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21/01/2025 / Chloé

Eight long years after Voix, Aluk Todolo finally released its follow-up, Lux, a dark, gleaming record of faceting guitars and hypnotic rhythms. Light might seem a paradoxical interest for such an obscure band, but it actually is a natural development of their uniquely cohesive discography. A couple of weeks before the release of this fifth album, I had a long interview with Matthieu Canaguier, the band’s bass player, to go over the long gestation of the record and these twenty years as Aluk Todolo.

From the groundwork of the first albums to the meticulous architecture of Lux, from the spiritual dimension of the music to its unique physicality, the Work unfolds, occult of course, protean, and in progress. A quest for the three musicians involved, and for all the listeners willing to join in…

Go to part. 1 (2016)

This interview took place in September 2024 and was first published on Radio Metal.

Lux is coming out eight years after Voix—it’s a long span for Aluk Todolo. How come?

For Voix, we toured a lot—with Oranssi Pazuzu, Insect Ark, Wolves in the Throne Room, in Europe, the United States, Russia… We felt the need to play this album and have it keep on living and evolving on the road. And we needed time to find the concept of its follow-up. The point isn’t to make a record just to make a record. We never did that with Aluk Todolo. And once we found the record’s concept and started to rehearse what would become the tracks, we needed time to learn how to play it. There are technical challenges you can’t necessarily tell from just listening to the album, parts that are very complex to play: all the rhythms are quite strange. I’d never played such time signatures: you can’t even count them! But everything is very precise. What took time was to manage to incorporate the record, the counts, the times… It’s the most written of Aluk Todolo’s albums. There are very few improvised parts, which were still there in Voix. Those were the big challenges.

For Voix, you had the title and concept before you started working on the music: was it the case this time as well?

Yes, and even more than before: Voix happened a bit more organically. There was an idea—what are the voices in Aluk Todolo? How do we find the voice inside each of our instruments, how do we harmonize these together?—but a lot of tracks were born out of improvisations transformed into compositions. For Lux, the starting point was rhythmic cells written by our drummer Antoine Hadjioannou. These cells are very precisely written, and each track is a repeated rhythmic cell, a locked groove. We had to learn to play that, then write from that: help the melodies, textures, harmonies, and counterpoints latent in this rhythmic base emerge. So yes, both a concept and a written composition preceded the record. To go back to your previous question, it’s also because we set up this new writing method that it took us so long.

When did you start working on Lux?

We started experimenting with some things in 2019. The album structure appeared around that time: Antoine had some kind of vision where he saw the rhythms become entangled. From there, we started learning these rhythms and playing them—no. It was even before: 2017-2018! It really took a while [laughs]. For Voix, we were always together and rehearsing every week, so it progressed quite fast, but for Lux, Antoine was living in Chambéry, so every time we needed to rehearse, setting up the session so we could be together took some time. Then, when we finally could get together for a week of rehearsals, for instance, we couldn’t be efficient right from the first day. We needed to get together again, reharmonize: that’s why it drifted so much in time.

And when did you record the album?

We recorded it a year ago, in July 2023, at the Kerwax Studio. The recording and the mix were very quickly done compared to Voix. Voix took ten, twelve days to record and at least as much to mix, plus the mastering, etc. Whereas this time, we arrived at the Kerwax on a Monday, and on Saturday, the record was mixed. After setting up, we recorded the takes in two days and did the mix in a day and a half. The mastering took place slightly later, but otherwise the whole album was done in one go. But we had played Lux on stage a lot. We had toured with the album before recording it, so we were much readier than for Voix. For Voix, we were still writing, or let’s say, changing things in the studio. But this time, we arrived, played exactly what we were playing every time on stage, and only did two or three takes per track. Everything was done in one go. We didn’t alter anything in the studio. There are very slight overdubs, but that’s it, nothing structural. And on stage, since L’Homme Sauvage in 2022 and the dates around that festival, we play the whole album. But then there are always modifications. Aluk Tolodo is music that is very alive, so there is room for interpretation, but not for altering the composition.

