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Jazz Articles » Interview » Fievel Is Glauque: Zach Phillips Believes Harmony Does N…
Courtesy BanjoZebra
People, myself included, are mostly going to use music to try to understand themselves, and will often fight tooth
and nail to defend whatever construction serves that interest.
Zach Phillips
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data-original-title=”” title=””>Fievel Is Glauque is an integration between multi-instrumentalist
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data-original-title=”” title=””>Zach Phillips and vocalist Ma Clément along with a mutable cast of eminent musicians. Their latest album is the homophone-titled Rong Weicknes (Fat Possum, 2024), which may or may not also be an oxymoron. Linguistics aside, this fantabulous collection of songs may well be the most resolute version of the ensemble yet. The music continually offers listeners a melody then counters with improvised sounds that briefly dabble with the festive (or melancholy) before throwing you a left hook. While listening to their music, one could be caught thinking about 21st century artists such as Royal Trux, Everything Everything,
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data-original-title=”” title=””>Black Country New Road, but you would be nagged by the perception that Fievel Is Glauque is a singular musical entity and would reject any further comparisons.
The point is their astounding yield, which includes rhythmic releases such as the joyfully epic snippets that are combined in God’s Trashmen Sent to the Right Mess (cassette recording, 2021), the zestful and visceral arabesques of Flaming Swords (Math Interactive, 2022), the alluring soundscapes scattered throughout Aérodynes (Math Interactive, 2023) and, of course, the aforementioned Rong Weicknes, surpasses many of their contemporaries, making their output retrospectively cool.
New York-based Phillips and Clément share compositional efforts. They give new meaning to the phrase “met by accident.” It was harmony at first sight as Phillips was knocked unconscious after losing a battle with a Brussels streetlamp. His friend Eric Kinny placed a call to Clément, who had studied nursing, to examine Phillips for head injury. After concluding he was sound, she said mysteriously in an interview, “We met because we needed to meet. That’s my interpretation of the events.”
It sounds like a scene from filmmaker Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the roles of the two musicians. From that point on, Phillips and Clément have met either in Brussels or New York to share the compositional work. Rong Weicknes serves as the culmination of their efforts to date and has redefined what emotional intensity could sound like. The album’s power lies in its radical restraint, its ability to transform limitation into transcendence. The duo not only want to deliver good songs, they dare to experiment; turning expectation and genre conventions upside down, not replicating the formulas or the demands of what has come before but intertwining appealing and unusual sonic combinations.
Zach Phillips’ introspective keys, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Thom Gill‘s spectral guitar work, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Daniel Rossi‘s barely-there percussion, ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Gaspard Sicx‘s complex drumming and ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Logan Kane‘s patient basslines combine with ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Andre Sacalxot‘s alto saxophone and flute, creating vast emotional landscapes for Clément to soar above or mingle with as in “It’s So Easy.” Her vocals float like frost on a New England morning, particularly on “As Above So Below.”
Each listen reveals new depths, like discovering constellations in a winter sky the band so perfectly evokes on “Toute Suite,” while “I’m Scanning Things I Can’t See” embodies the band aesthetic of understated beauty and quiet resilience. “My Oubliette” is a strong gesture of their blissed-out side with Phillips coaxing drama out of an arrangement that intensifies as each measure steadies. The bookend tracks of “Hover” and “Haut Contre Bas” sound as distressed as they do euphoric, pinned forever onto the shirt collar of modern jazz.
Fifteen songs delivered in 45 minutes, anchored by the dense, punishing title track and the emotional, aching, “Dark Dancing”both of which offer powerful bittersweet contrasts. The lyrics for “Rong Weicknes” are so absorbing that one can feel transported to the “Ring of Weakness” in Lord of the Rings, where Gollum bit off Frodo’s finger and fell into the fires of Mount Doom.
What allows Fievel Is Glauque to bridge the gap between the arrhythmic and ominous deconstructed terrain of avant-garde jazz and the seminal chromatic unpredictability of modal jazz? The answer is in the whole-shebang concept of embellishment and layering upon traditional forms. Or, it could also be found in the following interviews with Zach Phillips and Ma Clément (read here).
