PacoVolume

At the age of 20, PacoVolume quits his Maya literature and civilization studies (for real) to try and become a rock star in New Zealand.

Quickly forced to live off something else than his musical projects, he becomes a waiter in an Auckland wine bar. Wine being fascinating, he decides to dedicate his life to it, comes back to France a year and a half later and becomes France’s fifth best young wine taster in 2001. He works as a buyer for a wine merchant, tastes hundreds of wine a week, plays a little, but finds music a little out of date, apart maybe from Nick Cave and Daft Punk.

Multi-instrumentalist, fascinated by Prince in the Purple Rain movie, he writes and records on a tape-recorder, either sad or completely stupid things.

Being a wine merchant, he ends up meeting musicians with alcohol issues (the Bordeaux rock scene), or, worse, alcoholics with music issues (the Bordeaux electro scene not being as renowned). He enjoys it, gathers up some self-confidence, goes back to Paris - good thing for he then was getting tired with wine and not writing anything, starting to tell weird wine stories to circumspect clients – and decides to dedicate the 30 next years of his life to music.

In 2004, he sets up and starts touring with the bands NapalmPilot (hard rock duo, guitar – vocals – drums) and Turbo Crystal (romantic funk duo, bass – drum machine – vocals), signed up with London-based label Tiny Sticks Records.

At the same time, he composes a solo album, records it in Paris with the help of director François Chevallier (Emilie Simon, Arcade Fire, Coldplay). It will be called Manhattan Baby, he picked the name a while ago, he can’t actually remember why, but it will be Pop, because it’s always nice to have jingling guitars, ancestral melodies, stuff about having your heart broken and feeling the rock, you know.

Right now, he does a lot of things, it’s wonderful. He was elected CQFD revelation by Les Inrocks in 2007, has recorded cover-ups for Béatrice Ardisson, played in the majority of Paris halls, takes part to other albums as additional producer, composes for other artists and above all, Manhattan Baby will be released by Discograph in May 2009.

PacoVolume addresses on this album various themes : a married TV host who falls in love with a woman young enough to be his daughter ; dancing ; killing wild animals ; disappointments ; canned spaghetti ; the arrival of disco music in Belfast in the late 70’s ; Donald Trump ; death ; girls ; THE girl ; Judas…Nothing about his life really, but he plans on doing a « My Way » kind of song when he is super old.

Harmonically, lots of minor chords, minor 7, major 9. Little D, oddly. No 7th chords either. It’s not bluesy at all.

About the style, notice his compositions are packed with it : 8 voices choirs on Stand By Me, artisanal claps, unison choruses, polyrhythmics, crazy arpeggiators, ternary, binary, a vietnamese zither…each track has its own atmosphere. PacoVolume doesn’t seem to like bridges, he is always a bit impatient to get to the chorus. Maybe he can’t write those bridges. Anyways, the tracks are great, and that, as his friend Kim says, you can’t go against !