Between composing music for films and his own personal project, writer, composer, performer, director and multi-instrumentalist Emmanuel Alias has his hands full, to say the least. Producer of several musical projects for the label Musique Nomade – including those of Anachnid and MC Q052 – he recently penned the original score for the series FEM with Kroy (Camille Poliquin). Last Spring, he released the album Embrace Chaos with his band ALIAS, and they’ll be spending the a few weeks in the Fall of 2024 in the U.K. and France, before presenting a showcase at M for Montréal in November of the year. We talked with the multi-tasking musician about his solidly booked Autumn.
“I studied jazz drumming at the Conservatoire,” says Alias, when asked about his career path. “I used to live in Aix-en-Provence, Southern France, and I fronted various bands left and right. I had a night job at the Lycée Militaire, and apart from that, I played in bars and I busked in the street with the sa,e keyboard player who still plays with me live today.
“A friend of mine had gone off to live in New York for a few years, and when he got back home he simply said, ‘What the hell are you still doing playing in those dodgy bars? There’s nothing for you to do at the military college or in those bars. Don’t you want to make music professionally?’
“But it was complicated for me,” recalls Alias. “I didn’t want to live in Paris. I’d studied in Marseille, but I didn’t want to go there either. That’s when my friend mentioned Canada.” Emmanuel Google-searched “studio musique Montréal” and “I called the first one at the top of the list. It was Jean-Phi Goncalvès who picked up the phone!”
Talk about luck! Stumbling upon Goncalvès, an accomplished composer, arranger, and drummer, and founder of XS Musique, a studio with deep roots in the screen music world. “I’ll never forget saying, ‘Hey man! I’m looking for an internship, even if it’s unpaid, you don’t have to commit to anything! I just want to come and play music, learn and discover for three months.’” At the end of those three months, Alias was hired, and spent more than seven years at XS Musique, learning screen composing (as well as composing for the circus, since Cirque du Soleil is a regular client), while taking advantage of the facilities to simultaneously develop his own project.
For the past five years, he and his manager have been running their own screen music production studio, ALIAS Musique. He recently created music for the series FEM, a unique project in which the music is woven into the dramatic thread of the story, about a teenager named Zav who questions his gender identity. “For FEM, the brief was rather unusual in that they were looking for a hyperpop musical profile,” says Alias, referencing the musical genre that emerged in the U.K. in the 2010s, and for which trans artist SOPHIE has become the icon. “Hyperpop is miles away from what I do with my band ALIAS, so I had to do a lot of research into the genre, the artists who developed it ,and the way they worked,” says Alias. “Once that was done, my writing evolved towards something a little darker, even though hyperpop has a fairly fast, almost happy tempo.”
Select the image to play the YouTube video of the ALIAS song “Cocktails and Dreams”
The sound of ALIAS – “I searched for an original name for my project for a long time, until I realized I didn’t need to overt-hink it: Alias is my real name!” he says – has its own identity: it’s rock, but includes electronic instruments, and it’s wild, almost punk. Alias composes and records everything at home, and invites a few musicians to play certain instruments which he doesn’t play, such as violin, or saxophone. The band’s “musicians” join him onstage to play live.
“My previous album [Jozef, 2022] had quieter moments, but after playing about 50 shows, the songs became faster, the fuzz on the guitars more violent, and my vocals more animalistic,” says Alias. “That led me to write new songs that sound more like what I want to play live – there’s even songs that I don’t play live anymore, because they’re too smooth! I’m not saying I won’t do quiet music again with ALIAS, but it’s not what I feel like doing right now.”
Alias” schedule is quite packed for the coming months: producing an album by Q052, a Mi’gmaq rapper and singer-songwriter; composing music for the next season of FEM; and working on an album to be released in the Fall of 2025. As Alias says: “You must strike while the iron is hot!”