Fievel Is Glauque

Rong Weicknes is the loosest, tightest, densest, and catchiest record that Fievel Is Glauque has made. Played by an eight-person version of the band (an international collaboration between New York-based pianist and bandleader Zach Phillips, Brussels-based singer Ma Clément, and a perpetually shifting lineup of musicians), the songs on Rong Weicknes are so layered that the details might elude the ear at first, but the melodies and strength of the playing are immediate.

Finding themselves in the novel position of having, for the first time, more than a single day to record an album and a label to record it for, Zach and Ma put together a band and brought them to live and record at The Outlier Inn, a farm and music studio in upstate New York, from July 27th to August 2nd, 2023. The Rong Weicknes octet features an array of accomplished musicians from US, Canada, and Brussels: Ma Clément (vocals), Zach Phillips (keyboards), Thom Gill (guitar), Logan Kane (bass), Daniel Rossi (percussion), André Sacalxot (saxophone, flute), Gaspard Sicx (drums), and Chris Weisman (guitar, electric sitar).

With time in the studio to experiment, Fievel Is Glauque finally had the resources to try an old idea Phillips had never brought to fruition: a recording approach he calls “live in triplicate.” First laying down a foundational take, then a duplicate take on top of it, and finally an improvisatory, antagonistic take, the octet exclusively played live together without using a click track, so that each layer of performance features tiny rhythmic variations and imperfections, both intentional and not.

Though the tracking sessions were infused with spontaneity and a camaraderie fostered by the studio’s idyllic country setting, the record’s post-production was challenging, protracted, and onerous. Since there was no overdubbing in the traditional sense, Phillips and Steve Vealey, the album’s tracking, mixing, and mastering engineer, had to instead subtractively chisel away at the mixes, removing bits and pieces to allow the form of the songs to emerge and submerge alternatingly, raggedly, with lots of edges. But although Zach is an experienced producer and engineer himself, he’d recorded the vast majority of his past work on antiquated tape machines, while this was a high fidelity recording tracked digitally in Pro Tools in an ideal studio environment.

Struggling with the lack of finality inherent to digital editing, the modern standard where any and all changes and fixes remain continuously possible, Phillips eventually settled on a performative approach familiar to him from working on tape, rebuilding the material from Pro Tools and individually editing each constituent instrumental stem (often numbering over 100 per song) on the barebones workstation Mixbus (designed to replicate analog workflows) in painfully long sessions as he selectively removed approximately 40% of the recorded audio from every instrumental track. Vealey then mixed from Zach’s edits in an equally time-consuming Pro Tools workflow, fighting to maintain the shape and spirit of the compositions as Phillips encouraged him to “become a member of the band,” emphasize the “wrong” elements, and push the songs into yet-greater dimensionality.

“We had a lot of material to work with, so we could have made something very minimal or something very maximal,” says Vealey. “Zach’s perseverance allowed us to go in this maximal direction. My job was to facilitate that. There is a magic to saying yes to the ideas and then figuring it out.” The intensity of the post-production process negatively mirrored the comfortable, easygoing, bucolic setting of the record’s initial tracking. Fittingly, because if there is one central, recurrent theme to Fievel’s music, it’s to do with the tension of balance: the dialectic that synthesizes something new from dualistic propositions; the floating superposition of “both 1 and 0” in quantum computing’s treatment of binary; or the “analytic third” created by the combination of the client and therapist in psychoanalysis.

The result of this long process is simultaneously dense and airy, like a cake. Fragments of takes join and collide, melodies leap or lurch across the stereo field, and instruments have a tendency to unexpectedly snowball, doubling or tripling before suddenly cutting out and leaving space for other sounds. Asked to contextualize the record’s collage-like approach to mixing and unique recording methodology, Phillips cites White Noise’s seminal 1969 album “An Electric Storm” for its meticulous collage-like intricacy and the Clash’s Mick Jones, who advocated for full-band-double overdubs on “London Calling.” Rong Weicknes is the result of a band using their hard-won resources to take a major risk and try something new. It’s obtuse, maximalist, imperfect, and, above all, refreshing.