All About Jazz: God’s Trashmen and Flaming Swords are filled with short, some might say undeveloped songs. It is not a common approach. Are the songs in fact fully developed and why did you choose to go that route? Are there longer versions you play live?
Zach Phillips: Some do say “undeveloped!” I say “concise,” “bespoke,” “econo.” Repetition is a great wonder. Just saying that cues “Loving You” by ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Kiki Gyan in my head. To my ear, there is space (and need) for every thing, and to the extent our various approaches to songwriting are stable enough to characterize, they certainly comprise no stylistic manifesto. Thinking now of Flaming Swords, I’m getting an image of “astronaut food”: shrunken, desiccated, vacuum-packed forms then animated by mental water and rendered nutritive to explorers. If you want a steak, there’s already great spots for that.
When writing, we’re always listening for what happens next, and sometimes what happens next is nothing: the form has elapsed, repetition feels exhausted, it’s time to rest. If our project were “maximally interesting music,” we could easily write interminable, through-compositions, and if it were “functional music for the dancefloor/office,” we could jam you to hypnosis with a groovy ouroboros. But we don’t have a project; we’re more like expert witnesses.
The rub is this: in writing a song, we’re not trying to deliver a product but to facilitate an event, a life, an unknown entity endowed with definitive shape, corporeal boundaries, self-identity. Listeners are certainly welcome to learn to play our songs and extend them to taste, but after inhabiting them, they’ll likely be surprised by their spaciousness. We do live in small urban apartments, after all, and have to make the best of it!
The relationality between song-form and clock-time is anything but linear, and it seems to me their lack of correspondence is one principal thing we all use music for, an untethering from clock-time we ask it to help us accomplish. To grab hold of rhythm on our own terms and enjoy it.
Music is something to make life beautiful and exciting and at times new
AAJ: Yet the final track on each album is four minutes plus. Given all the brief tracks, what is the significance of that for “No Title” and “Clues Not to Read?”
ZP: We play with excellent improvisers and it’d be a waste not to give them white space to wiggle in. Both of those songwriting sessions just happened to yield “locked groove” endings conducive to playing out: “Haut Contre Bas” on Rong Weicknes, too.
AAJ: How does “layering” the music effect the overall sound? Do the layers remain active or are they flattened like in a Photoshop file? Can you imagine an infinite number of layers (like the concept of turtles all the way down)?
ZP: We didn’t plan to make a “layered” album. We’d always recorded our groups fully live before. Our commitment to the “live in triplicate” approach of the album was a sudden studio improvisation brought to fruition by our talented engineer Steve Vealey and wonderful studio, the Outlier Inn. The sudden concept was originally (1) “good” live take #1, unedited and panned left; (2) “good” live take #2, unedited and panned right; (3) “bad” improvised take #3, unedited and full stereo.
The result was too busy and, despite the experimental process, suffered from the traditional disease that blights recordings done without representationality being creatively engaged; the recording just didn’t feel alive as an object yet. I’m an advocate of what I call “touching everything,” which can very much include examining an element and ultimately leaving it alone. So, I individually edited every constituent instrumental track on the album, limiting myself to volume edits. I would say I ended up silencing at least 40% of every recorded instrument. It felt a bit like quilting.
AAJ: Was there a story or flow that you wanted to achieve through the sequencing of Rong Weicknes?
ZP: I have an ambivalent relationship with the album format. On the one hand I accept it as a fun given, on the other it is not the unit of my form, which would have to be the individual song. My attachment to album sequences is limited to hoping the hypothetical listener will stick around long enough to catch the songs I currently like best. I think of Emily Dickinson’s “fascicles.” Albums are strange because they enframe groups of smaller enframed objects, songs. I do like that we’re supposed to pay attention to both frames at once, like an optical illusion.
AAJ: “As Above So Below” feels like a track filled with elation for its creation. The title paraphrases Matthew’s gospel”Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”conjoining the physical with the spiritual realm. However, occultists often use this phrase when their belief system denies God. Does any of this enter into your choice of title and why? And, if not, what did?
