Who Is Autre Ne Veut?

Meet the artist behind Anxiety, one of the best records of the year.

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Complex Original

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We currently live in a musical environment where repurposed soul, funk, and R&B from an older generation seems to define progression of the genres themselves. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. Songs that follow this structure, like "Suit and Tie," "Blurred Lines," or "Get Lucky," are difficult not to enjoy. But from out the hurricane of music following suit, we find a refreshing drizzle in 31-year-old Arthur Ashin from Brooklyn, NY, known to his fans as Autre Ne Veut.

Although Autre Ne Veut has been making music for years, his latest effort, Anxiety, is garnering attention from some of the biggest musical outlets as one of the best records of the year. In fact, we ranked it at No. 4 on our list of the Best Albums of 2013 (So Far). Combining elements of pop, soul, R&B, funk, electronic, and indie, Autre Ne Veut manages to marry and progress genres of music to a place they have never been before, rather than revisiting a past form of music to reassemble it in a new way.

His rich melodies, thick harmonies, layered production, and vibrant hooks all rest nicely in a sing-a-long package of eclectic emotions and swaying moods. However, following Arthur's break out record, one thing remains to be thoroughly explored. Who is Autre Ne Veut?

As told to Ben Meredith

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Growing Up In the Suburbs

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Autre Ne Veut: "You want to believe that on some level [that you’re hometown inspired your music]. There’s know way it didn’t, but it wasn’t like I grew up in an area that was rich with culture or anything. It was just a working class, suburbs kind of vibe. I don’t actually have that much Connecticut pride unfortunately, but it was cool.


 

There were no good bands in my town. You know there’s like this magic town where every kid started a band in high school and half of them were good and have careers based on relationships built at that time? That wasn’t what my life was like at all.


 

“I was close enough to the New York City that I used to spend a lot of weekends coming in seeing shows and stuff like that, so my outlet growing up was New York mostly. That was the place to do something. You didn’t need a car to get around. Hop on a train and you’re there in not too long."

"There were no good bands in my town. You know there’s like this magic town where every kid started a band in high school and half of them were good and have careers based on relationships built at that time? That wasn’t what my life was like at all. Kids that had bands were making goofy band knock off shit or bad punk bands or whatever.

“There wasn’t a lot going on in terms of that that was successful in any way. It became something that I practiced on my own. I also was super insecure about my abilities, so I kept it at home for a really long time."

Getting Into Music

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Autre Ne Veut: "I did a lot of choral music in high school and that was kind of my primary, stable outlet for music because I didn’t feel comfortable being a soloist. It was a cool, safe space for me musically.

“I had a, I don’t even think she was a choir teacher to be honest, but basically she told me that one of the coolest things about male voices is that they don’t lose their upper register when their voice changes, they just gain extra notes. There is a little bit of a loss, but you can maintain a ton of that if you continue to work it out as your voice is changing, so it’s just something that I was kind of aware of. For social reasons, I wanted to be a baritone, but I was probably a tenor, just kind of goofy trying to be a man as a five foot tall little scrawny kid.


 

Music, even if I ended up doing something different or do end up doing something different in the long run, it’s just something that is life blood. If I’m not participating in some way, I feel like I’m wasting my time.


 

"I was taking piano lessons when I was maybe five. I wasn’t super generative, but I would kind of skip over lessons and just bang out ideas on my own. I had a Casio keyboard just like every other kid in the suburbs at that point in time. I played a little saxophone, tried playing guitar for a little while.

"Music, even if I ended up doing something different or do end up doing something different in the long run, it’s just something that is life blood. If I’m not participating in some way, I feel like I’m wasting my time.

"When I was a kid I would kind of just jam out. [Laughs.] I wasn’t any good. In high school I decided I wanted to learn guitar, so I picked it up and starting teaching myself some basic chords and started playing with friends. Guitar inherently lends itself to be guitar music, especially when you’re not good at guitar. We would do things like cover ‘Stir It Up’ or The Velvet Underground or whatever then write goofy, folky pop songs. In college, I had a rock band that was somewhere between The Cure and Pavement. So, kind of a bunch of not very good bands or projects for a lot of years.”

