Hello everyone, we're here today with HYPNO5E. How are you doing?

HYPNO5E - We're doing very well.

So, we're here to talk about your new album, Trame Noire, which will be released on November 6th. It's an album with only five tracks, running for around 40 minutes, whereas normally in your discography we tend to see albums that are over an hour long. So, why the decision to make it a little shorter?

Manu - It wasn't necessarily a choice. I felt like it needed to be more concise. It was a more direct album. Naturally, the compositions developed in that direction.

It was longer initially, but we decided to cut it down. I had the feeling that there was a density that we perhaps had more of on this album than on the rest of our discography. Something less ethereal, more raw, more condensed.

Naturally, we ended up with a runtime that was a little shorter than what we usually do. But it wasn't a deliberate choice at all. It's just that, for this particular album, I felt it made sense not to dwell on things for too long. It had to get straight to the point, to be an album that you come back to several times, rather than one that stretches out over a long period.

It's true that this was something we questioned. I asked myself a lot whether it was too short or not. In the end, 40 minutes and five tracks isn't that short.

Pierre - There were more tracks that were recorded, written and finalised that didn't make it onto the record. So, it wasn't a deliberate intention. We ended up with this arrangement, these tracks, and thought: "Let's do it this way. We like the record like this, let's go."

Manu - By adding other tracks, we would have lost the… We would have muddied the waters and lost some of the dynamics. What the album had to tell, its density and all that, would have been diluted a little. So we preferred to keep something more compact.

The narrative aspect is part of your identity. But generally speaking, do you start with a narrative direction in mind, or do you let the music speak and then build the narrative from there?

Manu - Generally speaking, since the composition periods are quite long… It's not that we're constantly composing for three years straight. There are always different phases. Over two or three years, we'll compose for a month here, a month there... So the whole process is very spread out over time.

I always prefer never to anticipate what the album is ultimately going to be about. We throw ideas around, things come up. I compose lots of different things, fragmented pieces.

As we go along, things start fitting together, structures begin to emerge. And once we get to something that resembles a structure, a sequence of tracks with its own dramatic arc, that's when we really listen back to the music. And from that point on, I try to see what the music is going to tell at that particular moment and what seems to me like it should be associated with it.

The concept really comes after the music. The lyrics are actually the very last things to be written. And it's very rare for lyrics to be written during the composition process. Even the songs, at the beginning, are just gibberish. It's more like these sudden flashes of inspiration that come along.

Afterwards, we graft things onto them. We summarise everything we've been through musically to try to tell a story at that stage. With this album, it was happening a little along the way, but the lyrics were written during the final few months before the end.

I think I've seen what the starting point of the album's story was. Could you tell us a little bit about it?

Manu - We were touring on Réunion Island for a theatre project. I was composing music for theatre. I was there with a theatre company. There was a friend of mine who was a scientific researcher, and she told me she had an appointment at the Maïdo atmospheric observatory.

She suggested I come along with her. So I went. We got to visit the observatory, and we met a researcher there who was studying this concept of dark infrastructure.

It's the study of ecological corridors, nocturnal corridors, and how light pollution and noise pollution modify these natural corridors, and how they may or may not influence the movements of flora through them.

When we were talking about this concept, I connected it to issues I might have explored on other albums.

The question of memory, the question of how nature is modified by little things, how it's doing, and how it becomes the space for our own memory. Starting from that concept, we have this album, which talks about how nature, during that night, gradually transforms itself to reveal the memory of the character. How, little by little, this environment becomes a reflection of the character's inner world.

That was the starting point. I also really like the term "trame noire"; I thought it was very evocative. There was something almost like genre cinema about it.

It seemed evocative enough that, naturally, when I got back from the trip, I told my father, with whom we wrote the lyrics, that we had to use this as the concept for the record and try to build something around it.

To connect this with the creative process, since you make quite a few decisions within the band and wear several hats, how does it work with the other musicians in the studio?

Pierre - A power struggle.

(Laughter.)

Manu is the guiding thread. He writes all the music. Together, we work a little in pairs. He works with Joe one time, with Charles another time, with me another time.

He fine-tunes his writing and the arrangements, and we make suggestions. For example, we've had sessions where all four of us were together, but often there are only two people behind the computer: him and someone else.

I'll take Charles as an example here. Charles picks up a guitar, comes up with a melody, an arrangement. Okay, they work on it together and fine-tune it. Then Charles leaves. Joe takes over and works on something else.

You see, it's a bit of a back-and-forth process like that. As far as the drums are concerned, a lot of things happen at the final stage, during the recording process, about 90% of the time. Manu makes pre-productions using MIDI drums. I listen and pick up on a few things.

After that, I also did some pre-production work. They asked me to do some at the beginning. I took the tracks and made a few suggestions. The problem is that there's a lot of back and forth. I could keep making more pre-productions, but at some point, you know, I'd rather just leave things as they are.

