Dan “Chewy” Mongrain: “I am now a band member who has been a fan of Voivod since the beginning”

Voivod is one of the pioneering bands of its genre and one of the longest-lived on the scene since its formation four decades ago in Saguenay, Quebec (Canada). They have fifteen studio albums on the market, each and every one of them with Voivod‘s personal label, reinventing themselves with each release throughout this time since they debuted in 1984 with the timeless War And Pain. Since then they have been revolutionizing the scene with each of their subsequent releases, among which the seminal Nothingface or the groundbreaking Killing Technology stand out, passing through lesser-known albums such as The Outer Limits but just as blunt as their first works.

Over the years they have experienced several lineup changes in these four decades, although the most significant change would be the loss of their guitarist Denis ‘Piggy’ D’Amour who in 2005 succumbed to the devastating colorectal cancer that was diagnosed months before his death. Daniel ‘Chewy’ Mongrain, a student of Piggy, would be chosen to take his place as guitarist in Voivod, one of the most visceral decisions the band has had to make to date.

The latest addition to Voivod would be Dominic Rocky Laroche, who replaces Jean-Yves ‘Blacky’ Thériault on bass and with whom they have recorded the two most recent studio albums, The Wake and Synchro Anarchy, as well as the live album Lost Machine and the The End of Dormancy EP. With their most recent studio work under our belt, Synchro Anarchy, we took advantage of the moment to chat with Chewy about the last few months in Voivod and the future of the band, as well as the recording of their latest studio album.

Hello Chewy, how is everything? I hope you are all well there. How have these last few months been? How have you experienced these last two years of the pandemic as a musician?

It has been very difficult, I think I speak for all musicians. Many people I know who make a living from music and playing live have suffered from it. Here the concerts seem to be moving again little by little but with many restrictions. Unfortunately, touring normally has been impossible until now so we’ve focused on playing streaming shows and writing our new album. Right now we are planning some concerts for the summer if all goes well. At the moment we have announced a concert in Philadelphia and at some festivals, it is something we can probably do.

For my part, I have been quite busy giving guitar lessons over the internet to students from all over the world, something that I am passionate about and that I can share with people from many countries. This way I can also meet very interesting people, although it is something that unfortunately I have had to reduce a lot because I am also a full-time teacher at a school throughout the winter since we do not have any tours at the moment. I feel very happy to be able to make a living from music even though I’m not touring with Voivod for now, although that is something I really want to do. I really miss meeting our fans, playing for them, walking the streets of the places we visit, listening to languages I don’t know and all that. We miss him a lot.

Let’s talk about Synchro Anarchy, your latest album. This is your third studio effort with Voivod, correct?

That’s right, it’s my third album as a guitarist although we also published the Post Society EP in 2016, so we could say it’s my fourth studio work with Voivod.

Great. What can you tell us about the album in general terms before we dive into it?

We started writing new songs at the beginning of 2020. We were touring for three years presenting The Wake and although we had more touring plans for 2020, everything was canceled due to the pandemic and we lost the opportunity to rehearse together. For a while we lost communication with each other and we felt somewhat lost without having any forecast of when we would be able to continue with our work normally, so I started recording some things at home even during that time. After that we got back together and prepared some streaming concerts to broadcast in the summer and that was when we realized that we had to continue preparing new material because we have a record contract. The clock is ticking! (laughs).

We did it all in record time: rehearsing, composing and recording in four months. During that time I was working as a teacher and it was more complicated to manage everything. Away and I are in charge of preparing the demos, recording them, even composing some bass lines, all so that Snake can prepare his part once the melody is finished. I would transmit some of my ideas to Away and between the two of us we would program some drum tracks, he would prepare some rhythms so that I would be inspired and in this way I could finish some ideas that I had in my head and then be able to get to the studio with everything done. and record without interference.

It’s the first time we’ve done something like this. At first it was quite frustrating, although we finally introduced it into our process as another tool to compose new music, to inspire us and to make the compositional process more fun and interesting for us. It was a real challenge but as you get used to it it is even nice to be able to compose spontaneously without having to refine the compositional process so much, in this way we were able to work under pressure with a different perspective achieving great results.

At the beginning I told Away not to worry about the rhythms, that if something didn’t fit I would rewrite it later and make everything fit. After all that we met in the studio to rehearse a lot of what we had already composed even though it was not finished and Snake began to improvise some rhythms on the melodies that he would later transform into real lyrics while the rest of us recorded our parts in the studio .

It must have been crazy to do all that work in a matter of four or five months.

It has been like living in a state of emergency at all hours, I have not been able to sleep during these four months. We have composed and recorded the album, we have even given a concert during that time, I became obsessed with writing new songs, Snake writing the lyrics… We have gone completely crazy. Synchro Anarchy isn’t that different from that state of mind (laughs).

So, is this chaos the general concept around which the album revolves or had you come up with something before focusing on its writing?

We didn’t really have any ideas before writing the new songs but at some point we decided that we didn’t want to make another concept album. I think that everything we have experienced during these last two years and even before has influenced us when it comes to giving life to new Voivod songs. Snake is a very sentimental person and has done a brutal job of internal reflection, letting his deepest thoughts be expressed through the band and more specifically through topics that deal with fiction, although not so far from reality. .

As I said before, Snake has his own way of composing and works on the lyrics once all the music is composed. When he has heard the melody of the song, he lets what he feels when listening to each song dictate the theme of the song and writes from what he has really felt listening to what the rest of us have composed. There’s a track in Synchro Anarchy that’s about old people in a nursing home where he delves into topics like dementia and how it affects people, how we behave towards our old people while they’re living in their world.

