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An Interview with Jean-Marc Pauly and Pierre Pauly of Parade Ground
Posted: Sunday, April 06, 2008
By: Matthew Johnson
Assistant Editor

EBM fans know Jean-Marc and Pierre Pauly through their work on Front 242's seminal album, 06:21:03:11 Up Evil, but as Parade Ground, the brothers take a radically different approach than dance floor aggression. Inspired more by avant-garde artists and writers like Man Ray, Joseph Beuys, and William S. Burroughs than by any of their peers in the industrial music scene, the Pauly brothers' aim is to nauseate and attack, not to move bodies in the clubs. Apart from occasional guest appearances, fans had heard little from Parade Ground in the past 20 years, and few were even familiar with the group outside of their appearance on the legendary This Is Electronic Body Music compilation in the late 1980s.

This isn't to say that the brothers hadn't been exploring their own art and psyches, however; rather than participating in the world of record labels and tours, they'd been taking a more radical approach to life experience by cloistering themselves in such isolated environments as monasteries and mental institutions, emerging only in 2004 with a surprise appearance at the Belgian Independent Music Festival. Late last year, the pair released Rosary, their second full-length album, on nascent label Sleep Walking Records. Sonically brutal and emotionally raw, Rosary draws on the brothers' self-inflicted explorations of madness and pain, revealing a commitment to intensity in all things that is unmatched by all but the most extreme performance artists. In an interview with ReGen that's even more enigmatic than their musical work, Jean-Marc and Pierre attempt to describe their philosophy of art as vomit while posing more questions than they actually answer.

The two of you have been doing music for over two decades. Can you tell us a little about how you first got involved in recording?

Jean-Marc: Through this, we declare that we do not belong to art anymore. Have we created anything already? Were we born? Are we sure of being really dead after our suicide? The past is what remains in a mirror. It is what we leave.

Pierre: It isn't that much a matter of knowing, rather than being born. It was always the question of the receptibility of our music; it is absolute receptibility, by its very existence. It has always been very tedious, since the beginning. We always wanted to put ourselves in danger, bumping into the objects, piercing the madness. We have always created together.

An interview is always an autopsy. We are two in a glass jar of formalin. We are being dissected. It's a rape, a vivisection.

Your new album, Rosary, is the first Parade Ground release in nearly two decades. What were the two of you working on between albums? Were you still involved in music?

Jean-Marc: We have never stopped creating. We wanted to make a last sign with our skin, our anguish, our guts. Music must be treated as life: an open sore.

Pierre: It's got to come out: all the rage, the tension, the vomit. We always knew that we would never achieve that. It will always be a frame, an unfinished body, as is life. This record represents 20 years with the intensity, the blood, the cloistering, the psychiatry, the blows, the howlings, the punched jaw, the cuttings, the prayer, the screaming head, the struggle into cruelty, the blows, the crawling. I think that ugliness makes everything bearable, the beauty of repulsion. We have gone to the core of mental experimentation. The madness abolishes the truth.

Many EBM fans are familiar with your work on Front 242's 06:21:03:11 Up Evil album. What was your involvement in that album, and how did it come about?

Jean-Marc: Daniel and Patrick have always been close to us. With the Up Evil album, they had a problem with both of their singers, who couldn't find the vocal melodies on the music. Patrick and Daniel had always liked our music, and particularly the singing of the songs: very melodic, holding the notes.

Pierre: I think Jean-Marc is the last crooner.

Jean-Marc: So they asked us to work on it, to find melodies and lyrics. It was six months' hard work. It's always difficult to rummage into someone's belly.

Pierre: I think we brought a certain spirituality to it, a vertigo, like a wound. An open sore. A number is never finished, achieved. One must always be off balance. Off balance, with an absolute revolt, an interior savagery.

While you've had close ties to Front 242 for many years, your music has evolved along divergent paths. Although you appeared on the legendary This Is Electronic Body Music compilation, your new material is hardly oriented toward the dance floor. Are you still interested in dance music? Were you ever?

Pierre: One doesn't ask a corpse what it is doing in its coffin! One doesn't put a label on something vomited. We'll never be interested in music. I really couldn't quote an influence. There still is a duality in our music, but for us only emotion, yelling and rage do matter, to put oneself in danger, whatever the style, until the asphyxiation of thought. We always do it as if it were for the last time, as if our life depended on it, to the utmost extremity. It may be that this is our last interview!

