artist Mantler

Here's a cool interview I did in July 2010, just after the release of my album Monody. It was published on Blogs Collette in France. TAKE A SAD SONG AND MAKE IT BETTER BY TINTIN TÖRNCRANTZ | JULY 19, 2010 There’s a longing in that disparity between the surface of reality and those moments that we can’t quite grasp. – Chris A Cummings Dom Pèrignon was a Benedictine monk who had an idea about drinking the stars. This humble servant perfected the méthode champagnoise while he was developing his thoughts about the cuvée in the 1600s. He had the spunk to suggest that a successful blending of up to one hundred fermented and cultivated grape juices from various vineyards would produce a chord much greater than any of its singular notes. “I like the underdogs who make it to the mainstream. All my models are failed artists, which is not exactly a recipe for success,” says the Canadian gentleman and undisputable lover of the arts, Chris A Cummings (b 1969), to Just another colette blog – himself an underdog who should make it big time to the mainstream with his latest Mantler album, the succulent Monody. Monody charms the senses; it’s mellow and innovating, mainstream and ahead. Just because Cummings’s music is indebted to the 1970s (especially the spirit of the early years) doesn’t mean that Monody is a 70s revisited. As Mantler he recasks the old sounds lodged in his mind to synthesise them with his own visionary and sartorial sparkle. There were no clocks around in the studio when Sly Stone recorded There’s a Riot Goin’ On in 1971, a time when North America was in the throes of identity politics and general upheaval. Mantler’s lyrics have the length – and to some smaller degree the inner unrest – of the nitty-gritty sermonettes of the 70s’ music scene. But there’s another kind of time on Monody, and another kind of timelessness. The grooves are laidback and perfect, the emotions are simmering and exquisite. The music grows, multiplies and swings, and brings out the right combination of sounds. Cummings, who works full-time at the Toronto International Film Festival (a ten-day cineaste regale held each September), recorded Monody digitally and did the final mixing on a 36-channel board. “I think it really separates the sound and gives some warmth to the digital recording,” he confesses, while he dreams about exclusive Mantler recordings using analogue hardware from start to finish. Mantler’s sophisticated cuvée of sounds is no Super Fly. Monody isn’t larger than life. Monody is something grander. It is large as life itself. Let us adore and drink together. Tom Wolfe called his times – this was in 1974 – “the age of Funky Chic Egalité”. It is a well-documented fact that you have more than just a thing for the 70s. You were only a baby and a kid during the 1970s. Do you still and partly hold on to that child’s view when you dwell into this fascinating decennium as a grownup – even though you’ve certainly studied it in depth, through all your records and everything else? What is it with this specific period that turns you on so tremendously? I like that word – decennium. Everybody just says decade but decennium is better because it reminds me of millennium and seems to imply that within each ten-year period there is a period of a thousand years. Well, the 70s have had a sway over me, my whole life. First of all, it was when I grew up, so I think that I do always see it through a child’s eyes as you say. Secondly, in the early 80s when I was a young teenager, the 70s had become a totally taboo subject. Nobody talked about them – they were just thought of as an embarrassing, brown, misguided period before we got to the glorious short haircuts and primary colours of the 80s. But they were fascinating to me – especially the early 70s. Those were the years of my earliest childhood memories, 1970 to ’72. And the memories I have from that time were so vague, just kind of flashes of colour and light, or very brief scenes. So in 1983 I was at my aunt’s house in Texas – my mom is American and my dad is British, so my sister and I were lucky enough to have frequent trips to the UK and the US as kids – and I saw some photos taken in California around 1970 and they were so evocative – the clothes, the colours, the way things looked through that particular generation of small cameras – these were probably taken on 110 or 126 film, which had a characteristic purplish cast to it. People actually looked cool and fashionable in the photos, it hadn’t yet turned into the beige/brown, wood-panelled, huge-collared style of the mid-to-late 70s. And I thought, “Here’s an era that hasn’t really been documented.” And that was it. From the age of 14 on I was kind of secretly obsessed with the 70s, and the 60s too of course – although the 60s were okay to talk about – they were a cooler, more revolutionary time, with better clothes. So I started devouring 70s Hollywood movies – mostly just by seeing anything with Jack Nicholson in it. Then, in 1987 when I was 18 I started