Progressive metal heroes Voivod have always been at the forefront of creative, challenging metal music and their new live album, Symphonique, further cements that legacy. Recorded live at the Grand Théâtre in Quebec City, Canada, Symphonique is a live record in collaboration with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra.
The performance revisits tracks from across Voivod’s career, putting a particular focus on selections that, along with the musicians in the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, have a particularly cinematic or soundtrack feeling. The end result is what the best live albums are: releases that frame the familiar music in a new light.
Decibel spoke with Voivod drummer Michel “Away” Langevin prior to the release of Symphonique (out June 5 on Century Media) to discuss song selection, rehearsals, movie soundtracks and how the experience affected Voivod’s songwriting.
You guys have done a few live albums as a band before. Obviously this one is a little different but what made you interested in another live record?
It’s actually the Montreal Symphony Orchestra that approached us. It must’ve been three or four years ago for this project and it took a couple of years to put it together. We had tracked some stuff in the past, like on the Wake album in 2018 a string quartet and for the Montreal Jazz Fest in 2019, we had a brass quintet. It’s always been a dream of ours to play with an orchestra. Even back int he day, we were including bits of modern composers into our music.
We actually got busted by the orchestra in Montreal, they recognized all the bits. We did the two shows in Montreal early last year and then in the summer, we got a chance to do it again in Quebec City. This time, we wanted to record the audio. Since all the instruments are miced up, it was a big mess at first when we got all the tracks because there were maybe 65 musicians. Thankfully, Francis [Perron], who does the albums with us these days, was able to clean everything up to where you can actually hear every member of the orchestra and every member of Voivod as well. I’m really impressed with the sound of it.
It’s very cinematic sounding. It has a movie soundtrack vibe, in a really positive way.
We’ve always wanted to do a soundtrack to a dystopian movie and that’s the cloest we got to doing that with an orchestra. We picked the songs accordingly, songs with many movements and some more proggy, though we did pick “Nuclear War” from the first album. We thought it could turn into a very scary military march with the orchestra.
You touched on it just now—you have so many albums and songs at this point. How did you go about choosing the songs you would include? Were you trying to give a full sample of your discography?
We definitely wanted to do an overview of our career but we also made sure that we picked songs that would match with the orchestra. We only had one restriction: if you go over 90 minutes, you have to pay extra money to the union, so we picked twelve songs and made sure that we were OK. Once the songs were chosen, the ones that we thought made a lot of sense with an orchestra, we started to do the setlist so it would sound like a long trip.
It took a couple of years putting that together. Chewy was very involved with Hugo, the arranger, and so he was giving him ideas like the band could stop and Snake could sing along with the orchestra, stuff like that. We had to make sure for these shows to remember the arrangements. It’s a lot of pressure on my end, because if I make a mistake, the whole orchestra is lost. I was very focused.
I remember we had a couple meetings with the arranger and I was mentioning the influence we had from early cyberpunk movies like Mad Max and Terminator, and I was also mentioning soundtracks for the old movies Planet of the Apes, where it’s more avant-garde material, so I think he really understood what we were looking for.
Chewy was asking him for a part in “Forgotten in Space,” he wanted the violin section to do something very shrieky like in the shower scene in Psycho. It went really well. It was a couple years of exchanging ideas. As soon as we got the first demos from the arranger, I immediately felt like I was in a sci-fi movie. I think we achieved our goal.
Do any of you guys have backgrounds in classical music?
Not necessarily, but Chewy teaches jazz in a college, so he has a lot of notions and he gave the arranger charts for every song, so he had a good head start.
How often were you working on rehearsals or performances for this?
We had a few sessions where we’ve been recording for the past eleven years or so. We had the arranger’s demos and Chewy matched the original recordings of the songs from the albums with the arranger’s demo, so we went into our studio to rehearse that. For the first two shows we did in Montreal, before the first show, we rehearsed the set twice. The day of the first show we did it once, the day of the second show, we did it once. Combined with the performance, the shows, it’s twice a day. By the end, I was pretty exhausted.
In Quebec City, we did the same, where we had two rehearsals before the show and the morning of the show, we had one. It’s not necessarily a physical exhaustion. It’s more like the brain has a hard time focusing after a while, but I made it.
Do you think it felt different than your typical Voivod show, like people were getting a different experience in that regard?
Yes, there was a lot to absorb with all these musicians on stage and animation as a background. These venues are just amazing. It sounds amazing. There were people that had a membership to the orchestra that didn’t know about metal, there were metal people not really used to classical concerts. Everybody really enjoyed it—it was a great experience for the orchestra as well, because they did not expect such a reaction from the crowd.
Usually it’s clapping—for us, between songs, it was a big roar, had a couple of standing ovations. At one point, the crowd started chanting the conductor’s [Dina Gilbert] name, “Dina! Dina!” It was a first for her and at one point, people were going, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” during a song and she said, “Thank god your public is on the beat.”
Do you think doing this string of shows will influence the way you think about writing or performing in the future?
Interestingly, we are, between tours, writing and recording a new album. We decided to record it three songs at a time; that’s all we can afford right now between tours. We noticed that the symphony shows rubbed on the writing and we can feel the influence. It’s a concept album too, so it might actually sound like a soundtrack. It won’t be ready this year, that’s for sure.
We have a lot of shows coming up. Early next year, we’re going to do the symphony show again, in Northern Quebec were Snake and I grew up with the local orchestra. That’s going to be really amazing. If we can, we’d love to take that show across the globe with the local orchestras.
I like the Asia Symfonia album with the local orchestra in Bulgaria and I think that’s the way to do it.