© Andy Julia

The recording was done completely analogically. Why this choice, and how did you do it?

Since Voix which was already recorded on tapes but mixed digitally, there was this desire to find during a take a kind of intensity matching what we experience on stage. When we record, it’s the three of us in the same room playing just like we would on stage, but in a studio, with the mics installed: we’re doing our sound inside the studio. This live energy is essential to Aluk Todolo. For Lux, we really wanted to take this logic as far as possible and have a record that would be the exact capture of what we do in our rehearsal space or on stage, the perfect crystallization of Aluk Todolo’s music. We wanted no digital alteration during the process, at least for the vinyl record. The chain went unbroken from the recording on tape to the vinyl itself; the mixing and mastering were done on tape, too. There are no 0s and 1s, no alteration, transformation, translation. It was really important to us to avoid everything that digital technology locks up, bottles up, and to keep alive in our music the magic of the moment: the magic of this music, this sound, and the moment it was made.

Since that’s what we wanted, we looked into the studios that could do it. The Drudenhaus, where we had recorded Occult Rock and Voix, could, but our label NoEvDia told us about the Kerwax. We had been hearing about it for some time. Mütterlein, with whom we toured, recommended it to us too—she made all her records there. And we came to the conclusion that it would indeed be the place where we could do Lux as we wanted to do it. In this studio, there are no computers—well, there is one, but it’s hidden in a corner; this technology is nowhere to be seen, and the only thing you can refer to is the sound, exclusively the sound. You don’t use an interface to visualize the music, there is no timeline nor waveform; you don’t look at music, you listen to it, and you sculpt it with the analog gear gathered and built by Christophe Chavanon.

The recording itself took place as it did in the 1970s: we recorded a take, if it was good, we kept it, and if it wasn’t, we discarded it. The decision was made instantly; you have to be seasoned and ready. Everything counts. Each moment gains crucial importance when you record with that technology. Digitally, you can record one hundred hours continuously, whereas here, a tape is thirty minutes long, and it has a cost. We used three tapes for Lux, including one we barely started: for a forty-minute-long record, we used one hour and twenty minutes of rushes, and we chose from that. It completely changes the state of mind you’re in. The recording of this album was one of the most intense weeks of my life: everything was condensed; seven years of composition converged toward a few days of recording, and we mixed the record in the same momentum. It was really that: an impetus, a gesture, unlike what you can do digitally, where there is no materiality to the gesture. Here, the recording and the musical gesture were bound by analog technology.

To what extent was it different from what you did before?

First, there was this notion of concentrated time. When we recorded Voix, we recorded on tape, then all the tapes were digitized and mixed digitally. Then the time frame was winder—we recorded, there was a month-long break, then we went back to the studio for the mixing. I also think we weren’t as ready. What changed was the amount of time for preparation: when you know there will be no way of making up for your mistakes, that you won’t be able to take, say, a bass part to put it where your fingers slipped, you just don’t [laughs]. You prepare yourself to not make mistakes, and if there are any—because there are some on the record, I don’t hear them anymore, but I did when we were working on the mix—you accept them as they are. I don’t want to compare us to Led Zeppelin, but there are fingers slipping in Led Zeppelin records; it was recorded like that as well, in one go. The perfection of the execution isn’t about that kind of detail. It is the momentum of the record, the track, the take that matters more than anything else. This time, we really feel like the recording captured the moment instead of having a succession of layers of time where guitars would have been recorded at one moment and the bass at another. That’s what digital technology makes possible; it can be a good thing, we made records that were completely divided collages of disparate things, like Finsternis, which isn’t a live record at all. Lux, on the other hand, was recorded in one day and mixed in another, over very short time frames.