The album begins with “Hover,” a sparse and melodic song that gradually builds into a climactic swell of multi-tracked tumult as Clément’s insistent repetition of the title alternately rises and fades into the mix. Next, “As Above So Below” marries propulsive and upbeat pop songcraft (inspired by Phillips and Clément’s affection for the resplendent tropes of American and French radio hits) with dense production (the layers of Thom Gill and Chris Weisman’s palm-muted guitars produce a cloud of shaggy percussion). The lyrics, as elsewhere on the album, are oblique and poetic, privileging playful phonetic and associative meanings over plain expressivity. Are they kidding around or not? Whatever the case, the lyrics’ focus on magic affirms the band’s trust in chance or kismet. Zach and Ma met accidentally, their writing process (in which rather complex songs are written in a single day, built up linearly, one melodic phrase after another) relies entirely on intuition and attention to the moment, and their recording methods are designed to let in the unexpected or uncontrolled.

“Love Weapon” (originally written by Phillips’ band Blanche Blanche Blanche with Sarah Smith) is a deceptively straightforward pop song with a simple pulse that often reverses directions. Its off-kilter but chilly near-funk groove almost resembles a surprisingly felicitous blend of Steely Dan and Royal Trux. As the album progresses, it swings between subtle sweetness (as on “Toute Suite,” probably the simplest tune in the Fievel oeuvre) and ramshackle exuberance (as on “Great Blues”). “I’m Scanning Things I Can’t See” and the frenetic, stop-start “Dark Dancing,” both previously released as a digital single in 2024 in demo form with Zach playing all the instruments, get the deluxe treatment here to great effect, revealing the band’s versatility in approaching the same material differently. Rong Weicknes concludes with the extraordinarily catchy “Haut Contre Bas,” the only French-language song on the album. At its denouement, the song surges into an overflowing barrage of sound that somehow remains melodic, pulsing, and even danceable, and we are left simultaneously overwhelmed and wanting more.

In this record, there are gaps… but… they are filled… with images.
Would you rather… have an explanation… or an image?
Sometimes, perhaps, seized… if you are fortunate.

So goes the brief, halting narration sampled here from Richard Foreman’s “City Archives'' on the interlude “Would You Rather?” Halfway between credo and proviso, the quote calls to mind the concept of Rong Weicknes as a rebus, one of those puzzles solved by deciphering images to reconstruct a verbal message. There will be no top-down explanations here, it announces: only lucky seizure via the record’s sounds and gestures and the listener’s own associative responses. The citation’s inclusion also highlights the band’s kinship with Foreman’s work in avant-garde theater, renowned for its steadfast avoidance of "emotional traps'' by creating uncanny settings and characters that ward off easy identification.

Following the release of God’s Trashmen Sent to Right the Mess, a compilation of early mono cassette recordings from band rehearsals (released on New Year’s Day, 2021), and their full-length studio debut Flaming Swords (recorded in one evening and released on Thanksgiving Day, 2022), Rong Weicknes is Fievel Is Glauque’s sophomore studio album and debut for Fat Possum. It is by leaps and bounds the band’s most confident statement yet. Phillips and Clément’s respective approaches to songwriting have now merged into a singular, immediately recognizable style. They sound more together than ever—the songcraft is tighter, the humor is more pronounced, and the band plays together with impressive fluency. 

Zach Phillips has long been a key figure in the world of underground, experimental songwriting—the kind of musically sophisticated but resolutely non-conforming DIY music known to many but lacking a unified, conventionalized history in popular music discourse. Phillips—both solo and in collaborations like Blanche Blanche Blanche—has released over fifty albums in this vein, and his now defunct label OSR Tapes was centrally important to weirdo music communities in the Northeast.

As for the album’s unusual name, Phillips cites the classic St. Paul's adage, "when I am weak, then I am strong,” which came up in discussions with Ma as they improvised the title track one afternoon in Brussels. The quote had dogged him for some years, leading to a eureka moment: “But what if it’s the wrong weakness?” In true Fievel fashion, the fractured spelling comes directly from Clément’s lyrics notebook as she phonetically transcribed those words, her second-language skills exhausted from a gig the night before.

We asked Ma Clément for her perspective, and her brief account may ultimately say more than all of the above: “This album is about space, ‘cause it’s recorded live but it’s not, ‘cause it’s overdubbed but it’s not, ‘cause we were all in the same room but we weren’t, ‘cause the mixing was about creating breathing in the thickness of the raw material.”