- Please, be so kind to tell us brief story of your Band...and the aim that moves the musicians into the Band to put together Rosa Crucis..
O: Rosa Crucis is a Band formed by 3 Musicians. I've worked with Claude for 15 years and we have always made Music "d'Ensamble". Her favorite instrument is the piano; she has played it since she was a child, she has inherited this passion from her parents, both pianists. Natalie, the double-bass player, has joined us for 6 years; bass player from so far without playing in any Band, she has started studying double-bass since her arriving in Rosa Crvx. Concerning myself, I was part of a choir in a boarding school of Jesuit friars when I was 6 years old and singing has always been my favorite 'instrument'. The Band was formed in 1986 and since that year we have produced 6 vinyl and CDs. And many video clips and a short film entitled 'Rosa Crvx/Jeux de Fees', which represents another side of our work, being the Band specialized in the performances. We have done about 300 concerts in France, Italy, Swiss, Spain, Ireland and Germany.
- I noticed that your own Label publishes all your releases, why? Will it be the same for the next ones? Will you take other Bands under the wings of your Label?
O: Self-production is the only way to remain masters of our own project. What's a Label? What is a Label for? Why using an intermediary? We believe that it is a real 'racket'...Self production occupies a lot of time, indeed; but we can mix a song thousand times if we are not satisfied with it, without worrying about the fact that we must respect ultimatums or budget. We have also got the habit, before starting a tour, of doing everything by ourselves for avoiding the dependence from any other person...this is the best guarantee to our freedom. We produce our tapes but also the recordings and mixing in a home-studio we have built up, we realize our videos and we produce our release, etc...Indeed, we have spent a lot of time in gaining the means of this independence but nowadays we are free: we can fill our tapes with the Music we want (Eli-Elo, Les Profanations) without having the problem of a producer that complains because our Music isn't commercial enough to sell good...
And moreover, we have to distribute our releases and luckily there are still distributors that give a chance to self-produced Bands.
- You use different languages in your compositions and what's more interesting, is that you said in an interview that you also use meaningless words (or you create them) to rouse emotions into the listeners...Reflecting on this, I arrived to define your Music 'Sublime' (I mean, in the sense of 'visionaire' like the paintings of the Romanticism). Do you agree with me?
O: We use Latin, but also Hebrew, and sometimes we use meaningless phonemes, sometimes we create words because we wish to obtain particular "consonance". In this way we can definitively replace all the "messages" of lowest degree with the purest sentiments. Words have been suppressed for leaving the place to the symbols and to the direct language of emotions. We sing with "the sound of the voice". Do we know the cry of the men as we know the cry of the wolves?
We have always confronted the 2 codes of work of Rosa Crvx, as for us image and sound are two indissociable elements. Our Music evokes precise ideas, particular themes that are not possible to tell with simple words; this because the text (without message) is missing. We transcribe emotions. Music gives birth to an emotion, and to an image too. We use sound and image as others would us words and music. The word represents a way to translate emotions; we can translate words and then find out synonymous that mean the same but in a different way. The music cannot be translated, it cannot be told, as it would be impossible to tell a dream...
I do believe that sound and image are really more direct.
- 'Visionaire' are also your live shows...Could you explain the meaning of the Dance of the Earth?
O: Most of our compositions hide a story, which we use to 'translate' with the performances that follow our songs. It's around the performance of the Dance of the Earth that we have composed 'Eli-Elo'. Where does the idea come from? It's not a real idea born by our minds, but the result of a sort of research: there was the will of express the very strong sentiment of Death, to confront the human bodies with the matter the man is born from and to whom the man must come back.
It's a kind of homage to Earth, through a physical contrast. In 'Eli-Elo' the Earth is represented by the low notes that introduce the title. The anguish of Death is transmitted through these overlapping voices that replace the emptiness of Death; the violent struggle that expresses the Death through these repetitive and mechanical (nearly psychotic) gestures, which permit to live the anguish of the living sound through the drum and the heavy parts, through the deflagrations of the big cases, which pound like a heart that is going to explode...
We do this dance every time we play 'Eli-Elo', we play 'Eli-Elo' every time we do this dance.
- And what about the invention of the mechanical drum?