ZP: The church and gnostic cults you reference are dipping into the same thematic stream as us here: life as microcosm, the relational mystery of our earthly lives versus a hypothetical divinity, and so on. It’s certainly a much older realm of thought than Christianity! The binary machine of the I Ching seems, for example, to be a kind of calculator for locating oneself in the vicissitudes of this apparent homeostasis between micro and macro.
I can’t bring myself to believe I can or should pretend to know what knowledge even is, but my agnosticism departs from the contemporary resonance of that word to extend to the claims of any science just as well. This primal doubt about language itself figures songwriting for me as an apophatic, heuristic process, and my chief attraction to songwriting is that when I visit that activity, I feel God, I am in and with God, because I am present and aware and multivalent, curious, inquisitive, ready, environmental, unbounded. Michael Eigen said: “My doubt loves God. My unbelief loves God. My atheism loves God. Can I say my faith hates God? There are ways that this is so.” I’m some kind of bracketed empiricist, levying no final decree about the truth of what I’ve supposedly observed. I cherish and coddle the “but!” above all. And I love Chris Rock’s socraticism in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, which is really the true reference point for the song we’re talking about: “Are you saying you believe?” “No, but I have a good idea.” wrote Gregory of Nyssa. “Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything.”
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Matthew Shipp in “Eulogy for Paul Bley”: he had a “disdain for the known.”
AAJ: Ma’s vocals seem to temper some of the more explorative and exuberant compositions in the sense of bringing them back from above to let in the below or vice versa. How do you see the expression of your partnership with her?
ZP: I don’t understand why we’re able to consistently get into these states together. Some kind of dispositional lock engages our ample “flaw-scapes” maybe. We have learned so much from this area of mutual oblivion we know almost nothing about. We’re lucky to have found it and I’m proud of us for really using it and digging, digging.
AAJ: Describe the collaboration process as to composition? Does the vocal fit the melody or the reverse?
ZP: As with most of our recordings, we’re still waiting to find out what all that music wants us to do with it. One thing we do can be summed up by the phrase “leading with vocal melody.” The ear is quite consistently good at expressing itself through the voice in ways that are typically uncluttered by intellectualism, the learned habits of one’s instrumental hand-playing, or reified reductions like chord concept. So Ma will improvise a short melodic phrase, I’ll experiment with harmonic settings for that phrase either using or ignoring hierarchical/functional thinking. We’ll find one we like, then rinse and repeat. Lyrically, we let words form out of increasingly necessary-feeling phonemes and batter lines into shape by editing out our identifications with their affect and subject matter, an approach maybe adapted from the Belgian writer Georges Simenon.
AAJ: Could you put this statement into words that the listener could understand: “The intensity of the post-production process negatively mirrored the comfortable, easygoing, bucolic setting of the record’s initial tracking. Fittingly, because if there is one central, recurrent theme to Fievel’s music, it’s to do with the tension of balance: the dialectic that synthesizes something new from dualistic propositions; the floating superposition of both 1 and 0 in quantum computing’s treatment of binary; or the analytic third created by the combination of the client and therapist in psychoanalysis.”
ZP: The point of the examples provided is to highlight possibilities lovingly beyond, yet still inclusive of the binaries we necessarily employ to structure our relationship to the world and to tasks like art. We’re all chimeras doggy-paddling through paradox, using arbitrary, contingent differentiation in a kind of peristalsis that helps us get around. You draw a red square, I enclose it in a blue triangle. We now have either, we have both-together, we have both-juxtaposed, and so on, all the way out to our hermeneutic horizon, which could always be otherwise. The central idea is that harmony doesn’t end with the writing or the chart or the performance or the mixing. One’s approach to representation is just as subject to harmonic consideration.
AAJ: Is there a ‘Rite Weicknes’? How will that manifest?
ZP: The album title references Paul the Apostle’s “when I’m weak, then I am strong,” so I guess Paul’s is the “right weakness.” Our jokingly serious question is: but what if we have the wrong weakness? I suppose it’s a koan we’re sitting with. The misspelling is not stylistic, just how those words wound up on the page of Ma’s notebook. We don’t share a mother tongue, so we’re making one up together. Ornette Coleman was on to something when he said his approach to music was equivalent to “the” being die in German, or “bread” being pain in French. It’s like saying, “Give me some pain” when you’re hungry, a way to describe and use information that has identical meaning but sounds like two different words at the same time.
