Interview with Thierry Jolif (Lonsai Maikov)

 

Thierry Jolif is a French writer and musician, best known from his band Lonsai Maikov which is well-known on postindustrial / neofolk scene. Maybe the most accurate description of LM's music has been invented by Thierry himself: "Apopkalyptik esotronic metal blues'n'folk". Or "Muzik that burns Modernity"...

Please describe us your album “The Smell of Knowledge” made with Russian project Aevum Spiritus. Why did you decide to record such experimental / ambient music? As we can see, there are “Prologos” and “Epilogos”, so is this a concept-album, a tale or a kind of spiritual journey?

It is, yes, a kind of concept-album. But really “ a kind of”. I feel very free, you know, may it be with music and its all kind of conception or concepts... It's always the same “thing” a mechanical work for the ones who want to see life through such sunglasses. With LM all wishes they came from the heart. The man behind Aevum Spiritus is a very close and spiritual friend, I love his ways, I love his music so it was very natural. And you forget to mention that this very special album is also made with ALES which is the musical project of my very dear friend Alan who is the man behind most of the concepts and photos and layouts of LM's album... So this album is a very special one... done with many respect from each others. In fact, if I remember well, Rasul of Lomeanor Net Label asked me for a song for his free-sampler “We Rise Above”... I told him that I really love his policy of making only free to download albums that are real albums... So the project was born and I told him LM will make some kind of weird stuff to build a special project for Lomeanor... At the same time Piotr of Aevum Spiritus was sending me some raw and good stuff, so I asked him if we could do something with two of these worked sounds I'd love. Then it appeared clear to me that this project should be a real collaborative album and I asked Alan, from ALES, to do the same that I've done with Piotr and I sent him two sounds that he worked out his own way...
So yes, it's a spiritual journey, spiritual in that special meaning that it is a meeting , without meeting... We 've done all the work separately without seeing each others, only via Internet... but in the same time we have shared many things by the spirit, being all connected not through a cold technical instruments but by music and gathered under a name that, each of us, at a different level, loved : Lonsai Maïkov... This is the power of TRUE virtuality... a name which is nobody (as in Ulysses...) and in the same time can welcome everybody that shivers in the same energy... Yes, this is the better to describe this... “the smell of knowledge” ! Feeling the brotherhood over frontiers... So the journey starts and end (EPISEMON) with two very literal and arty pieces, very French and very Russian with, into the lyrics, quotes from N. Fedorov and Paul Gadenne. It's about words, about their “power”... Then the travel goes into the dark and painful aspect of the words. “HIELAND” is a Germanic word used to describe the Last Supper into the Germanic warriors mentality, and so it has more the image of a banquet of braves !! But the lyrics said that “pain is engraved in our hearts”... No consolation only in the words and their possibility of transforming truth into what the common called “reality” ! The following stations have their titles speaking for themselves : “Nazareth”, “Stone peoples”, “Passing by the spring of true life”...
About ambient/experimental music, you must learn that this is the first way of LM. Most of peoples do think they know about LM by reducing it to some kind of poor second class fashionable “neo-folk” project... It's very sad... LM has done many things before the three CDs most of people in this scene are knowing and the first tapes were really into experimental stuff... You can have an example of this with the OEC edition of Barddwedi... This was just the good form for those “songs”...

And what about your forthcoming material “Décembre au mont des Oliviers”? We can listen to song “Allonge le pas” from this album and it seems to be a strange mixture of neofolk, dark ambient and psychedelic rock – just like track “Souverain” from Old Europa Café sampler. Is it a new direction of Lonsai Maikov ?