It is about a grandfather who is confined to his wheelchair and in his free time builds a flying saucer outside the residence and all the time tells his classmates that he is building it and that one day he will fly in it and leave that place, although Unfortunately everything ends with death and neither he nor the saucer are there for anyone.

It’s symbolic, but there’s a lot of feeling behind his lyrics. Snake opens the doors of reflection by inviting us to think about what is happening in the world and how we perceive it. He didn’t want to talk about the pandemic and so on like many other bands have done, he wanted to go much further and address other topics of interest that we normally don’t pay as much attention to but that are still as relevant as the pandemic itself.

I think that many bands have taken advantage of the pull to talk about the pandemic in their songs, something that doesn’t seem bad to me but I have always believed that Voivod has gone much further and has focused on talking about many other current issues without needing to talk about them consciously, many times taking certain issues to fictional terrain where they are treated in the same way but with a totally foreign environment.

Before being part of Voivod I felt it the same as you, it is something that always attracted me to this project and now that I am part of it it is something that gives us a certain perspective, allows us to relax reality and see beyond that forest that constantly envelops.

I also see a certain similarity between Synchro Anarchy and Dimension Hatröss, as well as in The Wake. They are very different albums but at the same time they have a lot in common. Synchro Anarchy seems like an extension of The Wake and at the same time is a spiritual continuation of the classic Dimension Hatröss. What the band achieved in 1988 with Dimension Hatröss goes far beyond what Voivod had already proposed in their three previous works, which is why Synchro Anarchy seems to me to be the best album that Voivod has published since then, although The Outer Limits is my favorite. The depth of the themes it deals with, the feeling you find in each song, all of this makes me wonder: What is the reason for this change?

That is a very good question. I think that in Synchro Anarchy we have let ourselves be carried away a lot by our feelings. I made sure that each song had its own identity and was different from the rest. Sometimes I changed certain things so that each song sounded different, being very conscious of it, giving a different sound or tonality. Getting to this sound has been the result of living in this bubble during this period of time in a certain state of mind during this era that we have lived in. We didn’t have any plan and that’s why it sounds so authentic and honest, it’s pure Voivod.

The goal of every musician is that, to put your whole being into your music and be yourself, to express what you feel without thinking about it too much because if you stop to think about it too much you run the risk of censoring yourself and you often lose the magic of the moment. . I don’t have a clear answer but I can tell you that it is the reality of this whole thing and it is the exact reflection of what was happening in that little chaos that we experienced during that time, the compilation of feelings that we have felt all this time.

It’s the magic of being Voivod. Now a complicated question: What is your favorite Synchro Anarchy theme and why?

Did you know? We’ve done everything so quickly and it’s been so intense that I haven’t listened to the album in a while because I think it’s necessary to get away from all that a little after immersing yourself so fully in a work like this. When Planet Eaters came out and I heard it I thought “Wow, we did a good job, I like it!”, and the same thing happened with the release of Synchro Anarchy, I was pleasantly surprised.

Mind Clock is also very progressive, it is very deep, I also like it a lot. I also really like the Holographic Thinking riff, I was really inspired by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. In fact, Emerson, Lake & Palmer played in Montreal in 1976, I was born that year and I’m from Montreal, there’s a connection there.

I really like Quest For Nothing, it’s something visceral.

Yes, this theme is inspired by seventies movies and series about police chases. That whole progressive jazz sound, the harshly thumping bass lines, it’s all there! In that song we tried to create an atmosphere similar to that of the composer Lalo Schifrin. The theme is really about that persecution, the search for something, the constant feeling that something or someone is chasing you.

Another difficult question: What is your favorite Voivod song as a Voivod fanatic?

Of his entire career? What a difficult answer, it’s not fair! A song that I really like and that we have played live lately although it is quite complicated to perform live is Forgotten In Space, although I love Jack Luminous from The Outer Limits (1993) or Rise from Phobos (1997). It’s very difficult to stay with just one, so there you have three good songs.

What future plans do you have? Have you thought about rescuing some songs from your career that have not been performed live for a long time or that have never been played directly?

We have been thinking about it since we feel that we have to get the machinery ready again after these two years. I have to reprogram my pedalboard depending on the setlist we are going to play since we have decided to remove some songs that we have played live over the last four or five years even though there are songs that have always been on the Voivod setlist throughout of the years.

Away has proposed rescuing songs from War and Pain and Rrröööaaarrr but we are definitely going to keep a couple of classics and we are going to try to revitalize the setlist by including songs from Synchro Anarchy and other classics that may not be so present in Voivod’s live shows.

The streaming concerts we gave in the summer in which we performed Nothingface and Dimension Hatröss in their entirety has influenced us when it comes to writing new material, has rediscovered our own album and is where we have seen the way in which that basses and guitars communicate, the dialogue that exists between the instruments. It’s likely that some of those songs will return to our setlist now that we’ve gone through both albums live. We really miss playing for our audience, it is something necessary that I have discovered thanks to the pandemic, the need to interact with our followers and connect with them.

Our fans are very loyal to Voivod, and I say this humbly as I am now a band member who has been a fan of Voivod since the beginning. Feeling part of something as special and unique as Voivod, the amount of things that their music transmits to you, the art of Away, once you have entered that universe it is impossible to walk away just like that.

That’s how I feel, being part of the Voivod family is priceless. It’s time to say goodbye, thank you very much for your time and, if there is a chance that I can be taken into account, continue playing Fix My Heart live, please!