UMAN

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One of the amazing things about music is how it can form connections across language.

Direct to the nice thing with Danielle is we don't need to use many words. We understand each other without speaking very much. We trust each other immediately.

And we can be a lot more direct in our feedback and saying things to each other.

The French voices here are those of siblings Danielle and Dde Jean. Together, Danielle and Dda make up the band Uman.

Human Human hu Uma umen umah Man Mummen.

When we talked last year, their nineteen ninety two album had just been re released by the New York based label Freedom to Spend. Wherever he might have heard it in the first place, this album left a strong impression on label founder Matt Worth.

It's an album for imagination, imagination that birds more imagination, or that inspires more imagination. I think a lot of that has to do with the way language is not only explored across dialects and regions, but also in the way that it is then fractalized within the sound itself, almost like this alien transmission. It feels like contact with another kind of life force. Our reason to reissue this was because it just felt so hard to place in time and therefore a timeless album.

My interview with Danielle and Dda was conducted with a live French English translator. Today we'll have some friends performing the English translation of their words.

When did you start writing producing your own music?

At a very young age, a friend lent me a tape recorder. I was fascinated by the stape recorder and I started experimenting with speeding up and slowing down. The sound.

Is the one who started playing with different bands, and at some point I joined them. We started songwriting, and then we started with instrumental music, but it happened progressively.

Vico pamaldu choregra.

To this album. We were working mostly with choreographers for contemporary dance, and we were creating instrumental music with or without voice. But part of us felt like it was frustrating, like we had to hold back because the music couldn't take up all the space of this art form. And so finally with this album, we felt like we could employ our creativity and do more to give it more to voice.

If I understand correctly, before this record, you cut a couple of albums recorded in like commercial studios in Paris, and then I think for this one moved to you built a home studio, right.

So, yes, we were recording albums of French music or pop and some very commercial professional studios. But our feeling there was that the sound engineers would oftentimes impose their point of view or their mixing, and so even if we had less means producing, we had more freedom at a home studio.

Se at those big studios, and time is money. It's very costly and there's a lot of pressure to work faster. At home. We had all the time that we needed to record.

Did you go in with with a vision of what this album should be like? Would be like? See?

Things happen little by little and it really depends on the mood I'm in at that time, so there's never an overarching vision. Things happen slowly progressively.

This is.

The swell was at the time. My process was more working at night. I would come up with different harmonies and then in the morning I would propose some different ideas to Danielle and she would improvise based on those things. Then I would do gimmicks with my m one.

And after did kept my melodi and the create a new melody.

Not always but sometimes. And what was great about it so.

Based on the long minutes of improv that Danielle would come up with, I would sample parts on my keyboard. I was keeping a lot of their original melodies, but I was adding to them or cutting them, and that was very exciting, like a ping pong match.

Woven across the album is a single poem, spoken eight times in eight different languages, French, Hebrew, Dutch, Vietnamese, Portuguese and English.

It's this force, almost animal warm, like a kiss, fresh, like the morning June that we call human warm. It's not quite sexual, but it's something to do with human nature that is so.

Tangible, some opportunity to lay.

In that time, there were a lot of social liberation movements, a lot of human warmth, especially in the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Some of the.

No Man doing New Yorkshires.

The poem Park came at the very end of the process of this project, and then it was integrated into other tracks, but we did it at the end.

We used people that were around us and people that we knew we used those opportunities to record their voices. So one of the first ones was Russia. That's because we had a cello player that played on some of our tracks who spoke Russia. At the time, we lived in a university town, so we had lots of nationalities around us. Popular for us, the voice is truly an instrument. We also use phonetic syllables and sounds in the place of words.

Gembiells just the mom I've loved to play and have fun with my voice, not just with singing, but with making noises. I like when my voice can be very breathy, with lots of air, or sounds that are more jazzy. And I've done a lot of world music, so I've learned to create sounds that are in my nose or in my forehead or other parts of my body.

There is a way in which very lyric forward music can be so much direct addressed from the composer, like a very specific meaning that.