getting into R&B and that completely changed my taste in music. I remember hearing – really hearing – James Brown’s music for the first time, and what that meant to me. The lyrics really got to me. I was riding my bike over to my friend’s house and I realised that the song “Funky President (People it’s Bad)” was about Gerald Ford. He wasn’t singing about himself – he was saying, “Just changed, got a brand-new funky president,” which in 1974 was Gerald Ford. And my jaw dropped. And I realised, “This isn’t just party music.” All my friends got into it too and it felt kind of like we were the only ones in the world listening to this music. We were middle class white kids, mostly, listening to JB, Sly Stone, Isaac Hayes, Barry White, though there were more of us – not only white, not only middle class – around the world than I realised at the time. And older people would say, “I can’t believe you like the 70s!” The widely-held belief was that the 60s soul music was “purer” than 70s soul – so that led into a lifelong obsession with so-called impure and inauthentic music. Of which the 70s was the best decennium. What you do, as with any real soul and R&B, is not a young person’s craft. Music that holds that wonderful cachet needs a lot of living and arguably some things to be “paid for” the hard way as well to achieve that mark of quality, distinction, importance and beauty. Some of your songs on Monody were initially written in the late 1990s. How come you passed them on through three albums to finally welcome them aboard at this point in your life? And how have they changed in terms of atmosphere and refinements? How are you achieving this acumen in your song writing? The songs “Fresh and Fair” and “Childman” were originally slated to appear on my first album Doin’ it All [2000], but my producer and friend James Duncan and I decided that we had enough material after recording six songs, so we never recorded them – although earlier recorded versions of those songs do exist. I was waiting for the right conditions – I read an interview with Neil Young in the early 90s where he said that he saved songs until the time was right, and I remembered that when I wrote “Fortune Smiled Again” in 1997. I said to myself, “This is my secret weapon – this would be a great first song on an album, but right now I don’t have the means to make it as good as it can be.” I ended up completely rewriting the lyrics in December 2004 – which was when I started working slowly towards writing the rest of the Monody songs – and at the same time I wrote “Author”. “Also Close the Rainbow” I originally wrote as “LINAG (Life Is Not A Game)” in ’98 and I also rewrote most of the lyrics in ’04. In both cases, the lyrics were just kind of immature and unformed, but the melodies and song structures were already in place in the early versions. I think by layering an older person’s perspective over these younger songs it adds more depth and meaning. But if I had had the means to do them justice in the 90s, I would have recorded the songs properly then, and the story might have had a different outcome. I think that, in 1997, I was already writing songs in the general style that I am now, but I have learned how to add more layers and atmosphere to the songs in the years since then – so they wouldn’t have been as refined. I still think that Doin’ it All is one of the most atmospheric records I ever did though. I should also point out that my longtime producer Zack Gilbert – who works under his nom de guerre Zack G – has had a lot to do with making my sound more refined. He has very good ears and is able to kind of bring out all the frequencies in a way that always has a special flavour. He co-produced my second album Sadisfaction [2002], produced all the songs but one on my third album Landau [2004], he did the majority of Monody, and he’s doing my next record too. You’d been studying piano playing for 14 years when you encountered the good old Rhodes, and – as I would guess – pretty much fell in love with it. The electric piano, of course, is stringless – but you play it as if you could “hammer out” any feelings or urgencies from it. You play a Wurlitzer throughout on Monody. Your kinship with this instrument seems absolute, yes? It’s all Wurlitzer on Monody apart from two songs – “Crying At The Movies” and “Mount Shasta”, for which my friend Ryan Carley lent me his “Suitcase” Rhodes piano, which has a beautiful built-in vibrato. I do love them both but the Wurlitzer just has that slightly watery tone that sets it apart. One thing I found I liked about electric pianos is that when you play them with force – “hammering” – they still sound good, which isn’t the case with a regular piano. My piano teacher was always telling me to play less forcefully when I was taking lessons. What is it with those heavenly major 7th chords? They seem to open the gates of your heart. I do love them so. I can remember sitting at the piano as a child and playing a C major triad and thinking