O: In 1994 I created a particular electronic magnetic process that permits me to move several drumsticks in a precise way: they can reproduce a roll of drums with a Conservatoire precision! The medium system (programmable for computer) permits a programming and a reproduction of execution that have got the fidelity of a rhythmical case. This new instrument, baptized BAM (acoustic Midi drum), at the moment is composed by 2 big orchestral cases, 3 drums, 2 toms and 2 cymbals...Very soon the system will reach an limitless number of parts, it is a question of proportions to (or to don't) respect. It was the habit of uses the rhythmic case that forced me to build up this instrument: its main problem is the sound, not proposable on stage (mostly during our shows we use a lot of percussion. We tried to work with several high level drummers and percussionists, but it didn't work out. Because when you have got the habit of using computer programming, it takes an important part also in the interpretation of the execution, and the little human errors sometime can be unbearable...
- I read that the concept of your Music starts from the 4 Alchemical Elements? What they symbolize for you? Are you involved is any particular doctrine?
O: Yes, the starting points of our work are the four Alchemical elements. We have followed the teaching of the apprentice sorcerers melting these elements in our music but also in the 'matters'. It's a work about man and the elements that encircle him. The work, that proceeds, is a kind of quest of itself: a daily research without exactly knows what we are looking for. It's an evolutionary work that proceeds through elimination: the principle is encircling what we must do and what we must not do. They are kind of choices, positions concerning both music and world, colors, objects...If we would be forced to make a sense to the mission Rosa Crvx, it would be like giving life to an imaginary world, a world complete with everything useful to itself. It is a kind of scenery we 'write' day by day and in a continuous way. A concert of Rosa Crvx is like a story, our story, that we are telling with a message that means "follow it".
Our work is a permanent research: music and image are elaborated in an indissociable way; man is the theme of this work. 'Les Jeux de Fers' tells about the human body and its aim: Music evokes the most cerebral elements such as desires, anguishes, and spirituality. It's almost impossible telling with simple words such a kind of research: we have tried to build a certain kind of objects because it was the only possible expressive way to 'translate' certain ideas; with the music we have tried to express certain sentiments.
Our work tells about anger, violence, beauty and all the abstract elements that characterize man.
-There's a drawing in the CD's booklet of 'Noctes Insomnes' showing the influences of Planets on human beings. Which are your believes according to this theme? And, do you believe that we - human beings- have a sort of 'planned' destiny?
O: The night, horrible instants where everything takes form (where everything stops), takes form again and man submits like an animal in its liar. Refuse, wish to continue; why this imposed situation? Why this 'punctuation'? taking the freedom of living outside this nightly context, living without time, in freedom. Freedom belongs to those whom work themselves up. Refuse the cliches, the ancestral habits, the hours. Create your own time, the thing you wish, take your time, unaware the hours, live the night, why not?
The Night: the body lies in a second state, a very different one. It's in the Night that we need to do more things. Is this a state of contradiction? Is it a way of living in the den? We do like Night: it is the silence, the stars watch us; it's the propitious moment to reflection and concentration and, while the rest of the world lies down the blankets or stays in front of the TV, we have got the chance to awake all, to throw off all.
Night is the Black, the coffee to survive, the loneliness; the phone rings anymore, everything gets free, the isolation. Very soon the brain remains alone with itself, it's an 'elite' moment.
In our latest CD, we present a picture of an anatomic table of the Middle Age: it shows an insane man (a good one) who teaches to a novice the influence of the planets on human bodies.
Moment of conscience, body is rotting
Ancient believed that Saturn or Jupiter (according to their position in the heaven) could influence lungs and trunk; Moon the head and Sun the stomach. This sums up all that was told: the day is the moment of the 'lunch', of all the existential things; the Night is the moment of reflection and dreaming.
This CD has been lived by Night. We had unbearable periods of insomnia...terrible anguishes, anxiety for the health...our bodies refused to sleep. And then we realized what happened to us: our bodies submitted to the 'hour' of the CD, to the necessary state to his realization. I watched the coming dawn while I was living the mixing room, the Night was passed in silence.
