If you’ve never heard of Demians, but you love bands such as Porcupine Tree, Opeth, Riverside, Dead Soul Tribe, and the like, you absolutely need to check out Building an Empire (2008). This band has become one of my favorites and among my highest played albums in my library already… and here I am publishing an interview with the mastermind behind Demians, Nicolas Chapel. He is truly one of my personal musical inspirations as he has done what I aspire to do; that is to write, perform, and record an album in entirety. To top it off, he’s done it masterfully and now has a live band touring Europe (and hopefully the U.S. soon!). Below Nicolas provided some very thoughtful answers about his writing process, detailed recording techniques, what it’s like to be suddenly on tour, and more.

I read your interview with Edwin Roosjen from the Dutch Progressive Rock Page (DPRP). I gather you’re a rather shy guy and take your music very personally. This interview took place shortly after only your third show with Demians and you had stated you were very nervous on stage. Have you since found a strong connection with your live band and are you still just as nervous on stage? Or has the connection with your band helped to ease your nerves?

I see many different things in these questions, some are linked and some are not.

The first thing is I’d say I’m not “rather shy” but extremely shy, sickness-bordering shy. It was hard trying to overcome that when I started doing the promotion, so at some point I stopped trying to hide it and really felt better dealing with it. Writing music and performing it live as well as doing interviews and meeting people seriously helps, my problem had always been an overwhelming and sickening problem in the past. I still have to deal with it, but I’m way more confident now, and meet many fantastic people everyday in the process of sharing my music, so that’s the most rewarding thing in the world, and it really is worth trying.

I remember doing this interview right after the Symforce show a few months ago. I’ll be completely honest about what happened that day, I didn’t enjoy playing at all. The whole day was amazing, everyone was being nice with us, I met some great people who made sure all the conditions were there for us to have a great moment.

But I was nervous on stage for strong reasons. The first one was that I had been extremely sick for the two days before the show, and ended up performing live with fever and suffering brutal coughs for a few days that really made my throat burn each time I was breathing. It was heart-breaking, but I had been waiting for this show for such a long time that it would have been a nightmare to not perform that day. It was one of the first few shows of the band, and I would have needed more experience to be able to overcome these difficulties on stage. I’m glad so many people got into the band that day, but I’d rather forget about this performance.

We were also a ridiculously small team, we didn’t have any technician with us for setting everything up on stage, and didn’t have a soundcheck. Like yeah, the stage is empty, and you have 20 minutes for setting everything up by yourself, doing the soundcheck and monitors, and it’s a 2000+ venue so everything better be perfect. We were not ready for this.

The main problem that day aside from the sickness was that the band was not making it. Aside from Antoine the bass player that had been involved a lot both personally and musically in the band, the other band members and myself had trouble working together. The keys player was asked to leave the band a few weeks before the show because it simply didn’t work at all, forcing me to change the way I worked on the live band completely. I spent months setting up a live band with keyboards and samples parts and stuff, spent a lot of my energy and my time on that matter, for finally throwing everything away at the last minute to work with sequences and a click track and ear monitors because I was tired of always doing what other people were supposed to do. We have no keyboard player live at the moment, and I’m perfectly fine with it. I’d definitely want to find a keys player for the live band so that we can play everything live in the future. But there’s no way i’m going through this process again right now, no way. I’m not trying to put the blame on somebody, it’s just what happened. I learnt a lot from this experience, and I know who to get or not get involved now, and why.

There was no communication at all left between the drummer and myself at this point, and he was left out of the band right after this show. The situation was a dead end, period. It also was a tough decision to make at the time because we were supposed to go on tour with Anathema one month after this show, and I didn’t want to scare anyone who had been supporting my music. But people who work with me know I don’t do anything without good reasons, and they were really supportive. Since then, Gaël Hallier has quickly entered the band, and I finally got my hopes up again. He learnt the songs by himself, and joined us for a rehearsal two weeks before the supposed start of the tour. After only one afternoon of playing together, the band sounded tighter and more powerful than it ever sounded. We all connected perfectly, and it was a great first step. We rehearsed for three days, set up our equipment for two days, and went on tour the following day!! It was just a dream come true, especially after what could have turned into a nightmare. Finally the band was a real live entity, everything clicked, and everyone got along so well! All the discouraging moments, the fights and the pain in the ass were gone for good.

The Hindsight tour with Anathema was the most incredible and intense and addicting piece of my life as a musician, we learnt so much and so quickly, that now we’re at home when we’re on stage.