It’s interesting that Lux, light, and Finsternis, darkness, are opposed in the very way they were recorded… It’s a digression maybe, but in 2017, a compilation of unreleased Aluk Tolodo tracks came out. When I interviewed you in 2016, you said that before working on a new album, you liked to relisten to your whole discography and go back over what you did to try and see what you could reinterpret. Was this compilation part of this process in a way, and did it play a part in Lux’s creation?

Making Archives Vol.1 helped us create Lux’s composition, definitely. What I like a lot in Archives Vol.1 is that many different periods are juxtaposed, and there, too, each track is some kind of locked groove. There is a rhythm played over and over again, then a sudden break, and we move on to something else, another time and another place. Lux is composed like that as well: there is an architecture unifying the whole record, but each track is a monolith, then there is another one, and another one… In that sense, yes, we’d wanted to make that kind of succession for a while. And about going back over our discography: you were talking about Finsternis being in opposition to Lux. It’s really as an answer to Finsternis that Lux was written. All the albums have their mirror, and here, it’s Lux and Finsternis that function together structurally and conceptually.

Do you feel like with Aluk Todolo, everything was always there since the beginning, and that your purpose is to go deeper in that direction, toward a center, instead of going somewhere else or expanding?

[Laughs] It would be beautiful if it were the case, but no, it was still built over time. Many things were there from the beginning, but in a subconscious, unformulated way, maybe. I think that when we did the first gigs, the first 7-inch or even the first two albums, it was really a time of research and setting up. Now, we refer to it. To me, Descension is still a crucial album in our discography as a reference point. But what we were doing back then was very unconscious. I couldn’t even describe the recording of Descension—it’s a huge black hole.

Plus we learned how to play through the years; at the time of our first recordings, I felt like we were all relearning how to play music. We had played black metal before, but no music played like that. And with Occult Rock, which is named after the style we are claiming to play, ever since we started to record live, we built the basic formula of which Descension and Finsternis can be references or ramifications, and that we will go on refining. We still have a lot to explore! I don’t see us as a band in expansion indeed, we are more about implosion. We’re digging, we’re going inwards.

To what extent does the fact that you’ve become more aware of what you do influence how you work?

It made it more difficult because we became more demanding. To go back to your first question and why creating Lux took so long: since it’s our most composed album, there are tracks that we worked on then totally discarded because we realized that there was an almost metaphysical mistake in their composition, that there was no room for them in the album anymore. It felt wrong from the perspective of internal structure and intention. That’s why we couldn’t keep them, even though it sounded good. Yes, I would say that as we’re getting older, it’s how demanding we are that changed, mostly. But still, we go on surprising ourselves and learning: each album is a lesson, and this is something we have to keep. We are already talking about the next one—we’re going to try not to take eight years again—and we want to try new things out. Within the very minimalist formula of Aluk Todolo, there are still things to deepen and explore.

In the same line of thought, I’d like to talk about the artwork: you were saying that Voix was meant to make the voices present in your music since the beginning heard, and this time, the artwork almost shows that Lux was always in the center of Aluk Todolo, in your very logo, since the beginning too… Antoine did the artwork for Voix: was it the case for Lux as well?

Yes, it was one of his visions. Antoine’s visions, whether auditory or visual, really guided us for this record. He brought a lot to the composition of this album. I also want to say that Aluk Todolo’s visuals and compositions are one and the same anyway. The Lux symbol is a metamorphosis of our cross, our logo… This is something that has been in Aluk Todolo since Occult Rock: everything is always there, within. There is no need for illustration or anything else from the outside. Everything happens inwards.

Is it the usual way to go—that Antoine or someone else lays the foundations and the others build on top—or is it specific to this album?

It is very specific to this album. I think we listen to each other, definitely—the concept and the composition brought by Antoine were strong, they imposed themselves on us. It was a digression on a rhythm: everything was to be created from that. Antoine came in with a rhythmic architecture, he laid down the concept and the relationship between the tracks. More generally, it really changes from one album to the other. For Occult Rock, some compositions came from a bass-drums improvisation, some from a guitar riff, or from a jam session we did together and turned into a composition, but it really depends on the record. When something proves itself evident to us, we follow the path that’s traced. There are no rules when it comes to that.