And it was after this period when we choose the title of the album: I was in an anxiety state and so I wrote the words 'Noctes Insomnes' as a witness of a real fact. This made the work more terrifying: more the bodies got ruined and more our album proceeded ...the thread of the album has created itself automatically, in a very natural way; the title has imposed itself...The skull, the teeth and the hair on the cover of our album represents the state of a body after a year of nocturnal life: it has lost every living essences, body and spirit divide themselves through a sort of 'dissection'. The album 'translate' all this and the order of the compositions has a great importance; it's a descent to the second state, a slow and progressive descent. The first track evokes a twilight instant for the melodies and the montage of the subject "Il passait les niuts presque entieres sans sommeil..."; then comes Anglon, a wish of flying like a raven; then, Ab Irato, that means 'in a sign of anger': Rosa Signat is submerged by melancholy; then comes the falling, the grand In Orbem (in a circling movement), that represents the never ending descent, the spiral, the point of no return. So, the second part of the albums chained to the first: "For them is the never ending Light; Blessed are the Dead who died at the door of Hell..." Beati Mortui is chained to Loewe, through its voices which endless repeat 'Circumdederunt' (circling around you) and then 'qui non cessant', that don't stop to scream; it is the moment of the total thread, influenced by the interior madness, a madness that belongs to every of us, hidden, latent...
And we are at the conclusion, the album ends with the revolt Exurge an Iratua (awake in your anger); it's the final act, visible in video on the CD-Rom track, the act of madness and mystery, the act produced everyday, the madness of the Night, in the Night of the bodies, deep into the thought: the grotto, the labyrinth, in which a lost building is hidden, its exploration and its destruction, the light of the fire, the flames that invade the inside of the grotto, the anger that awakes, the fire in the deepest Black "Incendere" (lighting the fire)and the day wakes outside in the real world, the fire of sun that stops it all and finally sleeping calm and quiet...
- In your web-site you present 'The Iron game', the body as machine, and you mention Leonardo Da Vinci and De Sade...Would you be so kind to explain this topic?
O: These performances have been called 'Le Jeux de Fers', presented in public representations very different from a normal concert. Under a certain medical look, it's the idea of the bodies that must be treated in a free interpretation and that only obey to the rules of the game, defined time by time through progressive discoveries. A part of the bodies will be studied, drawn and analyzed to exalt its essence and reveal it through the construction of a machine in movement. This work is 'drawn'. It is built by the observation of the errors and permits to obtain a precise principle of research.
Here an exhausted man stands up on a rudder bar that creates vertical movements forward and back. There, another man with flat abdomen stretches out a harm from a 9-meter trolley that grazes the soil scratching against guitar's cords. Over there, 2 mans dressed as 2 gladiators fight inside two metallic cones, which resound thanks to the effect of the fighting bodies. Near, 2 fighters at naked trunk, rivals, prisoners of a rail that smashed them against a wall formed by piano cords. The men, simple elements among the others, against the machine are like mobile and sound sculptures.
Out of clandestinely now, the Iron Cage, as a torture machine of the times of Inquisition, has got inside a naked man; he is like a living instrument of percussion in his obscure noise.
During these performances, some mice circle in their wheels and they play to the hurdy-gurdy.
Some dancers shock the people falling on their knees in front of argil piles. With full hands, guided by an inebriating rhythm, the dancers cover themselves of argil. Their bodies become okra and long threads come out of their mouths, their heads move with violence...a terrible and touching tragedy is played. The performance at its apex. All in all man is represented in a primitive way, little gear of a mad world, artisan of his own suffering.
Leonardo Da Vinci of the collective unconsciousness and in this way he has inspired us in an indirect way. I remember, I was very surprised by the resemblance of my draws and the ones of Leonardo. This had really disturbed me. Then I had the chance to discover the draws of Marcel Duchamp and I understood...in a way the draws of Leonardo come from the 'spirit'...
We must note that I never use electricity in my works but the force of gravity, or better say the human force that moves these machine (and this can remind more to the Middle Age); and I wan to add that these machines have got a phantasmagoric side, that are always created following the proportions of the human body and of the golden numbers, that they are forged in iron...indeed, this seem a Renaissance influence; but Leonardo never built up his machines, they were only draws and he only wanted to discover new kinds of army and means of transport. My machines haven't got absolutely any practical utility and they are just created to live my fantasies...
- Having seen your CD-rom track, my curiosity has awoken: which are your interests\jobs a part from Music?
O:Any other interest apart our work, our research that we live day by day, in the daily life...


:Contact:
www.rosacrux.com