa Gerrard in concert and we were listening a lot to Dead Can Dance at home. My first passions and influences are therefore a mixture of classical, medieval and folk music.

[Read our Lisa Gerrard interview]

I think I decided to play music when musicians once came to my school. One man was playing guitar, another transverse flute and the person who would become my teacher played the violin. The violin completely hypnotized me. I think for me it was related to the beauty of the instrument itself, its sounds, its curves and its swirls.

It is thanks to my mother who paid me lessons that I was able to learn violin with a professor and had the chance of playing music now.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

My body can interact with music by dancing, changes its state by becoming more relaxed, etc. It depends of the type of music. Dancing can be the immediate reaction.

Or on the contrary it can also create the opposite effect: I can practically have the sensation of leaving my body. When this happens, I can not say where I am unless the song brings back a memory. But each time it’s a question of movements, inside the body, with the body or outside of it.

These different movements generated by the music bring a certain fluidity and breaths to creation. I guess it allows me to be spontaneous,  to have meditative moments while I am creating.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I started making music by creating soundtracks for my videos when I was a student. I had a zoom h4n and started taking my violin out of its box, using small flutes, a cantele and field recordings to create a sound edit with a software for video. I was accustomed to this software thanks to my practice of making videos. And I did not know the other software for sound. I took what I knew and what I had at hand to create something guided by the desire to create a dialogue between image and sound.

For a while I continued to link music and video by making clips. But gradually the music became the most important part. I started to play music by improvising and each concert was totally different from one to another.

Now I create tracks that I keep and keep working on for a long time. My choices are getting clearer. I use my voice and I choose words, I write sort of short poems. My voice is no longer just an instrument but a tool for telling stories.

It is a perpetual research, a practice that seeks to constantly evolve.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I grew up near the forest inside a forester house. We used to walk in the forest with my sister and my mother. It was a space where we felt free to talk together, a place where we were able to meet in intimacy.

Later, I went in the woods on my own and that's when I started picking up sounds and videos, staying in the same position for a long time, trying to disappear inside the forest and becoming invisible. It was a kind of meditation. I was trying to learn to listen to it, to be aware of every little sound to try to locate its source because I wanted to be able to observe how non-human lives were going on there.

I relate to the forest as a territory that constitutes my identity and I feel intensely close to it. It's a place that helped forge my mind to be sensitive to the living. Being a woman who grew up near the forest has a definite impact on my art. So if I had to put things inside boxes let’s say I apprehend art and music through the prism of an eco-feminism sensibility.

I also like to think of my identity as the “identity-relationship” as Edouard Glissant called it. My music and my art are impacted and enriched by encounters and exchanges.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Initiatory, odyssey, transcendental, parallel world.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I like to find round trips inside different temporalities through music or when it superimposes different temporal strata. I love when music takes me to places that don't really exist or that existed a long time ago, making back and forth between a hypothetical future and ancient times.

I listen to traditional music. Traditional music records are important archives which preserve what might disappear especially when one notes the neutralization of cultural diversities today in Western Europe. For example in France Jules Ferry banned the regional patois in schools in the 19th century on the threat of corporal punishment. The disappearance of languages also entails the irremediable loss of parts of the culture of the geographical areas concerned. A language also makes it possible to designate local climatic phenomena, an endemic fauna and flora that no other can evoke as well.

We learn less and less to play music, to sing and to dance. Intergenerational transmission, popular meetings, schools, associations, groups, community centers and other dying institutions should make up for this erasure of collective memories. But art and music are relegated to the background and a single culture written with a capital "C" is set up as unique.

I recently learned that my great-grandfather of humble origin played the violin himself or was perhaps what is called a "violoneux" as I like to imagine. My hairdresser mother had however to pay for music lessons which are currently rather reserved for a wealthy social class. I am aware that folk traditions sometimes convey outdated patterns. There are gender roles in some folk dances that convey sexism. The challenge would be to bring them to life while adapting them to changes in our society, which must get rid of this type of discrimination.

If the paradigm of "creolization" according to Edouard Glissant could happen it would make it possible to make cultural diversities coexist and bring them together:

“Creolization is a crossbreeding of arts, or languages that produces the unexpected. It's a way to continuously transform without getting lost. It is a space where dispersion makes it possible to come together, where culture shocks, disharmony, disorder, interference become creative. It is the creation of an open and inextricable culture, which upsets the standardization by the great media and artistic centers. It is done in all areas, music, visual arts, literature, cinema, cooking, at a dizzying pace...” (interview, Le Monde, 2005)

Traditional music can sometimes appear in fragments in my music. Nobody has taught it to me. I had to listen to folk music and l have learned some traditional Irish and Yddish music sheets. But I like to imagine that bodies have the memory of very old gestures and that they do not forget them completely, that the body memory and its cells are imprinted with memories of ancient music.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

The most important instrument is my violin. It has accompanied me since I’m a child. It is a faithful companion. I like to improvise with it but I also like to decipher music sheets with it. The other tool is my loop station. Thanks to its inbuilt effects it I can transform the sounds of the violin and give to it a new voice. I can create a dialogue between recorded sentences and live playing. I like to imagine different ways of interacting with the machine and to avoid as much as I can the effect of stratification.

Even if the violin is really important I also like to have a little family of different instruments with me as a small orchestra with different characters and roles: flutes, percussions, bells … My voice is also a precious instrument that is part of this musical ensemble.