Interview with Chamberlain: Modern Day Composer

1. Hey Chamberlain! Can you tell us a little bit about you? What are the different sides of your personality and how do they show up in your projects?

I am originally a pianist who started with classical music, and I turned towards rock and pop groups. Then I learned jazz, and worked a lot with harmony, composing and touring around Europe with my group. I am an arranger and accompanist, I produce and manage the artistic direction of singers and rappers. I’ve been composing music since the age of 10, with the idea of building, like what the director Gondry does. I’ve also acted in the theater, composed music for the stage, and for advertisements. What I am really interested in is humanity and its ability to produce emotion, and in the same breath not to characterize those emotions. I try to reconstruct their complexities. I think that my compositions are at the same time sad, happy, sweet, salty, modern, nostalgic, but I try to present them as wrapped in silk. 

I work a lot with different cultures, to blur the borders between crude styles and feelings. I try to make the music coincide between wise, composed, and pop. 

2. What was your first contact with music? How did you come to start making music?

My first contact with music was from movies, reggae, and the African-American music that my father listened to at home singing the melodies. Then I met my first teacher, an old lady from the countryside. She was a very educated woman, married to a farmer, who killed time on her piano in her cozy living room. She made me give my first concert at 8 years old, we shared the stage with friends who brough their old monophonic synths, and we shared the music and instruments. At the same time, I made music in my room with the old technique of “ping-pong” (recording onto a Grundig tape recorder, with a low-cost synth, folk guitar, and the upright piano).  

That might also be Chamberlain, the search of my original childhood processes (and I really love the idea of chamber music). 

3. “Step over the Steppe” seems to be your leitmotif: Is there a link between the semi-arid Russian plateaus and where the inspiration for your melodious products that takes us somewhere between joy and melancholy are born?

From the beginning it was an idea of a vast region, Eurasia, at the intersection of different cultures, a natural place, but lived by a great human history. But thinking about it now, there is an idea of the solitude in the face of the immensity of the world. The echo can find its proper silence, and the idea to “step” over the steppe in one motion, or to jump on a horse and go across it galloping, with the combative spirit necessary to reach the absolute and inner peace. 

During the crossing, there is that multitude of feelings that we feel, the colors placed end to end that create a dramatic meaning, life in all its detours. (“We know only too well, the echo of our own silence”).

4. Your track T-ISA was praised by the Why’d community, and was finally selected Track of the Weekend. Tell us what you felt!

Full of pride! That gives me wings, and more confidence in myself to advance, and produce even more must, and the confirmation of a constant today accepted by everyone: the web can mix big fish and the smaller ones. This promotes creation! (which expands the size of the forest too, so you can lose, but sometimes it’s exciting to lose!) 

5. From the point of view of an artist, how do you use Whyd today and how would you like to see the service evolve? 

Whyd lets one get lost in the forest of musical creations, but with a map! It’s exciting to lose yourself, but to always know where you are!

The idea to create a synthesis of all the other streaming media in one place is excellent. Plus when we find a playlist from someone else, we discover new connections with even more music, we listen to more types of music, but with intelligence, we enlarge our capacity to feel new music! I appreciate the simplicity of use, I am not a specialist in web development, maybe with deeper integration to other social media, Whyd could surpass Deezer or Spotify.

Everyone must know Whyd. Whyd proposes an more ever-expanding offering — in the end infinite — than the other platforms that are market only. That’s the creative spirit! 

Subscribe to Chamberlain on Whyd, Like his Facebook Page, Follow him on Twitter and keep a look our for some new music due out at the end of this week!! 

25th March 2013