Then, when we get to the studio, we're all together. I play the parts, and then, we rework things and rethink the track. That's how it often goes. A lot of things happen during the recording stage.

Manu - Everything is worked on right up until the last minute. Even during the mixing stage, I can still be in a position to change this or that. That's why the whole process takes such a long time.

When we get to the studio, we never arrive with finished tracks. I never show up with a track that's already completely done. I arrive with loads of ideas that are scattered and separate from one another.

And together, we'll structure them. Then they'll go through another stage, where we leave them alone for a month, and I'll come back to them having changed everything. There's a lot of back and forth. But the tracks, as you hear them, are questioned and reworked right up until the very last minute.

Even when we're talking about the drum recording stage, which comes towards the end, before the vocals, when the guitars have already been laid down. Even at that point, in the studio, we're recording and discussing the possibility of moving a riff somewhere else, of changing the way I'd originally imagined something, but which he might take in a slightly different direction.

Everything is worked on right to the end. And there are never really tracks that don’t change, or maybe one that is sometimes already good enough and remains almost unchanged until the end. But that's very rare.

Maybe that's the case with Molecular Angel, but all the others…

Pierre - Oh no, on Molecular Angel, the verses are completely different. Completely different.

Manu - You see.

You explored quite a lot of different things on this album, and it's true that your identity is still very much there, but there are also plenty of things that have taken you in different directions and made you evolve. Was there anything you tried in the studio for the first time, something you hadn't used before?

Manu - There are some instruments we hadn't used before, or perhaps had only used a little. The harmonium, for example, which we'd never used before. Otherwise, the working method is pretty much the same as usual, except that…

This time, the process has also changed because it's the first album we've made together with the new line-up. As we were saying, we're not often all in the same place at the same time. So perhaps it's more the way we made the album itself that has changed, rather than the work in the studio.

Pierre - You see, that passage… It's silly, but that moment in Falmer.

I think these are things that haven't really been done musically in HYPNO5E before. I only joined in 2022, you see. But I think these are things that hadn't really been expressed or explored musically, or that hadn't really been part of HYPNO5E's universe before.

Manu - There's something more organic about it than what we sometimes had on our previous albums. Even in the way we process the sounds, the choices we make for the guitar tones, the approach to the drums or the final sound.

Even when it comes to the album's sound, we talked about it with Chris this weekend. We had emphasised that we wanted something very raw, very organic, with a lot of dynamics. We didn't want it to be ultra-produced, or to sound like a typical metal production that you can immediately identify with the sounds and productions you usually hear.

So even in the way we process the sounds, these are things we hadn't tried doing before. The ramping on the guitar as well, and bringing in some fragility. I wanted it to be rough, to have a bit of a messy edge, not to be so overproduced.

There had to be imperfections. I'm talking about flaws that aren't really flaws in themselves, because they give the tracks a certain colour and identity. But I like the fact that you can hear the harmonium at the end of Trame Noire.

Actually, it's recorded… Not the way you're supposed to record it, because I don't know how you're supposed to record it, but I put a microphone on it. You can barely hear anything other than the sound of the wood and the pedals creaking. We tried to bring that kind of thing further to the forefront throughout the album.

Pierre - I think there are lots of little details. It's funny that we're talking about it now. I used a second snare drum, for example, as a side snare, off to the side, which has a much higher pitch. I never use that. I've hardly ever used a second snare off to the side, a slightly piccolo-style snare. We used one on this record. We did things like that. They're details, but all the same, they give the record a different texture.

Manu - Naturally, there are far fewer samples than before. We should talk about it because it wasn't a deliberate choice. In my opinion, everything that needed to be said had already been said musically, and we didn't want to overload it with meaning or concepts. We really wanted to get to the essence of the thing. I think that's why the tracks are what they are on this album. That's also why the album is shorter.

Two of the five tracks have already been released. The very first one was Lost Fires. It's also the opening track of the album. Was that a coincidence, or was it a deliberate choice?

Manu - No, it wasn't a coincidence at all. It just seemed to me to be the track that best represented certain things we wanted to create on this album.

It still has the HYPNO5E signature, just like all our albums. But it's not quite as drawn-out. It has atmospheres that you could find in some of our older tracks, but it takes us somewhere we're less accustomed to exploring, with chord changes that are less conventional.

Pierre - The whole section where there's this sort of bridge in the middle, which is a bit flowing and oozing. This sort of passage that catches its breath each time, only to start oozing out again afterwards, a little. I think that's something you find in other places on the album, and it perhaps wasn't really present in HYPNO5E's music before.

Manu - I think it's a good summary of where we went with this album. You find a bit of everything we wanted to do. The passage in the middle is a little dissonant. There are rhythmic elements… It's a good summary, the right way to approach things when entering the album. We had to start with this one because it sets the tone for the whole thing.

