Illuminine: confrontations in the twilight zone

Tom Peeters
© Agenda Magazine
08/04/2015
(© Lara Gasparotto)

When Kevin Imbrechts was asked to present Illuminine at Silence Is Sexy, he didn’t have a band, let alone an audience. But his name in big letters on the poster now shows the impression he has made with his intense, introspective soundscapes.

Kevin Imbrechts wrote “Dualisms”, the opening track on #1, Illuminine’s first album, when he was eighteen. He is now 25. “I never actually intended to let anyone hear this, never mind bring it out,” he told us in the cosy Gitan café in his home base, near Leuven. His other band, the noise-rocking Mosquito, is always in the foreground. “This was the music with which I could retreat in peace into my own room after rehearsals. During exams, too, it was a good distraction, and I could deal with my teenage years with it, in private.”

Other people keep a diary or preserve their memories in photographs; Imbrechts records melancholy soundscapes that propel him back in time. “That’s why I found it so important to keep the spirit of the original demos during the recordings in Het Depot in Leuven. The album is a hotchpotch of moments that affected me between the ages of 18 and 25 and that I tried to capture on an old iPod. Experimenting with the little microphone, I tried to create the sense of space that matched my feelings about, for example, my dead grandmother or a friend who died after a blind-spot accident on his bicycle.”

What made you realise that you wanted to share this personal music with other people?
Kevin Imbrechts: The click came during Ólafur Arnalds’s appearance at Het Depot [where Imbrechts was on a work placement while studying Cultural Studies, TP] in November 2013. His songs had a public and I felt that, even though they were performed with a guitar, they were closely related to what I do. The musician Chantal Acda, who teaches singing at Het Depot, was the first person to hear them. She put me in touch with the producer Christophe Vandewoude, who, among other things, plays with Isbells.

And before you knew it, you had a recording contract and you guys were mixing an album in Iceland, in the studio of Birgir Jón Birgisson, Sigur Rós’s sound technician.
Imbrechts: Because his sound has influenced me so much, I had sent him a mail. I got an answer straight away, to say I could come. We still had to come up with a name. It wasn’t until June 2014 that we sorted that out. “Illuminine” is the title of a lovely song by Thurston Moore, who constantly moves back and forward between his gentle and his noisy, experimental side. In the studio in Iceland, very little is said. For me, that was a good sign. First and foremost, Birgir Jón made the album sound more like a whole. When I wrote the numbers in my bedroom, I never had landscapes in my mind, just feelings. But they are there now, alright. After the work was done, we headed into the magnificent natural scenery in a jeep and I was bowled over by the overwhelming mountain summits, which radiate both power and calm – an ideal setting for listening to the mixing for the first time. I will always treasure that moment.
Why do you thank the German sociologist Theodor Adorno in the liner notes?
Imbrechts: Have you an hour? [Laughs] After he moved from Europe to the US, fleeing the war, he argued that popular music, such as the Tin Pan Alley hit factory, helped to maintain the capitalist culture industry. In his theory, the structure of a pop track is always the same. Only the component parts differ subtly, so that songs always sound that bit different, so the consumer won’t notice that he is being made a fool of. I wrote my thesis about how Adorno’s theory is applicable today to TV formats like Idol, in which musical talent is commodified and only the details change a little, such as, for example, the chairs in The Voice, again in order to disguise the fact that the underlying structure remains unchanged. I have always kept in mind, including when we were making this album, that the whole must change the details, and not the other way round.

Strange to hear that from someone who works at the heart of the music industry, for SIMIM, which represents producers.
Imbrechts: True, but that tension between those two domains is there in Adorno too. During the day, I see the hard, dry, and businesslike side of the industry, while in the evenings I drift off in my own sensitive, often melancholy compositions. That involves a confrontation and creates short circuits in my head, but on the other hand it keeps me fresh, as it is precisely in that twilight zone that inspiration emerges.

SILENCE IS SEXY: ILLUMININE
12/4, 22.30, Ancienne Belgique, www.abconcerts.be

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