Like the Shore Is to the Ocean

• Track Listing

The third album by The Franco Proeitti Morph-tet pushes their unique Montreal electronic vision deeper into funk and hip hop with excursions into jazz, dub, big band, and related; using an almost Zappa-esque attention to complex composition and execution as all these elements are fused together along with turntablism to create new adventures in the electronic diaspora. Their previous two albums were both on the Grammy longlist for Best Contemporary Jazz. Like all Montreal musical collectives, the FPM ranks have been known to swell up to as many as 10 people; creating a powerful live show that is unprecedented in scope and complexity. Watch for viral videos, live touring, press and word of mouth to spread the word. Franco Proietti on the new album: There are a whole bunch of guests on the album - part of the concept was to really use the studio to it's full advantage and saturate the songs with all of the layers that I heard in my head, imagining them without the limits of logistically how many people I can have in the band full time. Let's start with the big band: We brought in 5 trumpets, 3 trombones and added 1 sax player to the 4 that have at one time or other been full time Morph-tet as well as getting Chris Tauchner on piano & J.C. Guénard on upright bass. These folks were brought in to flesh out the 2 big band charts that Alex Gutjahr had arranged for me. The ballad, 'Away From The Sound And Fury', was always meant to be a big band tune - I wrote the chord changes and melody, and Alex arranged it into what's on the CD. Inspired by the 'Suite For Ma Dukes' project, I really wanted to do a hip hop tune with a big band backing the vocalists instead of all that synthesized and auto tuned stuff that's popular today. This brings me to my next guest: DShade. He's the second vocalist on 'Montreal'. It's been a dream of mine to work with him since I jammed with him on stage years ago at a Pawa Up First show, maybe even earlier than that... I remember buying a Shades Of Culture CD when I was in grade 9 and thinking to myself 'I wanna play with these guys'. It took some doing, as he's really busy, but we got him in the studio with Jon Emile and I'm super happy to have a pioneer, the father maybe, of anglo hip hop in Montreal on this track. On every CD, there's a track I share with my dad, and this is no different. If it wasn't for papa P, I might not be playing. I certainly would not have been exposed to all of the great music that has influenced me. Watching him jam on harmonica at back yard BBQs was very inspirational to me, so it's always a pleasure to get him on disk or on stage with me. On 'Silence Left Unspoken'... haunting & lamenting rather than the fiery blues he usually plays... I think he stepped up to the challenge and surpassed his own expectations. Vanessa Rodrigues is a kick ass, funky B3 player. She brings the funk to the opening track - the rest of us just try to keep up. Whew! Finally, the choir I put together for 'Spacewhale'. Ever since I conceived of the song, I wanted to have many vocals in it; getting Brie Neilson, Genevieve Schreier (The Unsettlers), Heather Eaton & Maya Nguyen to beef up the vocal tracks that Nando, J.F. and I had already laid down brought it to the immenseness that I heard in my head. This album is really a comment on human duality, or even, more than duality, complexity, let's say. Every person has more than one side to them, and every side they have is valid, given certain circumstances. The title comes from the 2 songs that used to be one 'Like the shore is to the ocean'. The shore is passive to the ocean - the ocean shapes the shore with it's energy, passion, fury, etc. In our society, there's this thought that being passive is a bad thing - that you always have to take control of the situation. It became apparent to me in many ways that sometimes, if you just relax about certain things, stuff happens in a better way than if you would have forced it. So in most songs, there is duality. 'Shout Out' is a happy sounding party song, but the lyrics get kind of serious. 'Montreal' is the coming together of 2 types of music that some people still consider as very different (though myself and many others would disagree) Jazz & Hip Hop. And all of these songs fit together on one CD the same way many different moods, beliefs and emotions can fit into one person. So much music is 2 dimensional - it deals with only one thing or one aspect of one thing... I want to make a complex and more inclusive statement with this disk. Some may call it 'inconsistent' or wonder why I can't just make a whole bunch of songs like whatever is their favourite track... I'm interested in way too many types of music, feelings and stories to repeat myself.