The connection within the band is what I cherish the most these days. I told you, I’d like to have a keys player, as well as a second guitar player that would sing vocal harmonies in the near future, but these guys will have to connect to both the music and the other guys and respect everyone, or that’s not happening.

You know, it’s like suddenly, Demians releases an album, has great reviews, and everyone expects great things of a live band. I’ve been working my ass off for the last few years, and have been doing so all my life, to achieve more than I expected. So not living up to my own expectations is what made me so nervous, first and foremost.

As far as I’m concerned, I think i’ll always remain introverted, but I found the balance Iwas looking for. At first the songs were still too personnal for me to feel at ease on stage. I’m singing about events and stories that occured through my life, not made up stories, which was not an easy thing to admit to myself at the first few shows. Now I know why I’m doing it, and what should remain inside.

I have great respect for your ambition to write and record your music by yourself. Very few people have the insight and determination to complete such a project. Did you ever feel very frustrated with the process? Did you need to put yourself on a schedule?

First, when you talk about “completing a project”, I’d rather say right now I’m at the very beginning of something! Ok, it took time and energy and it was a long and striving process to get the album out and create a live band, but now this is done, it’s only the beginning! Everything still needs to be done, and that’s the most exciting thing ever when you do something like this!

The frustration only was there when the band didn’t work the way it should have worked. That was more than frustrating. About the album, the frustration sometimes appeared during production, because everything was done with poor means, cheap gear, and I’m-broke-so-let’s-find-a-decent-cave-to-record-something-today state of mind.

The only schedule I forced myself to was “ok I need to get some sleep now”. A lot of pain in the ass, once again, and tries and mistakes because some gear broke down or I couldn’t afford decent speakers, and this kind of stuff. But once I sat behind the instruments and put my headphones on, and started recording, all I could do was enjoying every second of it!!

But the process of creating my own music by myself and bringing life into it is what I love the most in this world. I love playing music with my musicians, I love performing live, Ilove travelling and meeting the fans, I loved touring with Anathema because I love their music and they are wonderful and down-to-Earth people. But above everything, there’s nothing like creating something from square one. Having a blank tape or hard-drive space, picking up an acoustic guitar, and then many instruments, creating soundscapes, bringing everything together… I don’t see myself doing anything else with my life. The songs I once imagined, and produced with my cheap recording devices a few years ago are now bringing me on the road, travelling through countries I never went to before, and people come over and tell me about themselves and what they find in my music when they listen to it with their eyes closed. That seriously puts a gigantic smile on my face everytime I think about it. And I see no reason for changing that, by the way. In the next few months, I’ll lock myself up in my bedroom for creating a new album, and everytime I’ll have doubts, I’ll think of all the wonderful people I met all around Europe and it will remind me how much I love doing what I do.

I see that you wrote all of Building an Empire (except for Sand) in 2002, but how long did it take you to record and mix the album?

I started writing songs in late 2001, and never really stopped. But at first, I did it only for myself. I kept on writing until the will to put out a record struck me a few years ago. I selected these songs in late 2005 and did a first version of the album which I was not happy with at all. Writing songs, I can do this really quickly. The original vision is what matters to me, so I don’t spend more than an hour on demoing an original song.

I did everything again on the album after being disappointed with the results, and I think it took me like 3 months for doing all the recordings and selecting the takes, one month solely for Sand which I’m really proud of. The mixing sessions took two months, mostly because my friend Rémy mixed it with me, he was the hands and the fresh ears, and I was bringing all the ideas because I wanted the sound to respect my accurate vision of how it was like in my head. Working with Rémy was amazing because, first of all he’s an incredible human being who is always full of energy, and his involvement allowed me to concentrate on the purely musical side of things instead of the technical aspects of it. That made one very cool team, the only downside to it being that we didn’t live in the same area, and both were extremely busy, sometimes not being able to meet for two weeks for working on the mixes. It took two months from start to finish, with lots of empty days between them.

I’m glad the album sounds the way it sounds, and I’d definitely be happy to team up with Rémy for working on another project, by the way.

Do you play the drums as well, or did you use a drum machine? If you used a drum machine, did your live drummer have any issues playing it live or do you actively keep in mind what can be played live when recording the drums?  If you do play drums, did you learn them specifically for this project?