Influences

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Autre Ne Veut: "My parents were Kenyan expats, so they were out there for a really long time right before I was born. So, [we listened to] not so much East African music, but West African music and South African music was pretty big. Paul Simon-y sorts of shit. My dad loved Fleetwood Mac, so we listened to a bunch of that. Phil Collins, my mom was really into that.


 

I was also really into Brian Eno, and that’s why I started doing electronics in college. Trying to do music for airport knock off stuff which was no good.


 

"The first tapes that I wore thin on my boombox were Michael Jackson’s Bad and the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. That was where I first kind of established my first sense of taste. A lot of reggae growing up. New Age-y shit, Enya and Enigma, things like that.

“[At one point] I got really into country music and started writing country songs. I was also really into Brian Eno, and that’s why I started doing electronics in college. Trying to do music for airport knock off stuff which was no good.

"I always loved R&B, even Boyz II Men shit. I would sing that and that pushes you into falsetto inherently. I always loved music like that and once I felt comfortable doing it, I never really wanted to turn back. It feels better to be able to go there. [Laughs.]

“I’ve listened to so much different music in my life and loved so much different kinds of music. [I listened to] anything between atonal and a percussive kind of noisy stuff to avante-classical. But I also have serious love for Timbaland, vintage Neptunes stuff, and J Dilla or whatever. Even Dr. Luke hits it on the head a lot. I am intentionally trying to not limit myself in terms of source material and trying not to prevent myself from making choices that seem contradictory, but then ultimately trying to make them work, you know?"

Writing Jingles

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Autre Ne Veut: "I think I was born into wanting to do music on some level. As I got older and older it seemed less and less possible, so I kind of gave up the hope of doing it at some point in my 20s.

"I was working at this production house in the city shortly after college and was writing jingles and didn’t even have the energy to work on my own music when I got home. I kind of gave up on working on stuff at that point. A big part of that was realizing how it felt antithetical at the end of the day to being able to make anything of substance.


 

It was music making that was about as uncreative as humanly possible.


 

"It was like a year long gig. I used to work for this company that did a lot of porting of commercials—this was like 2004, somewhere in there—to the web. A lot of licensing issues were even more Wild West than they are today in terms of what the value of music is on the web for artists.

"One solution was that companies could hire production houses like the one I worked for to port out these commercials. Because they owned all the rights to the songs that would be in the back of an Estee Lauder commercial or NFL ad or something. I would basically re-create an alternate version that nodded to the same kind of effect of the original music without actually being the original music in any discernible way. It was music making that was about as uncreative as humanly possible."

How He Got His Name

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Autre Ne Veut: "Autre Ne Veut is inscribed on the back of this hat ornament at The Cloisters, which is a part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I picked it maybe 10 years ago, I was just up there with some friends.


 

I was imagining a context in which this duke was forced into the marriage, whatever, I don’t know, and the mistress was his one kind of emotional outlet.


 

“For some reason I haven’t been able to verify that this is real, but I have this memory that somebody told me that it was a gift from an English duke to his French mistress and something about this idea of wanting something that is just outside your reach.

“I was imagining a context in which this duke was forced into the marriage, whatever, I don’t know, and the mistress was his one kind of emotional outlet, but she was impossible on some levels too and all he could give her was this hat pin. I kind of liked the emotional tension of that at the time, but again I was 20-years-old and then it stuck.

"I guess on some level I like some things being a little vague, a little up in the air. I like the idea of everyone from fan to journalist kind of making their own interpretation about what they think the name means, so I guess it doesn’t really matter what people think."

First Live Shows

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His Older Albums

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The Making of Anxiety

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Autre Ne Veut: "We were all in a room. [I worked with] my friend Dan Lopatin, who does Oneohtrix Point Never, and my friend Joel, who works with Dan on this project Ford & Lopatin. The sound came about from us playing the tracks live together in a live room, but we also dumped out the midi and then kind of went from there. Then took that live sound and changed the sounds and changed the vibe. I definitely had help on the production side, but I was executive producer.


