Tristan (RSD 24)

Birdmask (Manuel Gagneux, renowned for his work with influential metal band Zeal & Ardor) The five songs of Tristan are steeped in sadness and beauty,  “We’ll never get better / It’s a long and gruesome odyssey,” sings Manuel on ‘Recovery’ over muted electronics. The soulful and stark ‘Dearly Beloved’ sounds like a message from the depths of depression – “Spend a week in the bathtub / You know that you messed up.” Whilst latest single ‘Leave the Rain Outside’ offers a swinging, whirling gothic melody as a vessel for Gagneux’s voice to swoop and soar, before the crescendo of sound on ‘Breathe In, Breathe Out’. “In metal, sadness always has to be this huge thing.” Says Manuel, “It’s never just a certain aspect of it – it’s the world is ending and your mom just stabbed you. It’s never heartache or ennui or anything like that. It’s misery rather than melancholy.”  And there lies the most important distinction between his two projects; Manuel has always felt a slight disconnect with Zeal & Ardor, as it finds him acting as a different person to explore societal topics. Birdmask on the other hand offers a true expression of himself, in what he describes as his “gleeful stupidity and childish exploration.” It sees Manuel confront more subtle personal themes, such as melancholy, and how his ego sits with feelings of imposter syndrome, “I write songs and I don’t really know what I’m dealing with and then years later I’m like, Oh, wait, I wrote that because of this and that’”. Recent years, Manuel says, have led to him having to work at “remembering what is me, and what is just the echo of other people’s projections. I have to be alone sometimes just to work out: am I doing this because people expect it of me, or is it something I genuinely feel? I think those concerns and emotions worked their way into this EP.” Hence the themes he identified: loss, cowardice, conquest and recovery.

Birdmask does in fact predate Zeal & Ardor, as Gagneux began making music under that name in 2011. He could never quite get it together with his musician friends to put a band together, “so I figured I could just learn producing on my own, and then, as a last resort, I figured I could make music on my own.” For several years he self-released on Bandcamp, labouring away in complete obscurity, releasing scores of singles and two albums, then Zeal and Ardor happened, and over a short period of time, Gagneux suddenly and unexpectedly found himself the toast of the metal world.

All throughout that time however, Manuel craved returning to the music he had been making before – “the yin to Zeal & Ardor’s yang”, as he puts it, and never ceased writing tracks with the sole intention of having them become Birdmask releases. In fact, whilst the duo of EPs (the Isolde EP is due early next year) were recorded over an 18 month period, the tracks were all written over an estimated 5 year span. And Manuel is at pains to stress this is not a side project; this is its own thing, his original vision. “I think I’d like to try to reach different people. And there’s a conscious effort of separating the two, just because it’s different music, at least to me. The reason I wanted to distinguish it is because it would be easy to gain an online following of people who just associate me with Zeal & Ardor and by proxy just happened to like this.”