7 Weeks : "Enregistrer en one take, sans overdubs" - Rolling Stone
7 Weeks, a French group with an abundant career, plays with styles and codes to invent a musical language of its own. Rock, stoner, grunge, prog, all in one? Response elements
It took you two years to release Sisyphus and here you are again in the stores of record stores with a surprise. How did this project get started ?
7 Weeks: What's Next? is the continuity of a confined and unexploited Sisyphus. It was our response to the situation: we couldn't play live anymore so we made another record. Especially since Sisyphus had a dark part in his creation that we had put aside to favor the solar side, and with this EP we were able to 'liberate' songs like "Intimate Hearts" which speak of confinement or of alienation.
In this previous opus you were very grunge, with big guitar sounds and here we find you again… In acoustics!
7 Weeks: We compose our songs in a simple way, “song” if we can say, guitar-voice, so it's quite easy to switch from electric to acoustic. The challenge was that we wanted to record in 'one take', without overdubs including for the vocals in order to capture something which, for us, has disappeared too much from modern productions, especially in rock: the spontaneity and the emotion which emerge from people playing at the same time, this feeling of being "on the wire".
There's an amazing cover that we didn't necessarily expect from you, from King Crimson, are you more rock than prog?
We are definitely rock, we are actually very far from the "prog metal" scene for example, but we do not consider King Crimson as a prog rock band, for us it is a universe in its own right and which does not has no equivalent, whatever the periods. It almost feels like you belong to a cult or some insider thing when you're a Crimson fan.
For “Cirkus”, again, we wanted to take up a challenge. There are tracks and albums that are more obvious, more accessible but, without being able to explain why, this track seemed to us to be able to be adapted with our sound. We did a lot of research on live performances from different eras to better understand their different readings of the song, because Crimson on stage is often very different from albums. The goal was to respect the codes of this incredible group and adapt them to our sound which is quite 'heavy'.
What is your relationship with prog because you are more into song formats than long epic pieces?
Yes, but in the end King Crimson only has one track over 20 min in his entire discography alongside the 4 to 8 min 'hits' ("Epitaph", "Happy Family", "Three of a Perfect Pair" , “Dinosaur”…). Our music has a frontal, 'first degree' side inherited from American rock and heavy rock but also more sinuous influences which come from the English avant-garde side of artists like Crimson, Bowie, certain aspects of the solo career of Robert Plant . Absolute fans of Led Zeppelin, we also recognize ourselves in their audacity but this is not a progressive approach for us.
We are not at all connected by Yes for example. Today people often think of progressive rock as something complex and a bit tedious, but some bands affiliated with it are often just very original like Pavlov's Dog or Supertramp on his first album.
As for the previous record, we feel the happiness of playing together, favoring spontaneity, is this still your angle of attack?
Always and more and more, the music is better it seems to us. We often, for lack of means or time, favored efficiency and safety on our old albums by separating the takes today we really tend towards live performance and the spontaneity that comes out of it, which is quite ironic since this should take the least amount of time. We have this fantasy of imagining ourselves entering a recording studio like in the 40s or 50s, playing and leaving with the freshly cut disc under your arm. You have to be very good at it, it takes a lot of work.
What’s Next? (The Sisyphus Sessions), the new 7 Weeks EP, available. Buy/Listen.
Interview by Belkacem Bahlouli