In early July, we had the pleasure to see Mars Red Sky live at Stoomfest London, a stunning heart-expanding show most of the crowd there had waited a long time to see. Julien (vocals/guitar) and Jimmy (bass) have been kind enough to answer some questions about their decades-long career, upcoming projects with Monkey3 and how they put together the epic soundscapes of their albums.
First things first, where am I catching you today?
Julien: We are in a van back from a festival south east of France
How was Hellfest? Did you melt? Did your gear survive the heat? What was the crowd like?
Julien: The crowd was great, as always at Hellfest. We played there several times and each time the stage we play (The Valley) gets bigger. It was a bit intimidating but we managed to pull out a good performance. And you’re right, it was insanely hot, but our equipment survived.
Jimmy : Hellfest was really cool. It was our 4th time there and the most crowded. The gear is fine thanks, we were lucky enough to be spared by a gigantic cloud that was crossing the sky as we played! We did witness a band that had to stop their show because the heat was so intense, their equipment barely survived.
I’m curious to know a bit more of how Mars Red Sky came together as a band. How did you meet?
Julien : Jimmy and I have known each other for a long time, we met around 1996. He was playing in a band and managing a practice place where he put on a lot of shows, so I got to meet a lot of people and musicians there. That’s where we formed the bands Calc and Pull, and Jimmy was always around, being more of a manager. He ended up working for a touring agency, but we always stayed close, even sharing an appartment at some point. Sometimes we would talk about playing together, we listened to bands like Dead Meadow, Sunn O)) and things like that.
Around 2007, we met Ben Busser who was playing drums in a duo, Berlin vs Brooklin, we were amazed by his drumming. We both separately had the urge to call him up and offer to play together. Apparently I did that first, and ended up jamming with him, using an alternate tuning. We were getting nowhere, so at some point, I brought my old Big Muff and came up with a couple of heavy, doomy riffs, and it clicked right away. I offered Jimmy to join in on bass and that was it, it all sounded great. We made the first album, toured quite a lot. Benoit was working on the side and playing in another band, so he started to lose interest in MRS and finally decided to quit. But he encouraged us to go on.
We decided to call Matgaz (Mathieu Gazeau – drums) because we’d known him pretty well, his band Headcases and ours often crossed paths, we’d meet at concerts in Bordeaux, we knew he was a great drummer. I remember seing him with a band I knew very well, Glastnost, they were friends and I had seen them live a number of times. I didn’t know their drummer had left and when I came to see them in that little cave, I noticed that Mat had stepped in on drums. And the transformation was radical, he totally brought the band to an higher level, they sounded so tight, it was really amazing. That’s why I thought of him right away when Ben left.
What sort of musical influences brought you together?
Julien: At some point in the early 2000s, Jimmy and I shared a flat. There we listened a lot to bands such as Dead Meadow, Sleep, SUN(((o, Bardo Pond, My Bloody Valentine, Witch, Spacemen 3….
What was your musical background prior to the band?
Julien : I played in several bands, mostly “indie rock / Noisy pop” and started a solo career in 2010 more “psych folk”. Matgaz used to play in bands like Headcases (Noise / Indie punk rock).
I first discovered you through your debut album, Mars Red Sky, and I’ve had Strong Reflection on repeat for a few months now. The bass groove that starts it is so addictive! Judging purely by streaming numbers, it seems to be your most famous piece. What do you remember about the writing of it?
Julien: Thanks ! It’s one of our favourites too, we play it almost every night. Strong Reflection is actually one of the first two songs I wrote for the band when we started playing with Ben, along with Curse, which is on the first album too and was on the very first 7” we put out. They were both composed the old way, with an acoustic guitar. It sounded very cool when we played them with Ben, but that’s when we thought something was missing; even though the guitar was tuned very low (in a alt-tuning in B) I thought it might be cool to have a bassist to make it heavier yet. We contacted Jimmy right away and indeed it all sounded way better !
Jimmy: That song helped us to be discovered by young people on streaming platforms. It really put us on the map.
Was there something specific that inspired it? It’s a very visual song.
Julien: Actually it was very simple. After making up this weird tuning that’s been our “standard” tuning ever since, I just started toying around with it. We experimented with Ben for a while, we just played instrumentals, but nothing exciting really came out of it. We were inspired by Shannon Wright, Cheval De Frise (a band from Bordeaux), June Of 44 with arpeggios and weird chord progressions, but it wasn’t very satisfying. So we went for a different approach. We were also listening to heavier bands then (Witch, Dead Meadow, Electric Wizard, Sleep, bands on Tee Pee Records), so I tried out a few riffs, came up with those two songs and offered to sing, brought in my good old Russian Big Muff at the next rehearsal and it just clicked.
As for the visual aspect, I think most of our songs have that aspect. For a long time we had videos live. Most of them at first (including Strong Reflection) were done by Jimmy who edited them out of archives videos he found on the internet. A couple of the later ones (Shot In Providence for instance) were made by our friend and light engineer Geoffrey Torres. We haven’t played with videos for while, but we do have a really cool backdrop.
What is your relationship to it now, almost 13-14 years later? Is it still fun to play?
Julien: Yes, it’s still very fun to play, especially the parts after the chorus where we hold those notes in the air, on the brink of falling apart !
Jimmy: Indeed we can’t tire of it. Be it the riffs or the drums patterns, we’re still having a lot of fun playing it.
Your latest album, Dawn of the Dusk, sure felt like more of an instrumental exploration than your earlier releases. What do you think has shifted in your lives that’s created this shift in style, from maybe more melodic, lyric and riff based to this often purely guitar-driven sonic travelling?
