After five years toying around on Ed Banger Records, releasing EPs and remixes, French electro-house DJ SebastiAn drops his insanely long, exhausting, and often exhilarating debut Total. Musician, video-maker, and artist Steven Golliday joins me to discuss this album and the state of the “album” as a concept in general. And yes, dude is totally making out with himself on the cover.
Brandon: French elctro-house DJ SebastiAn released his debut LP, Total, this year via the Ed Banger imprint after 5 years on the scene dropping EPs and remixes like hailstones from a storm cloud. 5 years is a long time to deliver a debut LP, but then, most people’s debut is somewhere under 22 songs. 22! This album is a body rocking glitch-funk monolith of sound that’s almost as abusive as it is exhilarating, flitting desultorily from one genre to the next – rock-techno, to R&B, to Disco, to Nintendo*. It’s equal parts Daft Punk, (label-mates) Justice, RJD2, and Gloria Gaynor and probably shouldn’t be consumed whole** for the benefit of your health and sanity.
The album is only 51 minutes long, but it feels so much longer. In fact, it’s kind of hard to sit through. Not that it’s not good, it’s just exhausting, like participating in a pie eating contest. I have a pretty firm axiom that an album should not be longer than 10 songs with an optional 11th song denouement. (This goes for mixes, too. In fact, this is very important for mixes. Mixes should be 10 songs or less. By the 11th song, I’m tired of your mix. By the 12th, I’m moving on.)
My point is, the fact that Total is only 51 minutes but feels so much longer is maybe a worse crime than a much longer album that seems to fly by. I have some ideas why the album is such an effort to get through. First of which is that it doesn’t feel like a unified creation, but, rather, an amalgamation of a lot of disparate songs and ideas. This feels like an album of mp3s, appropriately given SebastiAn’s DJ credentials, to be cherry picked and played at parties or thrown on mixes. And there are a lot of really great tracks on this album to be sure.
Steven, not to get too desultory myself, I’ll stop there and ask you first what you think of the album. Have you found a coherence in its structure that I’m missing?
*[see: “Motor.” That song totally could have scored just about any racing/fighting game on the original NES.]
**[That’s what she said.]
Steven: Total is my first introduction to the music of SebastiAn, though most of the album does not feel at all alien. The soaring, up-front-in-the-mix synths and drum beat surges that have been made a staple by Daft Punk–and which seem to be a requisite ingredient for any contemporary pop banger–are prominently featured. The funky rhythm guitar riffs of “Love in Motion” and the slap bass of “Embody” conjure reminiscences of Rick James, Prince and Teena Marie, albeit with a more jerky, less loose quality. And while some of the elements of Total may seem stylistically disparate at first, it only took listening to a few tracks for me to start feeling a coherence in its structure as it grinded on…and on…and on.
Listening to Total, I feel that SebastiAn has a very clear concept of an audience and venue for this music. In my mind’s ear I can hear this thumping in a very boring, exclusively priced club and getting the dance floor packed. In my mind’s eye I can see a car full of southern California sorority girls swerving at dangerously high speeds and chanting along with the M.I.A. guesting “C.T.F.O” as it bangs. And this gets to Total‘s relative unlistenableness (did I make that word up?) as an entire album at 51 minutes. SebastiAn has created a bunch of music that is not so much to be listened to as it is to be felt and to drive experiences, and that in my opinion is the album’s coherence. Furthermore, meticulous crafting, mixing and mastering are ties that bind this album together. The only anomalies as I hear them (tracks the sorority girls would probably skip) are some of the shorter interludes like “Cartoon” or “Night” that hint at an artist who could get off into some way out shit if he wanted to create something primarily for listening.
I’m fascinated by shifting (or shifted) attitudes towards albums in general, and specifically more ‘conceptual’ ones. Song/album length in recorded music originated as a commercial and physical restraint of the medium. [ed note: the vinyl LP only holds 45 minutes of music.] This being the case, I’m skeptical of attitudes that would prescribe a certain standard length on an album, because I feel that to be a position molded so heavily by market forces and not artistic ones. In the case of Total, I think SebastiAn has made an ‘album’ of music in a way that is perfectly contemporary, because the ease of skipping about through hundreds of songs afforded by iPods and the like has pretty much obliterated (or at least heavily diminished) the conception of what we knew as an ‘album’.