To go back to the idea of Lux being in Aluk Todolo since the beginning: when you play live, there is always this light bulb hanging between the three of you. When did you start using this accessory?

At the very beginning, during the first Aluk Todolo concerts, we played in complete darkness. It came little by little. The light came for practical reasons, so we could see what we were doing instead of hurting ourselves while playing, which was the case before—we would leave the stage or the rehearsal space with bleeding hands, which eventually got sort of stupid. The conception of this light came from Shantidas [Riedacker], our guitar player, who actually works in architectural lighting design. This, too, happened through a string of intuitions. This light bulb almost became a kind of symbol for Aluk Todolo, and for Lux especially, it’s crazy all it ended up crystallizing. This light bulb, this light brought texts and even a certain relationship to the rhythm that came from observations, notably light observations… This light bulb flickering in the center of our concerts became a source of inspiration.

The way you’re talking about your music, now and in the press release, is very visual. Is synaesthesia an important concept for you? Is it how you experience music or something you’d like to trigger, maybe, especially with this album?

Synaesthesia was always present in Aluk Todolo. It was already quite obvious with Voix: making an instrumental album called “Voices” is already appealing to levels or states of consciousness that aren’t the ones of the common senses. And we elaborate an album like an artwork in itself, a piece. We envision the work Lux by Aluk Todolo in its full manifestation, both the music and the visual dimension. Holding the record in your hands allows a deeper understanding of the music. We sent it to you digitally, but I received the records during the summer, and it was a shock to finally listen to it like that. As soon as the record was in my hands, with its minimalist and complex sleeve, this alliance of the intertwined sigils of Lux and Aluk Todolo, these titles that are actually dots (the time signatures of the tracks), it was like I was listening to this music for the first time. To have this materialization gave me an understanding of the record I didn’t have before.

We already mentioned this in interviews: with Aluk Todolo, there is no illustration. Never. When we talk about the ritual dimension of our music, we always say that the music is the invocation and the manifestation at once. What we’re looking for through the music is that this music manifests itself in this way and that it can have this effect, that it can bring toward such a state or such a path of awakening. This is its goal. Our music is a spiritual quest, and its manifestations are the music and visuals we offer. It is our own personal quest—we each have our own quest within the band, we don’t do the same research, we don’t have the same aims—and it is what we are offering the listeners willing to embark, too. This is the ultimate goal, the ultimate quest. This time, it happens through the observation of light and its sonic manifestation by Aluk Todolo.

We already touched the subject when we talked about the relationship between Lux and Finsternis: the duality between light and darkness, black and white, this very strong and minimalist contrast that can open on many things, is a running thread throughout all your releases. Was it always clear that it would be an important aspect of this music—or this quest?

It has always been here. Aluk Todolo’s few incursions in color weren’t our initiative and, according to us, were more or less mistakes… I don’t really know how to explain that or even talk about it without saying things that are too explanatory. In the beginning, it’s really a matter of taste: we come from black metal; its old school black and white artworks were the aesthetics we wanted to bring to psychedelic rock. And it takes a much stronger symbolic meaning now, especially with Lux, that comes as an answer rather than in opposition to Finsternis.

It’s Antoine who took care of the artwork…

Along with Shantidas. I step back a little when it comes to the artwork, but we do everything together, both the conception and the validation. Nothing is done without the approval of the others.

Is the fact that you do everything yourselves, light design included, just a practical choice, or is it deliberate?

It’s deliberate. It is part of the inner conception I was talking about earlier: we don’t separate the graphic design from the music. However, we do work with other artists like Ëmgalaï, for instance, whose work we like a lot. He did some visuals with us for concerts, posters, t-shirts, etc. But for the Work itself, it’s the three of us without any outside intervention.