Julien: It’s funny you say that because I felt that there’s a lot of vocals on most of the songs. Maybe the instrumental parts on some of these (like on The Final Round or Carnival Man) are longer than on the previous albums.. We always have at least one instrumental on each album (here it’s A Choir Of Ghosts. title that’s taken from the words in Carnival Man by the way, that’s the kind of tricky things we like to do). We realized that we have a sort of ongoing pattern when composing and editing the songs: each album has its corresponding “twin” on other albums. There’s always an instrumental, a sort of folky/catchy tune (here it would be Slow Attack), a song with Jimmy on lead vocals etc…
Jimmy: It already is our 5th album and we always try not to repeat ourselves. We are particulary happy with that one. We think it’s a good balance between MRS fundamentals and new soundscape explorations.
What’s your writing process like? Is one of you the main driver of a song, bringing it specific tunes, or do you jam together?
Julien: Usually I come up with a bunch of riffs, instrumentals or more elaborate demos with vocals and unfinished lyrics, and pretty basic structures at that point (verse/chorus, maybe a bridge idea…). The three of us go through these, we agree on which might work, then we try them out in a rehearsal place. As we like to say, we pass them through the Mars Red Sky engine ;).
Sometimes we keep the basic idea (like Slow Attack, Under The Hood, Join The Race, Crazy Hearth) but we often add other parts, sometimes we patch up different riffs together, make some Frankenstein-like experiments which are always really fun to do. That’s how we end up with quite complex songs such as Apex III, Soldier On (on The Task Eternal) or Carnival Man.
Usually Jimmy comes up with a couple of riffs too that we try out. The Final Round on the new album is a good example; he brought the main riff, then we jammed around it and made up the “verse/chorus” parts, not knowing where and if vocals would be added. He offered to sing lead on those parts, wrote the lyrics and tried out different melodies in the studio. We used one of my riffs for the last doomy part that we played really heavily, slowing it down as we near the end, loaded with Jim’s great heavy bass and Mat’s awesome drumming as usual.
Mat also brings in drum patterns and riff ideas on occasions (Mindreader or the instrumental Arcadia for instance). But the core element of the band is really the chemistry between the three of us.
Tell me more about the Monkey on Mars project! It sounds so so cool, Monkey3 are such legendary instrumentalists, how did this collaboration happen? How do you know each other?
Jimmy: We met Monkey3 a long time ago when we shared same stages in Germany. We always loved their special instrumental tunes and we thought that their background was quite similar to ours and very easy to mix. We love the guys and that possibility to form a common band called Monkeys on Mars was an invitation!
Julien : We met Monkey3 a dozen of years ago, on a European tour. We played two nights in a row with them and we bonded immediately (Boris, the guitarist, even gave me a spare fuse for my amp and saved my life the first night!). We have different approaches and sounds but we also have a lot of elements and influences in common.
What sort of sound will the eponymous album of that project be like? Tell me a bit more of how you’ve collaborated, what’s your process working together with the Monkey3 guys?
Julien: At first we simply started to send demos and riffs to each others. Each band added layers on top of the cake before we officially recorded these 2 very long pieces in real studios.
I’m very curious about the place music plays in your life. Are you full time musicians? What do you feel playing music helps you with or supports you through?
Julien: Mat and I are professional musicians, we’re lucky enough to benefit from a specific system in France called the “intermittence”, which is basically an unemployment aid that you can get if you manage to work a certain amount of hours each months over a year. That’s why we have other projects aside from Mars Red Sky: Mat plays in several other bands such as Epic, a great instrumental trio (drums, bass and balafon) mixing lots of various influences, from black metal to African music and great melodies. He also plays in a band called Ündes with two musicians from Mongolia and a metal guitarist, the blend of occidental metal and traditional Mongol music is mind-blowing. There’s also his former band Headcases (that’s how Jimmy and I met him in the late 90’s) who have been playing Nirvana covers for many years now (Headcases plays Nirvana).
I was in a band called Calc when I met Jimmy and Mat. We put out six albums between 1997 and 2007 and reunited briefly in 2017 for a couple of shows supporting the release of a double vinyl compilation. Since 2010 I’ve also had a solo project under my name, put out three albums and toured quite a lot with it (thanks to Jimmy who also works with me on that). There’s a new album on the way that’s almost finished and should come out sometime next year. I also play with our friend Helen Ferguson who goes by Queen Of The Meadow. Helen writes and composes all the songs and I record them at home, adding arrangements, back-up vocals etc.. On stage it’s mostly acoustic, same as with my solo project where she sings back-ups and plays guitar and autoharp.
As for Jimmy, he works as a booking agent at 3C, a Bordeaux-based agency. So he’s not just the bassist in the band, he’s our manager and booker for the shows in France and works with booking agents abroad.
How did MRS Red Sound come to be? What was the motivation behind building your own label?
Jimmy : We needed a support in order to release our first album on vinyl back in the early 2010’s. We started using that “tool” to help other bands release their own projects. A few years later, it’s now a more serious and professional outfit.
And how do you find new bands to sign onto the label?
Jimmy : Floriane Fontaine who is in charge of our PR and label now picks up new bands with us. They’re mostly musicians we meet on tour and whose music we love.
What’s next for Mars Red Sky? Is a new album in the works, any more touring?
Jimmy : Probably, that’s what we call ‘the Task Eternal”.
Many many thanks to Julien and Jimmy for their time and generosity in answering these questions. Mars Red Sky are still on tour and will join Monkey3 in October for a Monkey on Mars debut tour.
Jimmy : It was a real pleasure to play StoomFest, good audience and lovely staff. Thanks very much!