Brandon: Steven, do you consider yourself an album guy? I have a number of friends who judge an album by how many “good songs” it has on it, but have no patience or interest in evaluating an album as a whole. I, myself, if it weren’t made obvious already, am distinctly an album guy, which may make me something of a troglodyte these days.
Steven: I do indeed consider myself an album guy; I love throwing on an album and being taken on a ride that feels directed, even if the direction feels hectic. However, I try to evaluate albums, and artists’ approaches to them, on their own terms. When I get the sense (or am specifically told) that a body of music is presented to be considered as a whole I judge how well it achieves coherence, or just an overall vibe. But when it feels like a so-called album is just a collection of disparate material that happens to be ready for release, then I’m more prone to evaluate simply on a song by song basis.
In our contemporary musical state, I think it’s a lot to ask for an artist to fight the tide that is eroding the audience’s patience for digesting unified collections of songs. However, I predict that artists will continue to make cohesive albums because I think it’s an effective branding strategy; it provides an identity.
Brandon: OK. So this is an album of 22 individual songs. As such, I want to take a moment to dig into them. We’ve mentioned a lot of touchstones, which are readily apparent – Daft Punk, Justice, Rick James, Prince, Gloria Gaynor. Would you be willing to go so far as to say that SebastiAn is derivative of these older sounds or is he bringing something new to the table?
There are a lot of songs on this album I like, but the voice that stands out most to me is the one mining old disco sounds. When I first listened to the album, I thought it sounded like electronic music as imagined by legendary disco producer Biddu. Disco, of course, is often credited as the forebear of House so maybe this shouldn’t be news, but the funky 70s groove of “Arabest” feels like a refreshing surprise nonetheless. “Embody,” “Kindercut,” “Water Games,” and “Yes” all sound like they belong on one of those multi-colored light-up dance floors beneath bell-bottoms, roller skates, and a mountain of 100% pure Columbian awesomeness. Even the horn stabs of “Prime” feel like they’re coming straight out of Studio 54.
And I’m with you in regards to “Cartoon” and “Night.” In fact, I adore almost all of the less-than-a-minute tracks populating the album. They feel wholly unique, a testament to SebastiAn’s far-reaching production talent.
I’d be remiss not to mention, of course, the weirdest song on the album, “Doggg,” a terrifying groove/death metal dance track complete with screaming vocals and a punishing distorted guitar rhythm built to stab unassuming kittens in the face. Not counting the 26 second outro, it finishes the album and, aside from its danceability, couldn’t be further from the R&B Prince-aping “Love in Motion” or delectable first single “Embody” that open the album.
So where does SebastiAn go from here? I like an album with a thousand ideas, but an album with a thousand directions is just a little too schizophrenic for me. Will SebastiAn be better served continuing this disjointed multi-directional path, or should he find a voice by which to identify and separate himself from the crowd? And should he choose a direction, which one do you think best suits him?
Steven: I’m not really sure where SebastiAn goes from here, but one of the distinct impressions I had while listening to Total is that it’s sort of an audition, displaying the far range of sounds that he can achieve. Perhaps some vocalist or fellow producer will like certain cuts from the album and want to pursue them in a more specific direction, which an ‘album person’ would dig more deeply than Total. It’s hard for me to speculate on an artist’s motives without knowing the person, but I think SebastiAn could be well served by the multi-directional path if the goal is to be considered a producer with a broad repertoire.
Personally, as a maker of music who loves a number of genres and styles, I find it very frustrating to have to reckon with the widely held notion that one should have a specific direction. After all, we only have one life to live, (unless you believe one is reincarnated with their artistic abilities intact) so shouldn’t we experiment as broadly as we’re able? That being said, I will concede that there is very often beauty in limitation. Moreover, it’s difficult as an artist to ask people to focus if you don’t have a focal direction yourself, unless you’re content with having a relatively small audience made up of cats like me.
Brandon: God, I hope if I get reincarnated I get way better artistic abilities than the ones I have now. Then again, I mostly just hope I don’t come back as a beetle.
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