You were saying that Aluk Todolo is a spiritual quest both for the band and you as individuals. This year, the band turns twenty. What do you think about how far you’ve come, both as a person and as a band? At which stage of the quest are you? What changed or evolved through the years?

We are at the stage of this album that Lux is, and, let’s say, at this level of learning. Its music is, from the rhythmic perspective, very complex, and forces us to think about it and feel it in a way that, personally, took me to a higher state compared to where we were with Voix, which was still quite rock’n’roll in approach. In Lux, on the other hand, there is no room left for any vulgar interpretation of the music. Everything is written, everything is deliberate. It forces us to count in a way that isn’t only like, “When I get to the end of this part, I need to change.” Counting, and counting these very specific times, puts us in unique states of reception and vision that take us to a state of consciousness that isn’t necessarily higher, but at least altered. It’s doors opening.

At the beginning, when we had to play those times, I thought, “I have to count all these things, it’s annoying, it isn’t what I want to do.” I felt hindered, less spontaneous. But now, actually, it’s the other way around; I learned how to play with it. There is pleasure in the counts and tallies because they take you further in understanding music and sound, even if, in the beginning, it was an obstacle, some kind of challenge.

When we started working on the fifth track of Lux, which might be the most krautrock, the most motorik, and we were trying to keep the pace as long as possible, we only lasted a minute. We couldn’t manage to make this thing last, and think about changes on top… It was really driving us crazy. When you listen to the track, you can think that there are just two bass notes and that it’s going straight on for six minutes. But for me, it was one of the most complex tracks to learn and incorporate, really bring inside my body. But now that all the numbers have been incorporated, not only it’s okay, but it could go on forever. There are six minutes of infinity that are played there. It’s dizzying to play.

© Lea Saniez

It’s interesting because it sounds like a contradiction: this idea of counting and being extremely attentive to what you’re doing seems to be the opposite of inspiration, of an altered state of consciousness. And yet, in reality, it is through these constraints…

… That we end up on the opposite side and manage to forget ourselves. Because it forces you to think about numbers in a certain way—it isn’t about counting, it isn’t a matter of quantity, of doing something a certain amount of time, but about each number’s symbolism. All the structures of the album are subjected to this symbolism that needs to be incorporated: I use this word literally, it is about getting these numbers inside of you, having some internal rhythm enter your spirit and your body, and tying it up together. Here, we’re going back to what I told you about the fusion of the artwork and the music—it’s the same thing for the spirit and the body as well. In his foreword to The Gospel Of Mary Magdalene, Jean-Yves Leloup evokes the Noùs, which in the ancient world, “was seen as ‘the finest point of the soul’; or as some might say today, the ‘angel of the soul.’ It gives us access to that intermediate realm between the purely sensory and the purely spiritual, which Henry Corbin so eloquently names as the imaginal.” Here is our search: reaching that state and ending up at this finest point while our music manifests and is perceived, received.

This makes me think about sacred geometry, which is mentioned in the press release as well. It’s a very architectural concept—a metaphor you also used earlier—and Lux does feel like there is something spatial about it, a third dimension…

Before a show where we’ll play Lux, if I close my eyes, I see a big ramification—that nobody will ever see—, the rhythms’ entanglement as a kind of tree. The record was built as a palindrome, and that’s how I see the path it follows. Then, within this path that is actually a big, fairly precise map—I see it very precisely, it’s a vision I can summon every time and that helps me play—, there are all the counts and tallies, the textures, the durations. It is different moments of visualization, and it is indeed much more architectural, like paths with numbers.

What you describe reminds me of the art of memory, a technique that, during antiquity, involved visualizing a speech you wanted to give, for instance, as a house with different rooms in order to remember it…

[Laughs] Exactly, yes. I’d stumbled upon a book about that a while back. It’s funny to talk about this because I’d never made the connection, but for a long time, we had the project of a record with several work titles, among which Stances [Stanzas], where the point was actually that each track would be a house. Which, by the way, can have an alchemical meaning. Ultimately, it sounds a lot like Lux, where each track has its own time signature, and they follow each other abruptly. Each track is a space with its own ramifications and numerical values.

