Name: No Tongues
Members: Alan Regardin, Matthieu Prual, Ronan Courty, Ronan Prual
Interviewee: Matthieu Prual (“I'll answer these questions sometimes for myself and sometimes for No Tongues, and often somewhere in between.”)

Nationality: French
Occupation: Performers, improvisers, composers
Current release: No Tongues' ICI is out via Ormo/Pagans/Carton Records.

If you enjoyed this interview with No Tongues and would like to find out more about the band, visit them on Instagram, and Facebook.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Usually my first source of inspiration is silence. I mean deep silence, no sounds, no actions planned, nervous stillness, loneliness. It's here that my bests movements are usually coming from.

In the case of No Tongues, the impulse is related to a lot of different layers, musical subjects, philosophical attention to what music is made for, personnaly and for human groups. An interest in the question of our relation to music created in the past, traditions, and also the question of the impact of our environnement on our creative choices, and how music takes birth in contact with reality and subjectivity.

The very beginning of No Tongues was the meeting of very old vocal sounds from a worldwide oral tradition, and four experimental musicians -  and the will to work with these.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

When I asked me friends to join me in No Tongues, I did not have a real visualisation of the sound that we would create together. I called them because of their way of playing their instrument first, but also because I knew that they were interested in working with old vocal sounds, with traditional music. The choice of instrument, especially to have 2 double basses, was already a kind of composition.

In our way of working, we tried to be as close to an oral act as we could. What this means is that we create the music mostly by copying a sample of a voice for example,and when we reach a point where the orchestration is efficient, we start to improvise a lot of different version starting from this point, before fixing it.

So the finished work is always a surprise created by this process.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

With No Tongues, the process is simple: We start by choosing a topic - in Les voies du monde it was an ethnomusicological record with only human voices from oral traditions.



For Les voies de L'Oyapock we did a trip to the Amazon rainforest, meeting the Teko and Wayampi natives, taking a boat trip deep into the forest with two double basses ...



And for ICI we collected sounds from our immediate environnement. Then, when we are happy with the subject, we collect sounds. We choose the ones that are of interest to us, and then we work with them to create our music.

We make a lot of versions, sometimes we record these, sometimes we don't, sometimes we create the concerts first, and sometimes we do the album first. Which is what we did with ICI.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control over the process or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

With No Tongues, we really experiment with a collective approach of creating music, so the notion of strict control is not really possible. We have the idea that every musician should agree with each second of music created together.

Sometimes, we individually prefer this part or an other one, and for another guy in the band it's not the same part. But all of this creates a quality of wideness in the musical feelings in our music, all the while maintaining a strong clarity in the global creation.

Creating together with no leader is a very interesting process, and it'useful in every aspect of life.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

We leave a lot of music on our way. Numerous versions of our pieces, hours of improvisations, tries. Sometimes fragments of these find a place in the next work. But even if they don't, it always gives a background to what stays in the final version.

They could also appear during the concerts, in wich we keep a high level of improviation.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

The creative state is the moment where I feel most connected to me and the world - somewhere in between what I hope for the world, what my personality  leeds me to like, what I love to discover, coming from nowhere but feeling that it as a strengh within. A vibration that I want to make appear and share with others.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

With our last album ICI, we experimented with creating music during the studio process.

In practise, this meant that we arrived in the studio with a lot of fragments. We then recorded them and we stayed open to ideas coming in at the same time. One sound gives the idea of the second one, and the third ... and we used a lot of edits to compose. We could change places of sounds of one instrument from one part of the soung to another, experimenting with different forms of a song.

And we did all of this with a very high level of consideration for the sound quality of the record in conjunction with our sound engineer Mathieu Fisson, who was responsible for the recordings and mixing process.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

We have the chance to quickly go back to work on the concert side of our creation, that we can share live with the audience. This makes the creative baby blues less difficult to deal with.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I love practicing every action of life with the highest clarity I can find, in the most present way I can.

What I love about creating music that making coffee may not give me, is a way to express abstract feelings and deep emotions. It's a form of poetry, allowing you to reach a state where time disapears and where you feel alive and connected to something with wich music shares some mysterious rules.

If you apply those ways to making coffee, I'll drink a huge one!