Jean-Marc: We want to suppress all of these labels, these name. 'Industrial,' 'rock,' 'dance,' 'art,' 'music,' and 'literature' mean nothing.

Pierre: The thing that interested me was this kind of sonorous magma, this excess, this violence, this nauseous eagerness. The voice was already instilled. A very aggressive music, and the singing that has always been an adjoined denominator.

The interval tracks, 'Rosary I' through 'Rosary XV,' placed between songs on the new album often cut off quite sharply, rather then being smoothly mixed. Was there a conscious intent to make the transitions between songs so jarring? What was the reason for that?

Pierre: There has always been a venomous necessity in every artistic act. For us, one must always instill the venom, the sourness in all you do.

Jean-Marc: That's what really mattered for us. The inserts are like sketches, two or three drafts, like red chalk. A vital despair, stippled bitings. One considers the inserts totally as numbers. That's what we wanted to do, like a short story in literature. The 'rosary' which titles this record, from which each song is like a bead told, finally burns the hands, and provokes something.

Pierre: The nausea insinuates itself.

Rosary was created using a lot of processed shouts and howls, as well as recordings of hammers on tree stumps, etc. What are some of your favorite sound sources?

Pierre: We have thought of Rosary as a musical collage, sound installations. Brutality, rage, something vomited, a musical abstraction. The only sounds that interest us are howling and shouting. Those are the only extreme and important sounds. All the numbers on Rosary are based on howling and shouting. We composed the album in an instinctive, primitive, tribal, physical way. We do scan and psalmodiate hitting on a stump with a hammer or a tomahawk to try to find out a rhythm, a link between the yelling. Our music is an irrepressible vomiting, a terrible suffering, a suffering act. Rosary is a constant clash, like some installations, performances such as Man Ray's Rayogrammes, or Joseph Beuys' Fluxus, or the cutting out of thought of writers such as William Burroughs, James Joyce's stream of consciousness, Tzara, the 'waiting' of Samuel Beckett, Robert Pinget...

Jean-Marc: What's interesting in a drawing is the fact that it is limited by a frame. Otherwise, the image is non-limited. The painting may broaden to the infinite. It may move. It's a drowning in movement. There are no rigid frames. But everything remains in movement. Space changes form.

Pierre: That's the difference with music which is rigid on a record. For us, it's a corpse. The numbers are like the dead to us once they've been recorded. It's like drawings, all this old rubbish that must be burned, all this hodge-podge to be set on fire immediately. All the records, the books, the museums are mortuaries. Everything's dead. It smells of urine and formaldehyde, with the corpses hung on the walls, the records in their little boxes, their coffins. All this does not interest us at all.

You've stated before that many of your influences come from visual artists, like the DaDa movement and early French film. How have these artists inspired you, and how do you translate that appreciation for visual art into sound?

Jean-Marc: That's it, a translation that we always intended to do. We saw that as a transposition, as a performance. When one speaks about 'cursed poets,' that means cursed by whom?

Pierre: It's a literary transposition, but plastic too. Our first album, Cut Up, was dedicated to William Burroughs. The surrealistic and also the DaDaist movement has always been very important for us, but also certain films from before the second World War: Carné, René Clair, which are more than a graphic and visual work. We have met legends like Marcel Mariën or Philippe Soupault, whom I have met in Paris, with all these affiliations. Tzara, Roger Gilbert-Leconte, Man Ray, Breton, Crevel... Duchamp, he is the greatest; he passed from Impressionism to the piss-house. That's formidable. That's what we have tried to transpose in music: the truth of the unreal, the tension, the blows, the wrenching, the anxiety, the terror.

Jean-Marc: Hatred is love in anger. It's not the anger that matters, it's the cry. It's somewhat like the art of Joseph Beuys, which uses light to create a tension, the movement, the space. It shapes something as a feeling. It's very powerful. Or Marcel Broodthaers, who takes aluminum that he puts around a fork. One feels something that's stronger than seeing images of hunger. It's a kind of interdiction with an extraordinary power.

