The Next Step: An interview with In Aeternam Vale

Tony Poland speaks with Laurent Prot, the down to earth artist behind a vast archive of powerful electronic music produced as In Aeternam Vale dating back to the early ’80s.

It’s hard to know what to expect when preparing to interview Laurent Prot, the creative force behind a dizzying archive of In Aeternam Vale material. Whether it’s his confrontational cyberpunk style appearance from the 1980s and haunting vocal delivery oozing out of the superb “Dust Under Brightness”, or the imposing figure you’ll find performing live today, Laurent seems every bit as hard-faced as the music he now makes as In Aeternam Vale. The reality couldn’t be any further from this however, with Laurent turning out to be wonderfully down to earth and humorous interviewee who, as it transpires, is dealing with the traumatic aftermath of a visit to the dentist.

There’s a lot of history (and music) to cover with Laurent, so the best place to start would be 1980s Lyon, where a teenage Laurent was caught up between the punks and the mods trying to find his own musical voice. “There was a lot of agitation,” Laurent tells me, “Let’s say that there were a lot of punk bands, there were a lot of mod bands also, and basically one was fighting with the other.” It seems that neither scene suited a 15-year-old Laurent, unsatisfied with the mindless monotony of endless practicing that makes up much of being in a band. “I was fed up with this system,” he says. “I decided to play alone, in fact, I decided to play at home so I could do what I wanted at the moment I wanted.”

This resulted in the formation of In Aeternam Vale, a band driven by a desire for improvisation that initially included Pascal Aubert. “We were able to work very fast,” Laurent recalls. “He had this desire to improvise too so it worked well”. At this time in Lyon, there were other similarly minded bands striving to improvise with “small drum machine and mono synthesizers”, and Laurent reels off names such as Los Paranos and Klimperei which leads to some frantic scribbling for research later. Both bands sound wholly more wave-influenced than anything In Aeternam Vale were doing. Indeed, Laurent tells me, In Aeternam Vale was, “a global reaction against rock ‘n’ roll, cold wave and punk musicians.” This is all delivered with a notable sense of exasperation infiltrating his Lyonnais accent, and he adds, “We were all different but we were all doing the same things.”

So Laurent and Aubert took to improvising with their synthesizer and drum machines, recording these experiments to tape in the caves and basement spaces of Lyon. It’s these early recordings that form part of what’s become this mythical figure of 200 tapes that Minimal Wave mention in a press release for their inaugural, eponymous collection of In Aeternam Vale material. When I quiz him about this number, Laurent confirms it’s accurate, “There are a lot of tapes from 1983 to 1989.” Furthermore, Laurent adds, “There is a lot of crap and there is a lot of rubbish, but there are a lot of recordings.”

Some of these tapes came out on Garde Au Sol Productions, Laurent’s own label which he calls “confidential”, claiming it wasn’t as active as some of the other tape labels at the time in seeking out bands to issue on compilations. The appeal of the tape format for In Aeternam Vale was the ease with which you could record naturally, but also its status as a primitive form of sharing music. It’s here that Laurent deviates to disclose a rarely discussed working relationship he had with Jean Louis Costes, a celebrated fellow French musician from Paris whose approach is described as trashy and focused on “shit and sex”. Quizzing him about the exact nature of this relationship, Laurent states it began in 1984 when Costes sent Laurent some tapes and as he explains, “I would add to it, or take some parts to make new kinds of music.” This process would be repeated endlessly, with Laurent drawing parallels with the manner in which people use services like WeTransfer to exchange stems today.

Though In Aeternam Vale constantly recorded throughout the ‘80s, they rarely performed live. The group were not comfortable with a crowd’s expectation to play the tracks they knew, which jarred with their own desire to improvise, never returning to the same track twice. Laurent informs me there is one In Aeternam Vale gig on YouTube that was recorded at Lyon venue, The Atomic Café, in 1984. The gig featured no recognised In Aeternam Vale tracks, instead the gig was “one long track itself; an improvised performance that was played once.” Watching the two-part recording later, you can see how In Aeternam Vale were then pushing the envelope of what could be achieved with synths and guitars and how it might puzzle audiences, the 20-minute performance being more akin to something you’d see on a Tuesday night at London’s Café Oto than the spiky cold wave sounds of ‘80s Europe.

A poor personal grasp of the French language leads me to ask Laurent on the exact meaning of In Aeternam Vale, and though we both feel something is lost in translation he explains it was decided in a youthful moment of playful megalomania. The Hebrew word for God, Yahweh, is pronounced IAV in French and from this they made up the name In Aeternam Vale. It is in Laurent’s own words, “a stupid story”, and this attitude is in keeping with his overall personality, something Veronica Vasicka touches on herself when I contacted her to discuss working with the Frenchman.

”He’s actually one of the most down to earth and modest artists I have known, considering his wealth of achievements,” Vasicka states, going on to say, “he’s insanely talented but never boasts about it, and he has the best sense of humour”. Asking Laurent about how he came to release on Minimal Wave, he tells me he was surprised when she made contact after finding some In Aeternam Vale tapes at a record fair in Europe. He goes on to reveal that at this point he was recording as the search engine-unfriendly alias Solid State and it was here that Vasicka that persuaded him to revisit the In Aeternam Vale project which was on hiatus. “The name came back again in 2006 when Minimal Wave contacted me to make a first project with old material,” Laurent explains. “And she wanted to use that name that I was not using anymore”

Vasicka expands on the story, explaining she first heard some In Aeternam Vale material on a mixtape a Norwegian collector made in 2004. From here, the Minimal Wave founder’s interest blossomed as she found some of Laurent’s tapes at a record fair in Utrecht, Holland, as well as picking up the In Aeternam Vale / Le Syndicate Electronique split LP issued by Invasion Planète Recordings. “But it wasn’t until later that I became aware of just how prolific Laurent actually was”, Vasicka says.

