What inspired you to first start making music? And how did you come to be in your current incarnation? Or if you prefer, a brief bio about you.
Celine began to play piano when she was a child , she took the old violin of her grandfather at 20, and I was 17 when I recovered an old broken electric guitar of my father, who used to play it (and an organ too) and sing , sometime late at night when he was drunk. I started very early to write songs I just sang , before I was able to play music :-).
We met during an improvisation class at the local music conservatory when we were around 30.
Celine followed classical violon course and I tried to follow some jazz guitar and classical writing courses 😉 .
We started a first folk rock combo with drummer and bassist, and finally left this school because we had too many concerts to stand more studies ;-).
Then we began to play in duo in 2008 and starting from an acoustic way, we moved year after year to an electrical one with beat box.
Provide us with some info about your latest release…
« Life Race » was recorded and filmed live by Benjamin Chagneux during a cold day in a desert and abandonned factory.
It’s about the remembering of days of childhood, a summer I past with my eldest cousin when I was 3 among tangerine trees , beneath Mediterranean sea. She past away last summer … it’s a song about the feel of someone getting back to childhood place and finding some kind of empty place.
Which ones would you consider your main influences both music-wise & non-music-wise?
Our influences are very eclectical. Books are maybe as important as music in our lives.
It’s hard to name someone in fact, without the feel to forget someone ;-)… song writing ,folk, punk, new wave, goth, the classics of your 20′ like everybody 🙂
« Less is more » is the kind of things we love… intimities as a form of universality… benefices of introspection …
In what way does your sound differ from the rest genre-related artists/bands and why should we listen to your music? In other words, how would you describe your sound?
At first ZATO ; that’s two voices, female, male, very different, maybe complementary.
Then it’s an acoustic, minimalist and simple way to play with some very electric sound.
A playground to mix very contrasted things… rude beatbox and violin, bass and guitar in one strange 5 strings instrument, deep open-tuning and distorsion.
It’s cold and heat at the same time.
Lastly we do music to create space to let emerge things, to loose control.
It’s a question of « living time » for us, and another special mark about Zato is that we always record our songs in live conditions
Please name your 3 desert islands albums, movies & books…
(answer for today, tomorrow will surely all be different ;-))
Albums : Faith (The Cure) , White Chalk (PJ Harvey), Suites de Bach
Films : Orphee (Cocteau) ; L’important c’est d’aimer (Zulawski) ; Limelight (Chaplin)
Books : Anna K. (Tolstoi) ; Last Exit To Brooklyn (Selby) ;
Hamlet (Shakespeare)
Do you prefer studio or performing live and why?
We always record in live conditions…, we essentially think about music in terms of exchange, between us , and between audience. We don’t have neither time, nor money to spend time to product a lot the songs we do. We take care about the base, the sound , the way to take a song, the intentions, what can happen in the moment. And we do this work before recording. we don’t spend time in studio, we are very fast :-). we generaly prefer « remove » than « add » .
Is there any funny-unique story you would like to share with us, always in relation to your music ‘career’?
One of our first concerts … we called a good friend from Paris to come to help us to sell the tickets for the evening ( because it was a kind of rented concert hall) , it was 2 hundred miles away from home, and it was very snowy. We had to clean the place and come back in the night, and ….We sold two tickets 🙂 …. But we went on and now things are a little better ;-).
Which track of your own would you point out as the most unique and why?
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Would you like to share with our readers your future plans?
We will release some split with Ossayol, another band of our label Ostorecords, two songs, for september, with two new videos filmed this summer . ’till september we’ll finish to record our next album « Broken Faces » (as a musical answer to the « Broken Faces » of our friend and painter Vitterbo) provided for winter 2020-2021. And we hope we could play soon as possible live, but except private evenings, it seems that it won’t be before nov. or dec.Alas 🙁
Free question!!! (Ask yourself a question) you wish to answer and haven’t been given the opportunity…
What could we wish to you for the next years ?
Play ,play and play … have nice projects with the « dreamteam » of friends we have around us , and travel thanks to music.
Curated by: Christos Doukakis
Recommended listening:
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Connect with ZATO:
Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgUL-yeL_3OvDhjfmjRslGA
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/ZATODUO/
spotify : https://open.spotify.com/album/0uYQiBiOXKGMSimAXK1CKe
applemusic : https://music.apple.com/us/album/life-race-single/1513493450?uo=4&app=music&at=1001lry3&ct=dashboard
google play : https://play.google.com/store/music/album/Zato_Life_Race?id=Bckecefdd7mld5jqqk3z73zafuq
amazon : https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B088NWFNKS/?tag=distrokid06-20