I’m A Vibe Vulture: Yves Jarvis Talks About ‘All Cylinders’
“I’ve done the inverse like try to explore complexity, so in songcraft, I was like, ‘Let me explore simplicity’ ’cause there’s so much there,” Yves Jarvis says about his upcoming album All Cylinders. If there is one experimental record you listen to this year, it should be All Cylinders. From start to finish, it is mesmerizingly creative and full of charmingly catchy tunes. Recently, I chatted with Jarvis about his upcoming album.
Setting the Stage
“I was kind of without studio for quite some time, and that’s not something I’m really used to,” Jarvis comments. Typically, Jarvis would record in a studio or his place, but when creating All Cylinders, he was unsure whether he wanted to move back to Montreal, which made him adapt. “I don’t think I’ve ever had this many settings in a record where I recorded it: a few sublets, at friends’ houses with their gear, borrowing tons of gear, I didn’t have my usual tape machine setup, recorded a lot of it at my parents’ house.”
Recording All Cylinders the way he did helped Jarvis grow musically. “That made me kind of less adventurous, I think, in a good way for myself in terms of experimenting with sound, sculpting sound, and layering sound,” he comments. “I was doing less of that because I was trying to feel grounded in the work in a way that usually I let myself go because I live in the work. I was bouncing all over the place, so I was trying to make songs that I could live in, and I don’t usually think about music that way as songs. I think of it as movements, expressions, or vignettes.”
Creating Songs Like Lightning and DIY Approach to Music
The tracks of All Cylinders are short; most are less than three minutes, and some are just over a minute long. “I love listening to long pieces, and I’m not impatient when consuming other people’s things, but I am impatient when expressing things,” explains Jarvis. “I like to be like lightning … I don’t even want my songs to have an intro. I want my songs to drop and hit the ground running. I also just want it to end. I don’t want it to have an outro. Even when my songs are longer, it’s usually because they are amalgamations of different vignettes that I was working on.”
Every song from All Cylinders Jarvis played himself, without the help of a single contributor. “I’m very impulsive, and I want to be patient, but I’m like, ‘I want to hit the ground running,’” he states. “I don’t even like the molding process. I don’t like molding things with other people. It’s too slow. I want to smash things. Working alone is just more conducive to that. But I definitely think I’m at the end of that. I think this is it for that, this record, ‘cause I’ve always done that, and it’s not that I think I’ve done everything I can do on my own, but I think I would get a lot more out of working with other voices on the next project. That goes for production as well.”
Road Music, Cars, and Painting a Picture
One of the reasons why Jarvis selected All Cylinders as the title for the record is because he loved the phrase. “I looked it up and was like, ‘I don’t think there’s a record called All Cylinders—I want to listen to All Cylinders. Like just as an idea. I want to listen to that record,’” he comments. His love of driving music and cars was another reason. “There’s just this feeling to driving music, this rambling down the highway type shit like Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” just that pitter-patter vibe it really speaks to me—a beautiful pitter-patter down the road into the sunset. That imagery made me want to allude to cars … I’m obsessed with engineering, cars, machines, and transportation. I think it’s crazy. I think it’s absolutely bonkers. And it’s very cool. I don’t like to think of myself as a machine, but of course, it’s easy to do just in terms of the way we work, so it’s very interesting to me. And maybe even abstractly the turning engine of ideas. ”
In “Silver KG” and “All Cylinders,” Jarvis name-drops the Trans-Canada Highway and Pincher Creek, respectively. “I’m definitely a Quebecer, but I’m certainly an Albertan, maybe more so; I hesitate to say that ‘cause I don’t want my Quebecers to hear that,” he jokes. “The landscape really resonates with me. I lived right off the Trans-Canada Highway—I could see the Trans-Canada Highway from my window. Pincher Creek was somewhere that we went when I was, like, 12 years old. My parents would take me to this folk club where they had these concerts.”
Name-dropping places and creating a vivid landscape within his music is something Jarvis does more than ever before with All Cylinders. “I always refer to the Rockies or Alberta somehow, but this was the most outright,” he states. “Maybe because I was listening to Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach like “Do You Know The Way To San Jose,” and I was listening to all this road music—like Jackson Browne “Running On Empty” and “Wheels” by The Flying Burrito Brothers. Just these songs about the road and landmarks just paint a picture. It helps to paint a picture—I just think it’s evocative to reference where I’m at literally.”
Experimentation as the Frontier
Jarvis views experimentation within music as the frontier. “There’s gonna be a lot of junk when you’re experimenting, but I think it’s good, that’s for the best,” he states. “I think in order to get to the good stuff, there has to be a lot of experimentation. It’s just necessary. I think that’s one of the ways, especially creatively, how things progress.”
However, Jarvis follows some rules while experimenting as he continues, “I’m very concerned with structure. I love boundaries. It’s easier to experiment within boundaries. Brian Eno is a great example of that where he has these oblique strategies, and it’s like you can really, in a Nietzschean way, create your own values on the fly, but it’s not necessarily this incoherent thing. Sometimes it can be. But at some point, it grounds itself. It rests. You can ‘hang your hat’ on some structure and then play around within that. So, I love experimenting but within certain structures. Not any particular structure, but there has to be some kind of defined structure.”