In the meantime, you recently released a solo record, and Shantidas did too. Has it influenced your work for Aluk Todolo in one way or another?

There are always connections. I indeed released an album of pure solo guitar in June. There is always this need to create music: I always have a lot of music in my head, and I know it’s the same for Shantidas and Antoine. It doesn’t take the same shape, but we all have parallel projects. And we don’t live in the same cities, but we aren’t going to not play anything for months when we can’t see each other. One of the reasons why I wanted to make this album was to find back this sense of solitude with this instrument, especially the acoustic instrument. It has something to do with what we were looking for by recording in an analog studio with Aluk Todolo: dealing with a naked instrument without an amplifier, with nothing but acoustic sounds, and playing with it things that may have something to do with electric sound, waves… My project, Inselberg, is this field of research. So yes, it will always nurture what we’ll do with Aluk Todolo, and at the same time, it is the pursuit of my path through this instrument I sometimes miss. I love to play bass in Aluk Todolo, but I like to keep playing the guitar as well; it’s a different relationship to waves and resonance that I still want to explore.

You’re a guitar player, originally?

I started playing the guitar and the bass in parallel. I was a guitar player in my first bands, but the bass was always very dear to me. At the very beginning, it was really the instrument I wanted to play. Discovering Cliff Burton, things like that, was really a shock; in the bands I loved—Maiden, Metallica (the first ones)—the bass was very important. Later on, when we started Aluk Todolo, it was a time when I really wanted to get out of black metal and metal in general, where the bass is still a somewhat secondary instrument. I discovered soul music and jazz around that time and relearned how to play bass through these styles.

You’ve been working with Norma Evangelium Diaboli and The Ajna Offensive for a while now. These labels, NoEvDia especially, are very black metal-oriented. How do you feel there?

We first met The Ajna Offensive, with whom we’ve been in touch since the very beginning of the band. We’ve known Tyler [Davis] from Ajna for a very long time, even before Aluk Todolo. We had talked about working together several times, but it had never happened. We finally got together for the On the Power of the Sphinx split, then Occult Rock. The collaboration with NoEvDia came from The Ajna Offensive, who put us in touch. According to us, they’re the perfect labels for what we do. The business aspect is at the right place—it’s there to set things in motion, but it isn’t an end in itself. And NoEvDia is indeed a very black metal-oriented label, but it’s first and foremost a label with a very strong religious and spiritual dimension. This is the common feature of the bands he signs. There is a strong aesthetic and spiritual line in all his choices. It’s probably what convinced NoEvDia to work with us. Anyway, the alliance with these two labels is perfect. We understand each other.

Lux will be released in a few days. What’s next for the band?

We’ll play two festivals for the release of the record in September: Wolf City in Berlin, organized by our booking agency Swamp Booking, then Summer Dying Loud in Łódź. We’re currently scheduling upcoming tour dates and festivals. It will start in December: we’ll go to Poland with Furia and Ghaals WYRD. A release party will happen in Paris, too, probably in 2025. You mentioned our twenty-year anniversary earlier: we’ll have available at our concerts a jubilee-tape tracing back our career. It’s a retrospective of our records in the exclusive shape of a tape. It’s our first best-of! It sounds stupid said like that, but we gave it a magical meaning.

How did you do that? It’s always hard for me to picture your tracks independently from the whole album…

It’s the same principle as Archive Vol.1: some kind of big collage, a trajectory, a labyrinth within our whole discography. It isn’t chronological at all. All of the albums are featured, there is nothing previously unreleased, it will be made in a very small batch and will be only available at our shows. This tape is a way for us to retrace the whole path, revisit our whole discography to see where it leads us. It recreates links, associates, connects, or superimposes tracks in a strange way to give them a new meaning and present them in a different light.

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