FEATURES The Synthtastic World of Zombie Zombie By Amaya Garcia · December 04, 2017
Photo by Maro Dos Santos.

Throughout their decade-long career, Zombie Zombie have demonstrated an incomparable ability to craft perfect atmospheres with their music—sounds that immerse the listener into fleeting worlds full of tension, ominous moments punctuated by John Carpenter-like synth lines, pulse-raising beats and, finally, moments of respite. Their music is strange and mischievous, eschewing every possible path to predictability while still conjuring old associations with concepts you may or may not know you have in your head—like visions of the future concocted in a ’70s sci-fi film set. It’s wonderfully confusing and disorienting, to say the least. By mixing influences ranging from old horror movie soundtracks to krautrock, early electronic music, Kraftwerk, and the ’70s French underground scene, Zombie Zombie set out to create music that is modern but rooted in old techniques and ideas.

Their journey towards creating this type of music was kind of a happy accident. “When I started to jam with [Cosmic] Neman, we weren’t really thinking of what kind of music we wanted to do,” says Etienne Jaumet, one-third of Zombie Zombie, in a Skype interview from their cramped recording studio in Paris. “We just wanted to have fun and make something for dancing, tripping, something easy.” Over the grainy video, the band—of which Dr. Schonberg is also a member of—showed me their space, which is full of old analog synthesizers, keyboards, and equipment they’ve amassed since they began playing together in the early 2000s. It’s the very same equipment they used to create that singular, trippy ’70s and ’80s sound you can hear in their LPs A Land for Renegades, Rituels D’Un Nouveau Monde, Zombie Zombie Plays John Carpenter, and their new album, Livity, among others.

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“When we started, it was a bit out of fashion to use analog synths, but we found our own way of playing them,” Jaumet explains. “It was quite simple to find them because nobody wanted them anymore. But we didn’t know what kind of sounds we could make with them because the internet wasn’t a thing at the time. It was quite an experience for us. We adapted ourselves to the instruments [we had]. I’m not a very good musician. I prefer to play with what I’ve got. But, if you give me a violin, I can do something because I am not afraid to try something new. Maybe that’s the thing the three of us have in common: even if we don’t know how to play an instrument, we just let our imagination do.”

A steady diet of horror movie soundtracks, like those of John Carpenter—whose music they would later cover excellently in Zombie Zombie Plays John Carpenter—and Goblin, the Italian band who composed several of Dario Argento’s films, helped them maximize the potential of the analog drum machines and synths, and develop a loose template for the sonic world of Zombie Zombie. “We actually discovered this after liking them for so many years, that all of the old horror movies use these instruments [in their scores],” Neman explains. “They use delays, reverb, echo, all these effects that we really like to use and I think that it increases the emotions of the sounds.”

They shy away from outright imitation or nostalgia, making sure the choices they make when crafting their sound aren’t wholly conscious. Their music, as Neman explains, is definitely a product of what they listen to, but it responds more to the fearless experimentation that Jaumet spoke of earlier. That has led them to veer into different terrains, like composing for French films like Irréprochable (2016) and Loubia Hamra (2014), and has finally led them into exploring sci-fi territory in their newest album, Livity, out on Versatile Records.

“We grew up with the Star Wars generation and the first sci-fi movies before 3D; our music is a bit like this, too,” Neman explains. “The image of the future back at the time seemed to be more exciting than most of the sci-fi movies now. Because we grew up with this, I think it’s pretty much bled into our music. For us, the perfect future comes from the ’70s or something. Maybe that’s why we’re really into this old, sci-fi style.”

Livity is a testament to Zombie Zombie’s thirst for composing tracks that let the mind wander and explore the possibilities within the band’s world. The album—composed of seven tracks recorded live in seven days at the Red Bull Studios in Paris and produced by the legendary house producer I:Cube—is an homage to experimentation that sees them mixing in 808 kick drums with jungle samples (as in opening track “Livity”), slow, acid-like rhythms with analog sweeps (“Hippocampe”), and techno with the free saxophone solos of Jaumet and Dr. Schonberg. The album is also a sci-fi fan’s dream, mixing vintage futuristic fantasies with seemingly disparate ideas like the Rastafarian concept of “livity,” a life-force or energy that exists within us and around us, and flows through all living things.

zombie-zombie-by-Maro-Dos-Santos-600-2

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Spirituality may seem out of tune with Zombie Zombie’s controlled chaos, but it is not wholly out of place in sci-fi narratives that are designed to question the nature of existence and the human spirit, a prime example being Blade Runner. So, perhaps using the concept was a happy accident, with Neman claiming that, while all members of the band constantly explore reggae dub music (which is tied to Rastafarianism) and their use of the space echo, “livity” functioned as more of a substitute for clichéd terms associated to sci-fi. Nonetheless, the association is not lost on them. “For me, it sounds like the cosmos or something that lives in livity,” Dr. Schonberg says. “I feel like it’s doing well with Zombie Zombie’s universe.”

That universe is completed with the illustrations of the revered French comic book artist and innovative illustrator, Phillipe Druillet. “He’s like an idol for us,” Neman explains. “He was one of the first French artists who brought sci-fi comics from the U.S. into France in the ’70s and made something different with this style. He also did the artwork for a lot of records from France in the ’70s by greats like Richard Pinhas, Igor Wakhévitch…underground, alternative music.” It just so happened that the band and Druillet also shared a mutual friend, which led the band to asking the illustrator if he’d do the artwork for Livity. “It was an honor. Obviously, we left him to do what he wanted,” says Neman. “He just had the record, said he loved it, and that’s what he did with the music.”

Livity is Zombie Zombie’s return to form, taking bits and pieces from the popular culture that they love and creating something new with them, while giving the audience—and, by extension, themselves—the opportunity to transpose their own stories into the music. It’s raw, intense, bombastic, and meant to rip you out of the ordinary.   

-Amaya Garcia
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