Pierre: That's it, we put a tension, an emotion, a nausea into music.

You've often used the word 'vomiting' to describe both your studio process and your live performances. Can you explain a bit more what you mean by that particular choice of words?

Pierre: Explaining is justifying oneself. One doesn't have to explain one's suffering, the nausea, the emotion, the rage, that terrible rottenness. That's it, vomiting is giving everything, as is the yelling of our music, an uncontrollable vomiting. It's uncontrollable. One must put one's skin on the table. One must pay. We see all that as an aggression, we really want to assault the audience, to make them rotten, to vomit on them. We want to assault the people, to dirty them, terrify them, to hurt them, try to destroy them so that they remember it their whole lives through. They must feel oppressed by it. They must be scared. They must have nightmares about it, so that they remember it all their lives. If they feel oppressed by it, if they're scared, if they leave before the end of the concert, that would be great for us.

Jean-Marc: Let them stay anyway! Pierre has a very intellectual approach towards that. I think one must particularly be true, always. Music is unfashionable. Each person can give it a different shape. We could be artists of the air; sketch a sculpture in the air with a movement—does it exist or not? To me, it exists. It's sketched in the air, nobody knows it, but for me, I've just created a work of art.

Pierre: It's up to the public to undertake this approach.

You've alluded to having spent time in a religious order and recording in a church. Are these statements meant to be taken literally or figuratively?

Jean-Marc: We have lived together with a religious order, as oblate and postulant, monk in a monastery. Those were intense years, a gift as a defenestration of the soul, seeking in the heart of God.

Pierre: So were our psychiatric experiments, being locked up, like an unbearable torsion, like eating up one's brain. An asphyxiation, an irradiation.

Jean-Marc: Moreover, I relate these experiments in Rosary, these devoured acts, the fulgurating force of these places.

Pierre: A blade that penetrates the brain, like this time where an old lady, an inmate, gave me her breast the whole night through.

What role does religion play in your music? In particular, what is the correspondence between your album Rosary and the devotional prayer of the same name?

Pierre: I think physical energy is very present in our music. It's a quite physical music, but inside there is a a spiritual dimension that we want also.

Jean-Marc: As a perpetual prayer, an imploring, we are more and more aware that the 'Ave Maria' of the rosary, as it is scanned and howled and repeated ad libitum, is what is closest to our music: 'Ave Maria, gracia plena / Dominus te cum benedictatus in mulieribus / Et benedictus fructus ventris tui Jesus / Ave Maria, mater Dei, ora pro nobis pecatoribus / nunc et in hora mortis mostrae. Amen.'

Having returned to industrial music after so many years' absence, have you found that the scene has changed a lot? How has the newest generation of fans received you so far?

Pierre: We have always been at the margin. People like us have no friends. The great difference is that now, anybody's got the material to make music or sounds. Anybody plays an instrument, anybody is an artist. There lacks this spontaneity, taking risks, this hazardous side. Creating is de-learning. Get rid of the others' work. As we began, we didn't want to play old numbers. We're no human jukeboxes. I've always detested the approach of people who go and see a concert or a play and wait for the most well-know number or sentence. One hears a big sigh in the audience. We don't want applause. Suffering or nausea is not a thing that should be applauded. I think that both on stage or listing to Rosary, people feel assaulted, provoked, the impression of receiving something vomited on you with all this rage, this tension, this trance, this primitive anger, all that fury, the choreography of chaos. We force them to think. We put them in danger. One mustn't achieve a piece of art but be the piece of art itself, to submerge oneself, to be, totally, to yield precedence to oneself, before one's thought. We have been surprised that people and media have a real interest in what we do now. It has intrigued them, called them on. They're shocked, of course. They recognize the rage, the singularity, the intensity, the provocation. You must never try to understand or be understood. Being understood is prostituting oneself.

Will you be touring to promote Rosary? Do you have any other plans you can tell us about?

Jean-Marc: We could create another way. We could make it through another media. It could be in literature, or through painting, or theater.

Pierre: We did some gigs. We'd love to play in the USA now. We still have so much to empty, to bite, to vomit. The French writer Celine said that New York was a 'standing town.' As to the towns in the USA, I would love to find a way to vomit on them.