There was no drum machine. The drums were performed on the album, even though I used some techniques that drummers usually don’t use. For example I sometimes recorded overdubs for constructing the drum parts, like performing toms and kick and snare first while replacing the hihats and cymbals by silent pads, so that I could then perform the hihats and cymbals once again without the drumkit. The goal was to have better separation for the mixing sessions. When the cymbals don’t spill in the drumkit microphones, you can put the drumkit as loud as you want without it sounding washy or noisy, and I think it worked and fits the music. Some drummer work this way in the studio, but I even did it when constructing and writing the drum parts, thinking of the drums like an orchestra in itself. So sometimes there are cymbals or a few hits here and there that a drummer would not be able to play live the same way. I think it fits the orchestral sound of the music, and one thing is important to keep in mind; this was made and made sense for the production, but I’d never ask my drummer to play each cymbal the way it was recorded, it’s pointless. These songs have lush arrangements and many details, but they have a solid and tight drums/bass/guitar basis as well as strong melodies, so even before they are produced, they already work as simple songs. That’s all I’m interested in when we play live. It used to be a problem, but now Gaël is in the band, and he can play anything I throw at him, which allows me to be really confident in the way I compose and propose songs for the band to play live.

You did a phenomenal job with loops and synths on Building an Empire. Every track flows into one another seamlessly. Do you find it difficult to pull this off live? Do you attempt to recreate the album when performing live or do you try to present it a little differently?

Thank you. One thing I’d like to say because i’m often asked about the synths and textures of the album, is that I grew up with analog and tapes and tape echo chambers and real guitar amps, and stuff like that, and I never really had the chance to use a computer or modeling technology or digital audio workstations before I started producing my own music. I’m not the kind of guy wo sits down behind a computer for days playing with virtual synths, but on the other hand I love to create sounds from square one, by using anything I can find. So most of the sound textures I used on the album were a mix of all these techniques, and a great majority of them come from guitars and guitar amps. For example the sound textures at the very beginning of Sapphire, the “chord pad” that’s going on in the transition between Shine and Sapphire basically is made of an acoustic guitar played backwards and going through a tape echo chamber with a lot of feedback. That created a way more personnal and organic sound than anything I’d have been able to create with software or synths, which are really awesome tools, but I had none at the time and didn’t know how to use them. The keyboard pads used in Naive for example are a sample that I used mixed with samples that I made by myself with guitar notes. they created the fat yet open pad sound I needed, and still very organic, which is something I like because it stands out but at the same time glues the guitar tracks and vocals together, compliments them really well. Same for the loops, some of them already existed and were used because they sounded great to me the way they were, and some of them I created with old analog gear that is easier because more intuitive for me to use. I can basically plug this into this and turn knobs in a few seconds, and don’t even have to use a mouse or open a manual for figuring out how to use it. That’s the way I like to use textures and accidents as instruments instead of gear itself. I didn’t have access to such gear at the time, but there’s always a way of renting or borrowing something, and it makes a huge difference in my opinion.

I’m telling you about that to say that these textures are here to glue the instrumentations and vocals together, and the soundworld works really well that way. My music is not the kind of music where you can improvise on, I see it more like a play where an actor is not here to show off or blow the audience away with his own lines, but is rather a part of a big picture, so every little detail he puts in his performance is important to help the whole thing having an impact. Everything is written. And by the way, it works well with the musicians in the band because they respect all of this, and like the way it was mapped out and written.

We’d love to change a few things here and there at times but the fact that we use sequenced orchestrations and synths doesn’t allow us to do some of these things. But on the other hand, with the sequenced samples, it allows us to play really tight and have a lot of fun with our own parts and instruments, whatever happens. The goal of a live setting is not to reproduce an album in the details, and the energy of our shows compliments the album experience really well in my opinion.

What really strikes me about this album is the complete disregard for the canonical song structure… this goes beyond progressive rock. Bands like Tool or Opeth break the song structure rules too, but Demians takes this to a whole new level while still maintaining coherence and cohesiveness. Did you have any specific influences in terms of how you’ve chosen to arrange your music?

Yes, the main influence was Life itself. I know it sounds glamorous or something, but it really is the way I see all of this.

I’d see that as Life itself: take two events that occured at different points during your life, and tell me about them. Each event developped itself in its own way, completely different things happened, and your reaction to them was also completely different from each other. Yet, the focus point was the same, both events share something in common: the person you became once you got through them. Everything that happens in your life could seem diskointed when you take them separately, but they’re not, and make the person you are today. Well, to me, these songs are like events, and the album is the world they create, the person I was when I decided to record it. This is probably why all the songs sound and react differently, yet remain focused and the whole thing sounds cohesive. This is also why my next records will sound completely different yet exactly the same. They will tell new things, and they will discover new things, but they will all share something in common that will always be there one way or another.