Going back to the music videos, in Lost Fires there are things that are almost quite explicit, right there in front of us. At the very beginning, there's some text, a bit like in a muted movie. And in Molecular Angel, you get more of a feeling through the contrast of the lighting. We're looking at two completely different approaches, but they're telling something very similar. How does that define the album, and how do these two approaches come together?

Manu - I wanted there to be a certain unity of locations throughout the whole thing. This album takes place over the course of one night, in a very enclosed space. Unlike the other albums, which featured wide-open spaces and movement.

To me, it's something quite confined, with an overload of things happening. If there was one thing the two videos had in common, it would really be that unity of locations and this dark chaos created by the lighting effects. The musicians' performances were filmed on the same evening, in the same place, using the same setup.

I directed the first video myself, so it has more of a narrative side to it. The second one was directed by someone else. That one was really focused on the musicians and the track. Molecular Angel was better suited to having something embodied by the musicians rather than by actors.

We're now working on the next video, which will follow on from Lost Fires. The idea is really not to separate the videos from one another, but rather to make sure they form a whole. Just as the album is meant to be listened to from beginning to end, the videos should also remain faithful to this atmosphere.

You mentioned your father earlier. I noticed he was credited as a co-writer and that he collaborates quite a bit with the band. And I also saw that he was the one who created the album artwork! Could you tell us a little about how that came about? Is this the first time?

Manu - It's a collage of several of his paintings. He had already done that for Sheol.

By chance, I came across some paintings he'd done again. We were looking for the kind of identity we wanted for the cover and the booklet. And it seemed just as obvious to me that we needed…

There was something somewhat exaggerated, rough, very busy, which immediately shows you things, and lots of things. I really wanted it to overwhelm me. And then, when I saw the cover… Well, when I saw the painting, I thought it was quite obvious that it fitted perfectly with what we wanted to do. So it ticked all the boxes.

It wasn't the first time, since he'd already done it for Sheol. But this time, it's really his painting as it was, with a few modifications and all that. But he painted it 30 years ago. So, not at all for the album cover. But it fitted the atmosphere really well.

What do you think are the best conditions for listening to the album for the first time ?

Manu - Alone, at home, with some time to spare. Or anywhere, but in any case, alone, with time, without anyone interrupting the listening experience, listening to the whole thing, without cutting the tracks short. Not on a phone, not on Spotify or anything like that, where the tracks might get shuffled around or whatever. At home, or live. But anyway, just like with all HYPNO5E albums, I think you need to listen to them when you can give them your full attention.

Pierre - Reverently.

(Laugh.)

No, but it's true, it's silly, but you know, I remember when I was a teenager, I'd go to FNAC, buy a CD, bring it home, put it in my stereo, and sit down on my bed. I wouldn't do anything else. I'd just listen to the record, like a maniac. People don't really do that anymore, but even I have to admit I'm guilty of it. I don't do it either, you know.

And I remember, not that long ago, my parents are music lovers, and my father is quite into hi-fi. Now, don't get me wrong, he's not into the kind of hi-fi where you pay the price of a car for a pair of speakers, but he does indulge himself a little.

And then the other day, they bought me a very high-quality CD player, you know, and they brought me some CDs I had. They brought me the Michael Jackson album, Dangerous.

I took the CD, put it in, put my headphones on, listened to it, and I was absolutely blown away by the sound. Well, first of all, because the record sounds incredible. I mean, those tracks sound incredible. But I really think that… Well, some people are going to tell me: "No, you can't hear the difference anymore between high-definition streaming and a CD. You can't hear it"

Look, I don't know. And even if I physically couldn't hear the difference, well, on a placebo level, psychologically speaking, I'm sure I put myself in the best possible frame of mind for listening when I've got a CD, when I've got that actual object that I put into my CD player.

Everyone's going to listen on Spotify or whatever, but still, if you can, buy at least one record to support independent music, you know. And that's it, really.

But it's true that the best conditions are to have a nice little listening session, a good CD player, a good amplifier, and that's the ultimate setup. And it's true that we've almost lost that pleasure of just sitting down and listening, you know.

Of course, everyone has their headphones, and nowadays, headphone systems are good quality, you know. So that's still pretty cool. But honestly, having a physical copy…

Do you have a message for the people listening to you?

Pierre - Thank you.

Manu - Thank you. Yes, indeed, for listening to music that might not be very accessible at first, but that you have to be curious and have the patience to listen to albums like this one, or the others, again. But for us, to be able to make demanding music like this after all this time, to be able to release records and play concerts with these people, yes, it's a blessing.

Pierre - And for people to come and be there… Yeah, all we can do is thank them, really. Encourage them to keep doing it. It's a privilege, so all we can do is thank them. And then, well, I don't know… Love and peace, calm down and love one another. We need love, especially in these complicated times.

Thank you for your time!

Hypno5e - Thank you!