Back to my conversation with Laurent, which takes place over Skype in the humid heat of late July, he’s perched in his studio with various bits of hardware and synths overflowing behind him. The temptation to quiz him on this background scene is too much, and Laurent’s only too happy to humour me as he picks up his laptop and leads my gaze to a drum machine self-built for live performances which only plays four sounds. Hardly the most tech-savvy of individuals, some vocal surprise comes from the London end of our conversation that such a beast of a machine can only transmit four different drum sounds. A swiftly served “Yes!” and a warm laugh is Laurent’s response as he starts up the machine and offers a quick demonstration of how to craft machine made rhythms.

Given the fact Laurent has worked as an electronic engineer in the industrial weighing industry for many years (“the job that feeds me is not music, you know” he later jokes), it comes as little surprise he’s fully capable of building his own musical tools. Yet he seems quite content with exploring the possibilities and limits of established music technology – be it hardware or computer-based. “I put a lot of things inside the computer and inside the recorders and then after, I delete, I delete, I delete,” Laurent reveals, before adding that he tries “to keep the shell, some very simple ideas”.

Our conversation remains on the topic of technology and how he deals with all the possibilities of today in comparison to the cheap “CS01 Yamaha drum machine and the SR88 synth” of his earliest In Aeternam Vale experiments. Laurent offers a typically wise response. “My mind was very simple 30 years ago and I’ve slowly gained experience,” he says of both production and life. “So, in some ways the tools became more complex as I became more complex.” This provides a good balance says Laurent, “because we connect and grow together at the same time.”

Listen to tracks such as “La Piscine”, “Ultrabase” and “Highway Dark Veins” and it’s hard for this generation to think of them in any terms other than various shades of long-form techno. Given that Laurent recorded them in isolation from the prevailing trends of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s only makes them sound more impressive. When prompted to describe his music, Laurent seems initially evasive, stating “I don’t want to give any direction.” Yet as he continues, Laurent may not assign the music of In Aeternam Vale to any particular category, but he does profess a desire to ensure “there is the feeling of the body in the music” When asked to expand, Laurent humbly states, “I didn’t learn music, but I am learning what music is telling me,” In fact, he says, “I was not taught music, music is teaching me things, making me feel things that I don’t feel with language and I try to express this when I make music for others.”

Laurent has lived in Lyon all his life, and like any lifelong resident he speaks proudly of it. “It’s an old city that has been around for more than one thousand years,” he says, adding it’s now a peaceful place to live. Yet it seems his musical legacy has remained in the shadows in Lyon too, until recently. A performance at this year’s Lyon’s Nuits Sonores festival was Laurent’s first, and he explains it was arranged at the invitation of local label CLFT. Eager to see how Laurent’s work has affected this younger generation of Lyonnais, I reached out to with CLFT’s Simon Chambon-Andreani who revealed over email they “were already frequently in contact with Laurent – trying to put some of his tracks out on our label”. When asking Chambon-Andreani about how this relationship started, I’m told he was always aware of In Aeternam Vale’s music growing up, but says he never expected to live in the same city as Laurent.

Indeed, the manner in which Chambon-Andreani discovered they were both residents in Lyon says much about the modesty that’s characterised Laurent’s approach to his music. One day whilst tending the bar at which he works, Chambon-Andreani got chatting to a 50-year-old local who was “aware of my parallel activities, and informed me about the existence of a mysterious old friend” who he was in a punk rock band with in the ‘80s, and was now making “monster techno tunes”.

Naturally this mysterious old friend turned out to be Laurent, but despite making contact it seems CLFT missed their chance to work with Laurent on releasing some music. Regardless, CLFT were happy to facilitate In Aeternam Vale’s performance at Nuit Sonores, and Chambon-Andreani goes on to tell he’s “happy that Laurent finally got some recognition.” Chambon-Andreani believes this is mainly through the efforts of Veronica Vasicka, and he says, “for someone who’s doing beautiful pieces of music for 20 years now, it’s more than deserved”

The announcement of a forthcoming release for the Jealous God label will see Laurent’s stock rise as Chambon-Andreani states, and it seems Regis and Juan Mendez have been planning to unleash some In Aeternam Vale material for some time. Laurent tells me the connection was made through Vasicka, who “proposed some tracks to Karl and Juan” when Sandwell District was still in operation. Whereas the In Aeternam Vale music on Minimal Wave is, naturally, from the Laurent Prot archives, the forthcoming Jealous God release is more recent material and fits in perfectly with the sound the label is establishing.

A scheduled performance at Berlin Atonal this month is a further mark of the high regard Laurent is now held in, yet the chance to play abroad poses its own set of issues. “It’s not easy because you can’t take big synthesizers on the plane, so I am not able to take this one,” Laurent says, pointing back to his prized self-made drum machine. The time artists are allotted to perform at festivals is an issue too, given the long-form nature of many In Aeternam Vale productions. “When I play an hour or an hour and a half I’m always in a rush because some tracks are maybe 14 or 18 minutes, so it’s very short,” Laurent says. “In fact,” he adds, “you play four and the set’s finished.” For Laurent, two hours is good because, “you get time to start, develop, there is some kind of climax and stabilisation, and then you go down.”

Veronica Vasicka, it seems, couldn’t be happier for Laurent, “I’m really proud of the long way he has come, both personally and musically,” she says. “I just think it’s amazing that he’s playing Berlin Atonal, and this resurgence of interest in his music is just the beginning.”

Interview by Tony Poland

In Aeternam Vale plays as part of Berlin Atonal this week – further details on tickets can be found at the festival website.