I don’t listen to other people’s records when I produce an album to get ideas or to produce it. Of course, I listen to a lot of music every day, since I was 5 or 6 years old, so that probably influences me like it would influence anybody. But I never sit down and tell myself I need to record this or that. Actually, for example for the next album, I could tell you right now that I want to record a very mellow album because that’s the way I might be feeling it now, but I can’t do anything about it, really. I’ll take the first instrument that I find when I’ll feel the need, and the album will create itself in my head and I won’t be able to do anything else. Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t write my songs, but that they write me instead. It really is the way I see it, sometimes it’s scary, but most of all it really is inspiring.

About the song structures, well, there is no recipe or formula that is respected in these songs. They go anywhere they want. A lot of them sometimes take a part and a huge buildup starts from there, it wasn’t planned that way, but afterwards, I see it the same way I said about the events in my life: I see it as taking a problem by the throat, admitting it’s bothering you, taking it as high as you can, and then smashing it to the ground and ending up moving on with your life. This is just the way I see it.

And you just compared my music to Tool’s. So I’ll just say “thank you” and laugh hysterically. That’s how much I love their music.

Do you have any plans for a US tour in the near future? If so, when can we expect to see you and with whom? By the way, we’d love to see you tour with another InsideOut favorite of ours, Riverside.

I’d LOVE to tour the US soon. It’s being discussed these days, and it will happen in the future. For the moment it’s too expensive for my band to go there with our gear and stuff, the band is still very young, but it will definitely happen and I’m really looking forward to it. The first time I went there by myself, I came back home and wrote Sand during the plane trip, that was one extremely inspiring journey!

Most of the bands I see coming out of France are much heavier. I’ve only recently tapped into the French rock scene, but do you feel out of place? How is the reception throughout the rest of Europe?

I’m really sorry, I’m often asked about music scenes and music categories, and I really tried but I don’t understand them, I don’t get the concept. I really don’t. Most of the bands I love, I don’t even know from which country they are, nor do I understand the tags people seem to put on them. It’s like people not liking an album because they expected it to be “prog” or “heavy”. Well, no it’s not supposed to be “prog” or “heavy”, to me it was just supposed to be music. I’ve always been disappointed when I expected something that wasn’t there.  I’m not trying to be arrogant about it, that’s why I’m trying to explain my views on the topic of scenes and categories.

To me an interesting band that has relevant things to say is something that will grab my attention, it doesn’t matter where it comes from and what kind of music it plays, so I don’t really know that much about any French rock band. It’s like people, everyone can have his own place as long as he’s searching for it, is trying to create it. I think no band sounds like Demians, and Demians doesn’t try to sound like any other band, so there is no competition, there is no feeling out of place, and every band deserves to be heard.

Furthermore, the bands I love, I love because they have their own thing. Neurosis is an incredibly heavy band, and I don’t love them because they’re heavy, but because they have their own incredible kind of heaviness, they don’t have a style, they are their style.
As long as you’re genuine, you can have your own place and be respected for that.

I’m being honest with myself and the music I compose and perform. I think people can feel that, and the reception has been amazing so far. I toured throughout Europe for a month and every night the reactions were different but amazing. Everyone is welcome!

Building an Empire is a very strong recording with a great mixing. How and where did you learn to record and produce music? What software do you use?

I learnt to record and produce by recording anything I could find and any way I could think of, and producing it. By myself, by listening carefully, by trying, by buying gear, selling gear, testing, not finding what I was looking for. I mean, it’s not difficult to start recording a guitar amplifier with a mic. Recording it well is more difficult. And finding your own sound with it is even more, and could ask years, or even your own life to achieve it.

This is the process that I’m interested in. I could ask a teacher or a professional to tell me what to do or what not to do, but a professional can’t know how the guitar amp sounds like in my head. Trying to figure it out by myself really is what made me start experimenting with what I had at the time.

Put a mic in front of the amp. It doesn’t sound right? Try another one, or put it somewhere else.  You could spend years doing that, and one day, well it just happens. Everything makes sense.  I’m not pretending I’m better than anyone. But I’ve been confronted to so many people pretetnding they knew better instead of trying to explain and share their experience, that I decided instead that I’d do it on my own.  It brought me a discipline in the way I work, that even relates to the discipline I put in all the other things I do in my music.  Production allows me to hold the big picture in my own hands without losing track of the details.

As far as software is concerned, I kind of told you earlier I’m not really a software guy, but they are both affordable, reliable and easy to use now.  On the album, I used a couple of cymbals from a software called DFH, there was a huge lot of cymbals that sounded awesome, better than anything I could afford. So on the record I used two great sounding cymbals of my own while recording and everything else is ddrum midi pads triggering cymbals from DFH. I used Kontakt sampling software and put most of the guitar sounds I recorded through it for creating some of the textures. And we used Cubase and Wavelab for mixing and mastering the record.