it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. That’s three notes. But when you add a fourth – and a fifth! – note, as I discovered later, something even more incredible happens. I’ve always been drawn to music that uses 7th chords – both major and minor – I think it comes from tv shows I saw as a kid like Sesame Street and the British show Vision On, which popped up periodically on Ontario television. Sesame Street had R&B and jazz for the soundtrack on many of their cartoon segments, which were the part of the show I loved the most, and Vision On had what’s now called library music on most of the soundtrack of the show – it was made for deaf children, so there wasn’t much spoken dialogue, just skits, Tony Hart doing live art for the camera and cartoon segments. The Beatles also used major and minor 7ths and they were the first band I really loved as a child. Then I heard stuff like Tomita and that got me into Debussy and Ravel. Then eventually I heard stuff like Bacharach and [Stephen] Sondheim, which are just chock-a-block with 7th chords – and other chords that use four and five tonalities. But the music that stuck with me the most was 70s soul. Songs like “Be Thankful For What You’ve Got” by William Devaughn – a beautiful melody, lyrics with a positive message, a great groove, and a lot of 7th chords. And that instrumentation – organ, vibes – just gorgeous. When I started writing songs on my own I wanted to incorporate all those influences, and make something extremely tasty that would “take the listener away” from their everyday cares, but without being totally escapist. Your songs are not by any means sulky, but there is a melancholy touch to everything that you do, not only in your quieter routines. That lends a quality to Monody not far from the French auteurs and their concept of “mise-en-scène”. Monody is not film music – this is music that per se is filmic: film as pure music. Thank you. That is high praise. Mise-en-scène to me means making sure that something is happening in every square inch of screen space, and that it contributes to the overall composition of the frame. It’s something I prize very highly in a filmmaker – and it seems to have become something of a lost art these days, especially in recent Hollywood films with everyone filming with multiple cameras, it just all ends up looking like tv coverage. As for the melancholy, I’ve really tried to erase all sulkiness from the music and the lyrics, but still in a lot of the negative reviews I’ve received this is a constant complaint. And I can’t do anything about it. I tried to write a “happy” album – Landau – but it still had a tinge of melancholy to it. If I could write something like “Celebrate” by Kool and the Gang, I would in a heartbeat. You also employ your voice in layers and layers of very close harmonies for the scenery? I just really love dense vocal harmony. I would like to do even more of it. My dad was always listening to choral music around the house when I was a kid and a teenager – I think it comes from that. There’s an album that I’m obsessed with right now, The Sylvers II [1973] by family vocal group The Sylvers. They were kind of a more eccentric Jackson 5. There are moments of such inspired lunacy, both in the song writing and the arrangements, peppered throughout the whole album – and this four or five-part harmony is just weaving in and out of it all. The sophistication and complexity of it is something I aspire to. My favourite track is “Cry of a Dreamer”. Anyone knows that he or she will become nauseous for weeks after watching a film by Bresson, but that the filmmaker will give us something as well of utmost value, a lesson for life. And Godard … he was hitting the stride in film after film from 1960 and onwards. What do these directors mean to you, and who are your other favourites in the world of cinema? I absolutely love Bresson, I think his films are the best. I don’t find him nausea-inducing at all. It just completely floors me every time I see one of his films, especially the later ones from 1966 onwards. He doesn’t waste a second of screen time, or a single sound effect. Sound is very important to him, and directors who pay attention to sound are usually the best ones. And Godard to me is just as great, not only in the 60s but throughout his career. He’s another genius of film sound. So they’re my two favourite directors. Here in Toronto we’re lucky because we have TIFF Cinematheque and they show Bresson’s and Godard’s films regularly, so you can see Two or Three Things I Know About Her or Au hasard Balthazar on the big screen almost on an annual basis. Other directors? That’s a tough one to answer because I’m always afraid of leaving somebody out. There are a lot of other areas of film that I absolutely adore – 50s Hollywood – Sirk, Minnelli, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Anthony Mann, et cetera – basically the films that inspired the French New Wave – 50s and 60s French film – Jacques Becker, Chabrol, Demy, Melville – and Japanese