AAJ: Some of your titles are very evocative. For example, “Eternal Irises” conjures up so many images. Are your titles an outpouring of some particular vision or thought or are they more spur of the moment, this feels right? “I’m Scanning Things I Can’t See” recalls a passage in a Phillip Dick novel made into the movie Blade Runner with its dark, rainy, noir. “Kayfabe” is perhaps an anagram. “My Oubliette” could be quasi-translated as “Ma forgets.” Could you spend some time discussing these pieces and their titles, how things fit?
ZP: We “aren’t allowed” to bring titles or preconceived ideas into writingnot on principle, but because we can only measure something fresh emerging if we don’t show up with “ready” material. “I’m Scanning Things” is an exception: that title’s straight from Fernando Pessoa, whose book I happened to be reading the day we wrote that one. It just did fit, we didn’t ask it to. “Kayfabe” is wrestling slang for their professional secret of illusion. I understand it originates from “be fake.” We spend much more time talkingarguing!about the lyrics than the music, which typically comes easily. If a song holds, its title tends to be obvious early on.
AAJ: The same question for a couple in God’s Trashmen: “About Face” is a doubleno, tripleentendre, a military term, being about facing something or the qualities of one’s face. “Go Down Softly” recalls Roberta Flack’s hit “Killing Me Softly,” but it could also be a rallentando, either musically or taken as letting go or falling away from life.
ZP: Stands to reason, I’ll adore that song forever, and who wouldn’t! Yes, I’m hip to the ambiguity of “About Face.” Strange to say but I don’t identify with this music, which is why I’m able to love it. It stands outside of who I am, like a person I can love partly because of our differences, our fundamental distance.
AAJ: In Flaming Swords, “New Embranchements” I assume is Ma’s title, literally branching off or perhaps a fork in the road, seen as a side project. Speaking of which, are all your many bands and names side projects? Is FIS the base at least for the present?
ZP: Her definite impetus, yes, though we wrote that one together. We settled on the translational valence of our off-ramps, as on a highway. My base is my life, my body. Music is something I do to make that life beautiful and exciting and at times new, and often sheerly to make it continue at all. I don’t think bands are altogether very real, not that real is the standard to measure things by. What Ma and I are doing as a duo and with our friends is more important to me than it having the specific form of a band.
AAJ: Do you have a preferencearranged vs improvised?
ZP: The only time I’m truly sure I’m improvising is when I’m definitely making a mistake and have to scramble to recover ground against the incursion of what is not just not meant to happen, but meant not to happen. Those moments are certainly of major interest, and my friend Tori Kudo is an aficionado of them. I often think of something he said long ago: “Over the course of the next two hundred years I would like to experiment with the sounds I have chosen, and then begin to think about collective improvisation.”
Gary Bartz
saxophone, alto
b.1940
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Gary Bartz eschews the word improvisation, rejecting it as pejorative, and I feel him entirely. But I love how ideas flip more than I love any one idea, and what listeners read as compositional intentionality in terms of how our music is represented feels more to us like improvisation in the Bartzian sense”without preparation,” I’ll readily admit! We stay true to our gestures, even when they’re “rong.”
AAJ: What does the term jazz mean today, would you say?
ZP: Some people say jazz and they mean standards played athletically, with unbelievable speed, acuity, and referential vocabulary. Some people say jazz and they mean whatever’s produced by the institutions that have bought its name. And quite a lot of music-streaming enthusiasts innocently mean a vibe suited for some ephemeral moment. I didn’t come up playing anything related to any of these conceptualizations, and they’re not where I’m personally headed.
What jazz names to me beyond the foregoing is a kind of active seriousness about recursively applying techne (craft) to the pragma (the thing done) generated by praxis (process), in other words, a devotional vocation for circularly employing interpretive and performative skills in actions and processes yielding musical objects that then get re-interpreted and re-processed. The music we call jazz has taken this very, very far, with incredible results!
Derek Bailey
guitar
1932 – 2005
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Derek Bailey defined improvising as the search for material which is endlessly transformable. Here in 2025, what kind of materials are particularly stimulating for you?
