Also known for Télévision, a fashion magazine edited by them, Télévision Services is a group of French artists that deals with fashion, publishing, graphic design, photography and direction. The founders of the Transalpine collective Hugo Blanzat, Boris Camaca and Matthieu Rocolle collaborated for a long time with artists from different fields: among them there is also the musician Gabriel Legeleux, best known as Superpoze.
For we the living, the second work of the French musician, is a record that has transposed the apocalypse into music: Télévision Services instead transposed the apocalypse into video and also curated all the graphic components of the album, from its design to its artwork.
Your collaboration with Superpoze has also become an installation at the Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris titled For we the living: a piano placed in the center of the space allows invited musicians to reinterpret Superpoze pieces with your visuals as the only background. This is your last collaboration but how did it start in the very beginning?
We first started working with Gabriel on his debut album, Opening. Back then, with the help of Camille Petit, we created the cover artwork, shot by Boris, and a few graphic elements. When Gabriel came back a year later with his new music, we had a long talk about how he had imagined the story behind For We The Living. And then we came up with formal interpretations of this story. Basically Gabriel describes how the end of the world and its aftermath would go throughout the album. The idea at first was to translate those emotions into short video arrangements, but it quickly became a much more complex process.
Gabriel entrusted you in everything in For we the living, from managing the artwork to the direction of the videos. How does your collaboration work? Does he let himself be guided by your insights or have you built a collaborative path?
Gabriel gave us a couple of directions. To him, everything had to be related to the end of our time. He had mentioned the end of Lars Von Trier’s movie, Melancholia, and this powerful image of two planets crashing into each other. He was always talking about a happy end of the world. Not even happy but peaceful end of the world. Then we showed him the end of Zabriskie Point and he was instantly seduced. Then, we began the process of building up the story, that would mainly take place around abandoned industrial zones that you can see from highways.
The main intention behind this collaboration was to find the way to accurately follow his inspirations and the story telling behind his album. Once we had agreed on how to properly translate them he entrusted us with everything.
How did you come to the concept that guides all the album For we the living?
We shared many inspirations with Gabriel and the label, and presented eight scripts to them. But we had a more global plan for the art direction of this album. We had also decided to « document » the events with our own writing style. Hence, we followed a very strict protocol, filing away and archiving every detail, up to the GPS location of every picture that was taken, picking up samples of dirt, various elements, like scientists would do, and scanning everything in the process. It would then become sort of an archive of the whole project. This is an approach we like to apply to other works, such as our magazine Télévision, but it was a definite good fit with For We The Living and Gabriel’s intentions.
The series of videos that accompany the album are very interesting: an aesthetic that fully represents the apocalyptic atmosphere of Superpoze’s songs. They have to be seen as an integral part of Superpoze’s musical work, a whole inseparable where slowmotion, blur, colors and landscapes exaggerate the images evoked by the notes. How did you build the plot around this series?
After we had made up our mind on the main direction of the videos, we watched a lot of different experiments on-line, based mainly on the idea of « serendipity ». We started going through the video archives of different Youtubers, such as The Slow Mo Guys, and found some similarities with what we had in mind for our « end of the world » scripts. This basically led the writing of all eight scenes, that would end up matching the progression of music and melodies throughout the album. And it is also why there’s a similar forward momentum towards the apocalypse, and then a slower advancement during its aftermath (Gabriel’s album is also divided in two very distinct parts).
For what concerns the composition of images: who or what inspired you? Are there references to other works?
Youtube experiments (the slow mo guys), Bernd et Hilla Becher (especially their work on water towers), Jon Rafman, De Chico (Superpoze), and of course Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.
What’s the best album cover ever?