As I told you before, we can't have “new direction”... Music is in the air. Vibrations and energies (dunameis in Greek, which we Orthodox christians believed to be “uncreated”...) ! It seems to me that, for example, you can find some similar feelings on “Our Lady of the Bones” with songs as “Like a Rose”... Sometimes I feel “crazy”, thinking that, in fact, most peoples don't really listen to music... They are so much influenced by fashion and movements, and being listening to the good thing at the good moment so that they don't pay a real attention to music... When I think about this period, reading all these things about “Our Lady...”, all those “so-called” music lovers, being unable to write something original about this original album, being searching only comparisons to please a little audience... So, yes, may be today we are more able to avoid the traps of a “scene” and do what we have to... Lonsai Maïkov is Lonsai Maïkov and we do OUR music... I personally admire musicians like Scott Walker, John Zorn, Trey Spruance, David Sylvian... they are not, at all, prisoners of a style except their OWN !
“Décembre...” is certainly the most personal work we've done... It will surely appear as a bit weird and strange but to me it is really the final embodiment of the LM's motto “doctrine exposed as poetry”. Essential and sincere because most songs are sung in French.

Tell us about your participation in “Enemies” compilation and about song “Paraklesis” which we can listen to on Youtube. And how did you get in contact with TSIDMZ (track “One Night in Bagdad”)?

In fact the collaboration with TSIDMZ is a bit old now... and I've done two songs with him. I guess I met Solimano via a German friend when I was trying to do something with some musicians for the second edition of the collective book I directed about Julius Evola's influences. He is the son of Claudio Mutti, a very serious seeker into the radical traditionalist way and he's very involved into radical music, so I thought it was a good thing. Finally this project to have a CD coming with the book never saw the light of day, but Solimano did like LM so he asked me to do some stuff on two tunes of him...It was a strange period for LM, we were waiting till six years, at least, to find someone who could release “Thee Darkening ov Powers” and I've already done some collaborations with Bleiburg... so I did those ones...

Lonsai Maikov...

Ciąg dalszy...

The song for ENEMIES and PARAKLEISIS are more recent stuff (even if the poem and the demo of Parakleisis are ready since five years at least...). For Enemies we were invited to participate by our friend Count Ash of Moon Far Away. The theme seemed very good and fitting our sensibility. With our side project Dervenn we did a cover of the song The Peat Bog soldiers by the Dubliners. In fact this song is translated in many langages, it has been written by prisoners in German camps and at a time during WWII the French resistance used it. It was so evident we have to do it our own version. It's a tune we really love, very deep and moving...
On the other side Parakleisis is less pacific... It's a song about the sufferings of Serbia during this very sad period when it is bombing by NATO and everyone turned against this country, and especially France when the two countries were closed and allies before... It's also a special song to me, because I really love Serbian culture and the Serbian Church, I think also about Kosovo when I sing this song...

You have recorded traditional songs from Bretagne with Gregorio Bardini on the album “Kantalon”. There were also other Celtic / Gaelic / Breton elements in your music, for example track “Tenvalder” on “Thee Darkening of Powers”. Could you tell us something more about your roots and your ethnic / national identity ?

Sincerely I don't really have any special feelings about ethnicity or national identity. Peoples, language, tongues, landscapes, stones, trees... This is what I feel a link with. The rest seems too much “intellectual”, “abstract” to me... During many years I've been into this kind of stuff... But yes it was a bit too much into an untrue world of ideals. Living only in mind not into flesh and spirit... I'm now very suspicious with all these fuzzy words, fluctuating, dangerous, ideological: culture, civilization. I'm closed to the nearest living things to me, not to the dead one. Brittany is a part of myself but certainly not the most important, “celticity” is in fact a kind of modern reaction to modernity, something with important roots into romanticism. I'm stranger to this kind of things and I'm no longer into any strong interest for archeological things. I've known too long and too well the intellectual world of political reactionary or conservatism ! There's too much of a black occult spirit into it, too much of necromancy...
I love the sounds of the Breton language, I really love the feelings it increase within me and the way we can use it, and I mean nothing nostalgic at all, on the contrary, I love especially what it can awake NOW, in OUR actuality... In some special places the resonance of the words with the landscapes is so strong. This aspect is very strong and give a good result in “Tenvalder”... There's nothing “folkloric” in this song. It's all about the feelings of the landscapes, about the dark, hard, stony, elemental reaction against a bad modernism, the black and negative reaction to a world using lie, always showing the contrary of what he really is... But this harsh reactionary feeling finally found its way in the darkness and by transcending its own negativity it comes to the light and unalterable gold of resurrecting flesh and spirit ! It was a mirror of our own way... Now LM needs no more such external cultural artifact, it is far more inner feelings and inner energies (dunameis).

