Photo by Svarta Photography

Listening to Igorrr is the unfiltered imagination of Gautier Serre, writ large. The French multi-instrumentalist takes an approach that bulldozes through concepts of genre, using a foundation of crunching polyrhythmic tech metal and glitching breakcore and only piling atop the sonic mayhem from there. 

His fifth album Amen features amongst other things Tibetan ceremonial horns known as dungchen, a gong fashioned out of a factory saw blade, and the kind of rubbish plastic recorder you'd play in your elementary school music class, but it's also imbued with a dark religious atmosphere beyond previous Igorrr works. Trips to a French monastery recording with a choir help forge a ominous mood and bombastic grandiosity that elevate the aural war of instrumentation.

In the seas of metal music that exists out there, it'd be easy to view Igorrr as a deliberate attempt to create overtly zany music, but talking to Gautier Serre it's clear how genuine an expression of his brain works Igorrr's music is, and so we get the lowdown on how such intense and stylistically diverse music comes together and makes sense.

You've been doing Igorrr for more than fifteen years now but it really feels like in the 2020s it's hit a new level of prominence and much larger scale. What's that been like for you in terms of both eyes on you but also having more resources to keep upping what Igorrr is doing?

Serre - Yes, especially since Spirituality and Distortion and Savage Sinusoid the scale of the project changed. From the very beginning of the project, Igorrr has been a playground for when I am having fun experimenting with sound and new ideas, and it was never supposed to be that big. It was supposed to be a friendly project just for fun and to find for myself the personal perfection of the music that I couldn’t find when I was younger. I was always searching for bands that fit perfectly what I wanted in music and when I didn’t find the band that marked all of the characteristics of what I wanted to listen to, I created this.

I kept doing that for many years and that was all okay, but since we signed with Savage Sinusoid we signed to Metal Blade and since Spirituality and Distortion where we started to tour on a bigger scale internationally, it has really changed the band. The pure initial idea of the project didn’t move at all, but now with the scale it is much more comfortable for me to work. I have created my own studio where I have all the gear that I need to be free and experiment. The fact that the band got so big gave me the possibility to get even weirder with my music, to go further, and to get even closer to my original aim to have my personal perfection of the music.

From the very start this album has a very ominous and sermonistic quality to it, and feels like quite a sinister and more atmospheric record for you. What led you into making a darker album in this way?

Serre - I don’t know in all honesty. I guess I was living some darker years that inspired me to produce that colour of music. Darker times bring darker music so I think it’s as simple as that. I have really been inspired by that colour of song and to go deeper. I did dark tracks in the past with Igorrr but not as dark as they are on Amen, like Pure Disproportionate Black and White Nihilism, Infestis, and Daemoni. Those are tracks with no joke.

On this album you were able to record with real church choirs for the first time. What do you feel that allowed you to achieve in the music?

Serre - It has always been the purpose with Igorrr to be as true as possible and today with the scale of Igorrr I could organise the recording of the choir. When the songs were being composed, I was working some of the choir parts with the MIDI files and some with my friends singing to work out the real feel and the right words, and once everything was done we sent it to the choir to rehearse it. The day when we went to this monastery, they had no idea what kind of music they would even be going to sing on, they just had their small parts sent to them.

On Blastbeat Falafel there is a choir for about one and a half seconds, just for one blast, and so they were there recording just this tiny part wondering why the fuck I even needed that because they didn’t have the full vision of the track. I was pretty touched by what happened though because it was the first time for me writing something in my studio and then seeing it in front of me with twenty people singing in a monastery with the reverb going far into the roof. There were maybe fifteen microphones in the room going all the way back from the singers so we could change the reverb, and it gives that real sound on the album so it’s not so artificial. With this album I wanted to push as far into this real organic music.

Is there anything you could tell us about that thematically in the album that aligns with those tones and sounds?

Serre - When I was telling you about the lyrics, they’re actually not real lyrics, because I don’t like the idea of having the brain working during the music. I don’t want to spread any political or religious message during the music, I want Igorrr to be music that speaks straight to the heart, so for me the lyrics are just a way to make the vocals sound like an instrument. I don’t want any meaning, I don’t want there to be any intellect at work, I want the heart to work. The lyrics are an excuse to find new sonority with the voice but I don’t want them to mean anything.

Your albums are known for being aggressively experimental with style, and on this album, tracks like Blastbeat Falafel or Mustard Mucous which features this out of tune whistle feel deliberately disconcerting in that way. How is it that you gauge what feels emotionally right for a song when combining elements like these in such violent ways?

Serre - I think it’s funny because for me in my sensibilities, I can understand that people hear my tracks as being so aggressive like that, but for me it is the logical way of making music. How I end up knowing which part goes with which really comes from instinct. To use the example of Mustard Mucous, the last riff is extremely heavy and very doomy, and the beginning of the track is pretty technical and fast. It’s a modernly-produced track with heavy elements and distorted guitar, and so I thought what would be the most opposite thing to put with that, it’d be a shitty school recorder that I have here. It’s the polar opposite colour. It’s cheap, it’s not well-played because I am not a flute player, and it’s exactly the opposite of the technical aggressive track that we are playing.

It’s one of the most thrash metal tracks we’ve ever done with Igorrr, and I was sharing some messages with Scott Ian from Anthrax also, and at some point I thought “well we are in touch with the greatest thrash metal rhythm guitar player in the world, why not ask him?” He said yes immediately and that makes the track even stronger, because he is a legend and as well as being an extremely nice and smart human being he plays extremely well. The contrast is even stronger then with this shitty instrument and his playing.

As well as Scott Ian it features Trey Spruance of Mr. Bungle, a pioneer of avant-garde heavy music. What do appearances like these add to a track for you?

Serre - I was in Arizona and Trey came to our show. I had on my phone the demos for this album with my shitting quick playing on it and I showed him Blastbeat Falafel, and thought it’d be awesome with his playing from Mr. Bungle and Secret Chiefs 3. I see tracks with colour and Blastbeat Falafel for me has an orange colour, and Trey’s playing for me gets that orange-brown colour.

You've described in the past your synesthesia and associating music with colours. Could you elaborate on how that informs your process?

Serre - Yes, I am synthesthetic, which means when I hear sounds my brain connects it with a colour. Most people can see colours, most can hear sounds, and it’s two different parts of the brain, but for me somehow most of the time it’s connected. There are some sounds that don’t light up anything and some instruments or instrumental players who bring a really beautiful colour. I can see an Igorrr track as a painting, with a guitar playing bringing this colour, the singer bringing their colour.

You've said how Igorrr was your way of creating the music that you weren't hearing in the synthesis of metal with experimental electronic music, but when an Igorrr touring bill comes around, you can expect a diverse bill of eclectic and experimental bands. Do you feel like there are more artists out there who are like-minded in their thinking outside of the usual metal box than when Igorrr was starting out?

Serre - I think it’s going in the right direction. There are lots of bands that sound the same because some band in the past found that playing on this amplifier or playing these riffs in this order worked, but everybody does the same. It is getting more and more accepted to chase these new sounds though. I’ve heard some bands starting today doing what Igorrr did ten years ago cutting screams up in the studio and making jumps on the volume with them, and this is starting to be accepted. Because Igorrr is not a project that is supposed to be just for work I was free to experiment like that, and today it’s becoming normal. These elements I was just doing for fun years ago are starting to be part of the style for music that is made to make money.

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Amen from IGORRR is now available via Metal Blade Records.