film – Ozu, Mizoguchi, Imamura, and Ichikawa are four of my favourites, but also the whole 60s Japanese New Wave. I also love what could be categorized as “classic” mid-century international cinema – Ophuls, Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Antonioni, Dreyer, Visconti, Powell and Pressburger, Tarkovsky and Fassbinder. I’m still a fan of 70s Hollywood too, and 80s action movies. But they aren’t on the same level to me. Jean Renoir used to say that he made films for three people. These were certainly not physical individuals but an idea that if he could really make a difference for a few, that would warrant works of great endurance. Is that how you too relate to your song writing? I’ve never heard that quotation from Renoir – and I love him too – but that does strongly resonate with how I feel about song writing, if it can help someone somewhere. Music like Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night [1975] really helped me through some difficult times, because I realised I wasn’t alone. I saw that someone else had once felt the same way, and they had made it into art. “Author” has something in common with Robert Wyatt, Old Rottenhat and “Shipbuilding”. In 1997, when I made my first “real” recording – that early version of “Fresh and Fair” – somebody said that it sounded like Robert Wyatt and I didn’t know his music at all. So he put on Old Rottenhat and I immediately felt a sense of kinship with it – and I’ve loved Wyatt’s music ever since. I tried to write “Author” as a modern-day Surf’s Up – a highly ambitious goal, I’m not sure how successful I was – so I would say it was more influenced by Brian Wilson than Wyatt. Is “Childman” about your son or about yourself – or both maybe, since you use the non-grammatical line “Childman, that’s what you am”? I don’t have a son, although my wife and I are expecting a daughter any day now! It was actually the very first song I wrote “as” Mantler in 1995. I wrote it as a letter to myself, saying “Grow up or the world will pass you by.” I wanted it to sound like Curtis Mayfield, who is also someone I revere to this day, even his name “Mayfield” sounds heavenly. I was 26 at the time. I also liked the slightly ridiculous conceit of having such an ungrammatical line in every chorus. It made me laugh, so I kept it. Has your record collecting led to new discoveries in other fields of culture? Besides film and music, I also love the visual arts, though I’m not nearly as versed in them as I would like to be, and literature. I didn’t really come about them through record collecting. One thing I would say that I kind of got into through record collecting was that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve become more appreciative of avant-garde forms, which I used to think were just for crazy people and academics. In later years, after being exposed for so long to the ever-more-marketed, over-commercialised world, I’ve definitely found a degree of comfort in the works of someone like Stan Brakhage – what he did, he did only for the sake of art, without any commercial considerations whatsoever, and there is something noble about that. And music like Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew [1969] I used to dislike but now I think it’s really beautiful. Part of it is being able to discern more detail in it now than I used to hear. When you’re young you tend to categorise things right away – or it’s more like, when you’re older you’ve heard more categories of music; you’ve not only heard disco but you’ve heard pre- and post-disco, and when you hear something new you wonder where it fits in, rather than trying to slot it into a category right away. You become more curious about things you used to dismiss. I thought that Mantler alluded to the grieving voices of the Greek drama, but you come from the land of reindeer and moose so it is understandable that the name is your wordplay on “man” and “antler”. Antlers are velvety and shed every year or so, they are the antennae of the caribou. You’ve conjured the spirit of the 1970s into a setting that is positively 2010. Your music is an urban form of playtime in which malaise and convivialities are dancing side by side; your analogue sounds are infused with warmth and vitality and the concerns of today. So musically speaking, you are indeed a man with antlers – or antennae. Thank you. It was actually just a surname in a database that I thought was funny in 1995. It seems like there are a lot of Antler and Mantle band names nowadays, which there weren’t in 1995. So maybe I was channelling 2010 in 1995. Hopefully by now I’m channelling 2025. But yes, I did think the idea of antlers on a man was kind of funny. And just the prefix “mant” is funny. There was actually a Canadian 90s band called The Mants, so what I said before wasn’t totally correct … And also I thought it was nice because it would be the opposite of a dismantler. One who puts things together, and lays a “mantle” of snow or a nice warm cloak on your shoulders.