One example of experimenting within a boundary is “With A Grain,” which started as a drum track. “I didn’t have any idea of melody, and I didn’t have any idea of structure,” he comments. “That song almost took a year of not continuous work but revisiting it and being like, ‘What am I gonna add to these drums?’ like the drums are doing something very particular. It took a year of me adding and deleting and adding and deleting for me to figure out a structure for it, and turns out to be a thing that I could have never planned to make. I mean, that’s kind of always the case, but I think the way this song (became what it) is because of the way I ended up recording it, just turning itself inside out. This notion of a Rubik’s Cube. That’s one of my favourite ways to think about music.”
Another example is “I’ve Been Mean,” in which Jarvis combines his love of Ween and Paul McCartney. “I love Ween—They’re a great example of being so free and experimenting within a clear set of boundaries,” he says. “They’re also cheeky, but with heart, and they’re tender, and I love that … I definitely love The Beatles, but Paul McCartney’s solo stuff does more for me. His self-recorded stuff, like II, was a huge influence on the record. I was thinking of that kind of production quality because that’s like my favorite quality where it’s people with like the biggest budget or with the most experience recording something by themselves without the frills, at home—That rawness coming from somebody who’s so polished in their craft is something I really love.”
Music as a Manifestation of Something to Project
“I’ll usually come up with a song if there’s something in the world I want to be part of or manifest in myself—like a feeling or something about the way my life has gone that I want to express,” Jarvis comments about the creative process. “A lot of times, that’s really minutia, like the way the sun is coming down; it’s very “Warp and Woof.” If I’m in this light, I’m gonna make something that twinkles like the “Warp and Woof” intro.”
“Decision Tree” sees Jarvis thinking introspectively about his decisions. “I was just thinking of how every decision is a branch,” he comments. “In every moment I just imagined myself in a swirling montage of a tree growing out of me, like every decision I make is a tree growing out of me. I was just thinking how to seize that and to be intenful, and mindful, as someone who’s very much subject to my impulses.”
‘I’m a Vibe Vulture’
It is hard to describe the music of Yves Jarvis. His one-of-a-kind music incorporates multiple musical styles, and he deconstructs them in a captivating way. “I actually wrote something in my notes that’s so pretentious, but a lot of times I’m not even remotely familiar with the things that influence my work; it’s just vibes, and I wrote that ‘I’m a vibe vulture,’” he laughs. “In terms of what influences me, I’m like, ‘Oh. I like the way that it is oriented—and I’d like to speak to that.’” Significant influences on All Cylinders include Captain Beefheart, Emmylou Harris, Jackson Browne, and Virginia Astley’s Hope In A Darkened Heart. “Something I’m interested in is taking these almost geometric realities about music, just truths about music, and they’re inexhaustible or never-ending, and using them today and using them not to harken back to anything, or not to reference, or not to revive anything but to dig deeper and to be here and now with these tried and true motifs is what I was interested in doing.”
Jarvis had tons of fun creating “One Gripe.” “I was like, ‘Let me get some John Mayer shit off,’” he smiles. “When I tell you ‘I’m a vibe vulture’ (I mean), I hear how the way something moves, and I want to do that. I think that’s what music is all about. We have an inextricable individuality but then were also not that different, like ‘Let me give you my take on that.’”
John Mayer’s “Helpless” greatly influenced “One Gripe.” “It starts with the same kind of staccato, jagged, grooving thing, and it’s a great driving song, too,” says Jarvis. “I was like, ‘I got to give my take on that.’ That was the verse, at least. In the chorus, I go into some Marvin Gaye or Prince territory. A lot of the time, it’s like, I don’t know if you’ll ever get a song stuck in your head, and then you’ll interpolate it with a different song too, and you’ll mix those two songs together, and they just kind of feel like the same thing. I feel like that’s just the project of music. It’s a Rubik’s Cube. Let me change it. Switch it up. Within that, there’s so much you can do. There’s so much experimentation to be had. A better allusion is a chessboard ‘cause, how many chess games can you have within a chessboard? It’s like this one framework; within that, you can just do anything. That’s the way I think about music.”
Importance of Creating a Safe Space and Representation
“We all need a safe space,” comments Jarvis. “Between representation and just a place of reciprocity, and something that you can see yourself in. I’m so glad in every arena and for every identity, there are people that are engaged with representing humanity at large. We all deserve that. It’s very good stuff… People are symbols of things. People represent things. As human beings, we should all feel this dignity to be a representative of each other.”
Concluding Comments
All Cylinders drops on February 28. “I try not to idolize, but I’m inspired by people, and I feel like as somebody who does creative work, that’s my job,” says Jarvis. “I want to give people a sense of dignity and importance, self-importance. Take yourself seriously and have fun at the same time. It’s a balance—but I feel that’s what I want to represent: a seriousness, in other words ‘grabbing life by the horns’ but also just having tremendous fun and being a child. I feel like that’s easy to say but not to do. I think art is a vehicle to represent that so to give people the courage, or at least to dignify that within people—That’s what I want to do for people because art has done that for me.”
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Preorder or presave All Cylinders here.
Photo Credit: Casanova Cabrera