All the compressors, EQ and regular mixing devices were UAD plugins, that sound amazingly good and respect the original quality of the tracks while getting the best out of them. You basically have the plugin looking the same way the hardware looked like, so that made things very intuitive and quick.

I’m a big fan of Universal Audio’s hardware gear. Simple, effective, and lets the performance get through. Set and forget, and always sounds musical.

To sum it up, I never went into a studio for recording anything on this album. Cheap mic for the vocals, no preamp, home-made guitar cab for recording the guitars, everything was more or less done in an artisanal way. We used Rémy’s software gear for the mixing sessions to make sure the performances would be used the best way possible.

I read that Sand was written much later than the rest of the album. Is Sand indicative of the direction you’ll take your next album?

I think Sand represents the end of an era for me as well as the beginning of something new. It opened new doors for me musically and emotionally. It can be indicative in the sense that the music will be less linear, more varied than it already is, more dynamic, and will have more character and personality because through this song I admitted so many things were possible. So the answer could be yes and no. The answer is yes, if you mean that it represents something that reflects a new way of trying things for me, and the answer is no if people expect 16 minute long songs sounding the same way than Sand does.

What is the story behind the artwork for Building an Empire?

At the back of my girlfriend’s parents’ house years ago, in the garden and near the water, there was an old chair, and the spot was perfect for me to spend hours, reading, playing the guitar, or just being away from people. I really enjoyed staying there. I used to spend a lot of my time writing there, or doing nothing, sometimes all day long when I was not feeling good.

A very long time before I started writing music or any kind of lyrics, I somehow knew that it would happen one day though. My girlfriend’s father was always very encouraging, a very smart and humble man, and sometimes the only human communication I had with anybody was with him and my girlfriend because they never tried to be intrusive. He once told me “one day you’ll get up and stand proud on your poetry chair”. I always knew it would make sense at some point, and it’s the first thing I thought of when I had to come up with a way to convey the message of the music graphically.

The character itself is heavily inspired by a comic book character I once saw, and the very organic manner in which he was drawn really struck me. I love the way this character could be anybody, of any gender, of any age, and would also be made of anything, being flesh and blood, being wood, being ground, or being stone. So I thought it was relevant as the character of this music, because it really is about human feelings and behaviours, anything that defines humans.

I think the overall theme of the album, the visual art and the title all gather in an obvious way.

You asked for the story behind the artwork, this is how it happened. Now about the title, the meaning, and this kind of things, I think the artwork allows everyone to have his or her own interpretation. My stance is that Building An Empire is not about me or my empire or something pretentious like that, but the title came out of the idea that anybody can achieve what he or she wants to achieve. And if all you got is three fragile chairs, then take them, go as high as you want, and don’t look down!

What is the meaning behind the name Demians?

My best friend when I was a kid was my grandfather. He knew I was shy, and that it would probably take me a lot of time for overcoming my shyness. He never judged me. When I was visiting him, I would spend countless hours in the ceiling, reading books. He had dozens of boxes with hundred of books, and when I was like 6 I started reading the book “Demian” by Hermann hesse and I really could relate to it. The name of the band is not necessarily about the book, it was inspired by the character of Max Demian himself, one of the main characters. I would definitely advise anybody to read this book. It always remained in my mind in a special place, and at the time I started mixing the album, the project didn’t have a real name to it, and I wanted to avoid putting my own name on it because I wanted to put the music upfront and not myself. I read this book again one night, and it struck me the same way than it did twenty years before.

I didn’t want a band name because there was no band, I didn’t want to put my name on it because people don’t care about me, to me it is all about the songs. Definitely go get this book and read it! When you come see us live, the musicians are not the Demians, the songs are. And when you listen to the album, the songs are old friends of yours, they love you, they hate you, they are gentle, subtle, and arrogant, angry, they are your own memories, they are everything at once.

There are so many things behind this name to me, that  I could carry on forever. I’ll just say what I already advised you, to go read the book and find a meaning to anything in Life by yourself. Searching for your own meaning is the most exciting journey there is.

Thank you so much taking the time to read and answer these questions for us at Obnoxious Listeners.  We wish you much luck with your long music career ahead of you, and we hope to see you perform live someday!

That was very nice, I really appreciated your questions, as well as your support to the music of Demians. I’m definitely excited about everything that might be happening in the future, and am looking forward to bringing this music to the US for shows and going on the road.

See you there, until then, take care and live your life to its fullest!

Special thanks to Peter Klapproth at InsideOut for making this interview possible.