You're supposed to take.

And something that I find so enjoyable about your album and so like re listenable about your album is that that's not the case, that it's full of language and the human voice, which is one of my favorite sounds in the world. But it's so much more ethereal and evocative, and it feels almost like choral music, like a lot of voices in concert together. Let's talk about gear for a second. What kind of Simpson in the in the samplers, and what kind of gear did you have in your home studio there.

In the beginning, we were just experimenting. We had two two track recorders, so we were recording one track and then singing on the other track, and we were doing a lot of mixes and experimenting, and I think all of that developed our creativity. When the first samplers came out, we had that preparation. We were ready to start using them because we had been doing this before.

JEVI. My first sampler was from Kawai. Then I had an EPs from Insnic and that's what I used to do the guitar sounds on the keyboard. I had the D fifty synthesizer from Roland, the j D nine to ninety from Roland, the Corg wave station, the COG. We had a rhythm box from in Sonic too. We had a software called Notator. It was the ancestor of Logic,

Obviously, we played with other musicians as well on this album. We had the trumpet, the piano, and the saxophone.

Would play them the theme and then they would either improvise or try to play the same theme on their instrument.

We recorded our guest musicians on an eight track, which allowed us to then mix the.

Mints, and the eight track was synchronized in the Notator software, so all the synthesizer sounds were recorded digitally, and then all the other instruments were analog.

The initial release, you released it in nineteen ninety two, right, So what do you remember about releasing it then? Sort of was what was the reaction?

The album was very well received. We had many articles written about it, so we felt very emotional and very proud.

But this album was still kind of a hybrid and an alien people were surprised. I am little destabilized by it. At the time, it wasn't possible to compare us to anything, at least in our own environment.

We couldn't be classified as pop or jazz or anything else. A lot of record companies had to turn us down because they didn't know how to classify us, and sometimes they did it regretfully. We could see that they liked our music, but they didn't know how to sell us.

When did Matt come at you guys and be like, yo, I want to do this record again, you want to put it back out?

I think it was at the beginning of Lockdown.

We actually got a message from Matt and didn't answer for a while because we had other things to do, but Matt was very persevering.

Well. What I liked about our conversation was that it didn't feel like a dialogue between an artist and a record company. It felt like a dialogue between two artists, and that really built our trust in math Is. As any artist, we start out by being very cautious of any commercial offer that comes our way. We've been signed with Universal before in the past, and that wasn't a great experience. We felt like there was always a lot of pressure on our heads and we didn't have a

How do you feel about the the re release? I mean, what sort of attention have you seen? Is it felt a lot different than it did nineteen years ago.

It's a very very different experience, especially because we hadn't listened to it in so long, But of course we're extremely happy. At the time, it felt like the beginning of something, and right now that feels very different.

Supposed to nineteen years ago. It felt like the beginning of an adventure and also the beginning of what I felt was pure freedom of expression. At the time, I started writing children's literature and making a living from that, and so I didn't feel this pressure to make best selling music anymore. The music could be one hundred percent my expression, and I felt a lot more free in doing that.

Well felt that music.

You know, do you still play music together.

It's interesting because the re release of this album has changed our way of working together. Actually we ex more so we find ourselves working together like we did in the past maybe and you'll see it in our next album. There's a feeling in the mood of that time, the book.

And nowadays we have to work a little differently because we've lived far apart and Didier lives in the south of France and I live in your parents. But we still work with this back and forth and send each other byle Well.

Dan Didier, thank you so much for taking the time.

This episode of Ephemeralm was written by me Alex Williams, produced with Max Williams and Trevor Young, edited by Casey Pegram and Rima il KLi, translated by and de Valence, and performed in English by Lauren Vogelbaum and Noel Brown. With special thanks to isis O Reagan, Sammy Jo Concilio, Danielle and Didejean and Matt Wirth. The re released album is available in multiple formats on band Camp and I get our vng dot com. Just search human m Am and look for us on social media. We are at