Your newest book is “A la chair des paroles” What does it contain?

It is an e-book. I really enjoy those possibilities. You can order it only via the “e-editor” website and the book is done only if someone buy it. Actually it contains most of the LM's lyrics plus some others I've done for Dissonant Elephant and some other projects... But in fact, I've never considered a song as something finished or perpetually done... There's always many, many possible “versions” of a song. I mean an infinity of versions...
The best things ever done with a LM's song is what happened to the song known as “A Burned Village” on Barddwedi. This tune is an experimental song I've done alone just after we've recorded “From the Fountain”... For this first CD we've been in a studio owned by the friend of a friend... When we get the recording sessions completed this person asked us for a big amount of money to do the mixes. Of course it was not possible... So the solution was finally found some months later and we bought material to mix this record and to do the future ones... So, just after this I wanted to see and understand this new material by doing improvised tunes and things like that. It was by this time that I met with Mathieu and I guess this song (in two parts) was our first collaboration... During a long time this song was just for the pleasure of our hears... but Mathieu decided to do a “metal” version of it... and finally with his “scarlet-metal” SADASTOR he released another version of it which has been done on a tape-album. One copy of this was given to Markus Wolff when he came for the Blood Axis concert we've organised in Rennes in 1998 and this came to the hears of the project L'Acephale, and they do a cover of it on their CDs... Actually the “final” version of it by Lonsai Maïkov is still unreleased. It is called now “The Red knowledge” and is based on the first “metal” version by Mathieu... Just to say, that LM is LM and we work our music in our own way. We do not believe in THE song to be done once and for all...
It's all about energy (dunameis) and vibrations of the air, about given feelings and inspirations. It's all about “breath”... and nobody breathe each time in the same way... Sir John Tavener has this great sentence “Music is liquid metaphysic” ! It is the same about “lyrics”... Why should we always sing the same words when we are changing, when we feel different and different feelings... I do not want to think about text that we should leave as old and used clothes, just saying something about a state we ignore now, about feelings we don't want to think about anymore, like dead skins we leave behind... Lyrics, poems... they still contains the power of Word... and He made flesh has victory upon death ! So this book will also know changes.

What is Lonsai Maikov “Black Box” and why did you decide to limit it only to one copy ?

It is something done in a very crafty manner for the 24th “birthday” of Lonsai Maïkov... It contains the three first CDs, dedicated, a CDR with five unreleased pieces (they will stay so in theses actual versions...) and some photos and gift... Only one ? Yes just because it is not so important and I wanted it to be a special link with the person interested in it...

Few months ago we could read on your Facebook: Work in Progress : Legenda/Legend of the great Inquisitor; a French-Russian project (with Aevum Spiritus -Ru-; Cisfinitum -Ru-; Dissonant Elephant -Fr-). When it will be ready?

God only knows.
It is a long and hard process of creation. DE and LM are based in the far west of Europe and our friends of AS and Cisfinitum are based in the far east... ! Actually we've already done a great piece but a part of it has been used in the common “Alchemical” project of Cisfinitum and our other good friend Olegh First Human Ferro, and may be it will be use entirely on another project... It's good. I like this kind of “flying” stuff, never achieved work... The “final” title should be “NE MIR NA MEC”. Inspired by the demonology of the great Russian spiritual literature, Legend of Dostoïevski, but also his “Demons”, the works of Merejkovski (his antichrist mostly..), of Sologub or Mikhail Boulgakov... It is very important for us... It is also about our personal links and relations, our true living into the actual state of this world (ruled by the prince, the father of lies...). It's like a crystal always reflecting different aspects of truth in his multiple faces, but always truth is deformed and turned into lies... It's a bit the same with modern music...