 

There was a painstaking process of pulling out 75% of things. So the idea was to not say no to any ideas early on in the production, but then make really stark decisions. What is privileged right now? What is the thing that needs to be there at this moment?


 

"Somebody would play from the beginning of the track to the end whatever it is that they’re playing. Then there was a painstaking process of pulling out 75% of things. So the idea was to not say no to any ideas early on in the production, but then make really stark decisions. What is privileged right now? What is the thing that needs to be there at this moment? There are exceptions, but for the most part, we were trying to have this one privileged thing happening at any given time. There was a lot of not saying no to anything and then cutting out most of it.

"With my earlier recordings there is tons of vocal layers, both actually performed but also massive octave pitches. I was listening to a lot of Silent Shout, that Knife record and trying to borrow ideas some ideas from that.

“I wanted the vocals to be more raw and exposed so I didn’t overly process most of them, but then there are these moments where there’s obvious pitching effects. I wanted each of the vocal effects to stand out for themselves and have more of a punch. Take a Dr. Luke/Ke$ha vocal treatment idea but put it in a weird place and have it do something too blatant. Instead of being comfortable and fitting in in a normal pop way, it would just stand out in an awkward way.


 

When I wrote that song, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and then had a weird little moment where the time period in my head between the present moment and my death kind of collapsed to no time at all.


 

"All the lyrics are stream of consciousness, so there’s not much thought put into them. [Laughs.] I just think about something, focus on it, and just go for it and see what happens. I guess I don’t swear that well inherently. Nothing gets written down.

"‘Gonna Die’ is pretty self-explanatory, kind of an existential crisis moment. When I wrote that song, I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom and then had a weird little moment where the time period in my head between the present moment and my death kind of collapsed to no time at all. I had a strong awareness of that and was kind of freaking out thinking I need to do something to distract myself, so I went in and knocked that song out.

“‘Warning’ is a song about trying to relate to somebody where all the clear warnings are there that there’s a problem and shit’s dangerous for whatever reason, but still going ahead anyway. ‘Promises’ is a song written in the midst of a relationship about the final breakup. It’s a statement of finality or a failed statement of finality and relationships being complicated. I don’t know, they’re all little neurotic, overly perseverating on one idea."

The Theme of Anxiety

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Autre Ne Veut: "I was in grad school at the time for clinical psychology and also seeing a therapist. I was really dead set on this idea that I had some sort of disorder, that I was fucked up.


 

I was like, ‘How can I be so unhappy all the time if I don’t [have a personality disorder]?'


 

"I was like, ‘How can I be so unhappy all the time if I don’t?’ So I’m in therapy and basically my therapist was like, ‘No man, you don’t have any real disorder. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t have a personality disorder.’

“So I was in grad school stressing out. My first record came out while I was in grad school and on one level, I really wanted that to work out, but was also telling myself that I didn’t care. Just stupid, normal first world problems.

"It was all building up at the same time and I was feeling totally overwhelmed by everything in my life. It just seemed like that was the honest theme, everything was hard to deal with. That record was just a way for me to deal with that stuff.”

On His Fanbase

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The Future

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Autre Ne Veut: "[I just played the] Pitchfork Fest in Chicago. I’m doing a handful of European dates and festival stuff mostly. I’m super new to this so I don’t know exactly what that’s going to feel like, but in my experience with the festivals I have done they’re really different than just touring. A headlining tour is super regimented, it’s like every night you’re in a different town doing your thing driving all day, but festivals seem a bit more relaxed.


 

I want a meatier sound. I want each of the sounds to have less going on and have more heft to everything


 

"There is a lot of enforced focusing on Anxiety in the sense that I’m still touring it. I’ve got tours pretty much until the beginning of next year, so that’s kind of hard to write too much during. I’ve been writing, but nothing production wise really.

“I just did this one track for Adult Swim and I’m going to try and get a couple other little projects done this year too, but it’s kind of more avant-garde world side projects. I want a meatier sound. I want each of the sounds to have less going on and have more heft to everything. A more thoroughly picked apart sound palette, but I’m not exactly sure what that’s going to sound like yet.”

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