ZP: We share a birthday! Maybe the real improvisation is all the reckless reasoning we do to justify our alibis to ourselves. Materially, I love language, and I adore frustration and confusion. I love the piano, the clavinet, the bass. Recently, I have become suspicious of paper and I don’t want to write things down, musically speaking. I want to hold them in my memory until they feel claustrophobic and run off, like cats.
AAJ: What are the emotional traps you strive to avoid?
ZP: 1. Overly believing I coincide with myself: Am I so sure I know what I contain, when I’m so often proven wrong? 2. Comparison to others, worrying about what they think.
Sonny Rollins
saxophone
b.1930
”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Sonny Rollins said: “What other people think of you is none of your business.” 3. Mistaking catharsis for discovering something new: Sometimes writing a song can feel like ecstatic unburdening, but I definitely don’t want to listen to the song that is my ejected burden. And of course I can avoid almost none of them!
AAJ: Do you personally feel it’s important that everything should remain available forever, or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?
ZP: No, despite my personal fixation on certain musical objects I would be very sad to lose access to, I don’t really believe any one thing is individually so important. There’s that old Oscar Wilde chestnut: “Don’t you think morality is important? Yes, but I don’t think importance is.”
To be clear, there’s almost no thing I like more than a magic, magic recording! But this fixation feels basically like a kink. Some people love bobbleheads or decorative plates, I happen to love “Sweet Stangin'” by Gimisum Family and “An Electric Storm” by White Noise, the internal rhymes of “Cuss the Wind” by ”
data-original-title=”” title=””>Freddie North, etc. Songs are unusual in that, despite technically requiring iteration in a performance or recording or mapping in a chart to actively, properly exist, their formal coordinates can still seem solidly stable without any of that going down. It’s a big, slippery topic and it’s hard to get language to stick to it.
AAJ: Do intercultural collaborations push you to reinvent your role as a musician?
ZP: I don’t feel much like a musician hardly any of the time. I think of Georg Groddeck, the wild proto-psychoanalyst. When someone came to him for analysis, he gave them massage, and when someone came for massage, he gave them analysis. I’m similarly tricky with myself when it comes to music. One thing is certain: working with Ma gives me psychedelic insight into the uncanny otherness of the culture that’s ostensibly my own, into English’s plain weirdnesses, into the mishmashed contingency that is contemporary life. How do we even know each other when we live halfway across the world?
AAJ: How much potential for something “new” is there still in jazz? What could this “new” look like? Is new all that important?
ZP: Everything is probably always new, whether we like it or not. If it doesn’t seem new, it’s not its fault.
AAJ: Tell me about one or two of your early pieces that you’re still proud of (or satisfied with)and why you’re content with them.
ZP: I’m very pleased that “Love Weapon” and “Haut Contre Bas,” which emerged when I was 21, are still alive and kicking. I look back on my music with Sarah Smith as Blanche Blanche Blanche as an awe-inspiring not-me object. Proof that a life is huge.
AAJ: Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?
ZP: I stay up late enough every night to hear birds from my apartment. Sometimes I’m sure they’re robots, but I could never understand why they would be. I love the wind.
AAJ: Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasized that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?
ZP: I would love to live in a world where it’s considered more normal to sing your lines than to speak them.
AAJ: Once a piece is done and released, do you find it important that listeners understand it in a specific way? How do you deal with misunderstandings?
ZP: People, myself included, are mostly going to use music to try to understand themselves, and will often fight tooth and nail to defend whatever construction serves that interest. If I could ask anything of listeners, it would be to investigate who played on the recording, how it was made, how to play it themselves, and maybe not to identify us-the-makers with our musical object, since that’s not really even our own experience. But I think the only people whose experience of the music I truly take to heart are the people who play it with me.
AAJ: Does AI have a place in the music of the future?
ZP: It’s equally assured that fast food has a place in the future of disease.
AAJ: Does Fievel Is Glauque have a mission statement even implicit or is it more of a come what may collaboration?
ZP: Decidedly no, but I still often think of the motto of the imprint we started to release the first Fievel album, “la Loi: aucun tabou, mais faites attention!”
AAJ: Could you conceive of being in an alternate dimension, one without music?
ZP: I sure can. I’m there most of the time.
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