"With Oiseau de Nuit I wanted to borrow the codes of hip-hop production, knowing very well that this wasn’t the kind of music I was naturally inclined to make. Still, the records that stuck with me before and during the creative process were from Beastie Boys, Kendrick Lamar, Makaya McCraven, Thelonious Monk, Armand Hammer, Dean Blunt, Alice Coltrane, Cymande, Yusef Lateef, Lolita Cuevas, Georgia Ann Muldrow, and Brahja. I stayed away from people who grab a piano or sit at a piano to write an album. The energy of jam sessions excited me after a year and a half of touring with a band of musicians with whom I blew up the boundaries of my songs on stage. I was finally discovering, or rather understanding, jazz. I was interested in further exploring sound collage, which I had touched upon on PISSENLIT.
I had also acquired a large collection of vinyl records and I thought of making a sampling album. Alas, I quickly felt cramped in this format and I decided to create custom samples, by inviting many musicians to jam in my studio. This was the spark plug for the composition of almost half of my record, as my studio was invaded by my full band. For the rest I returned to my first love, alone at the piano or with a guitar, but the recorded material would be arranged in great part with the help of the jam sessions. I spent a lot of time experimenting on my computer with all the material that I had recorded on reel-to-reel."
"Writing wise my starting point was the things we choose not to say. I was questioning my identity, the public one, the intimate one, and the one that only I have access to. What was innate, what was constructed? I turned in circles for a while before daring to reveal what I never had before, diving into the depths of my childhood and my adolescence in order to try to reach the source and, maybe, understand myself better. I found several instances of violence which, even when they didn’t leave physical marks, burrowed into the flesh, which can lead to a need for dissociation, a powerful desire to become another, a double, a new being, to get past the imprint of the dark. Traps and distractions abound; affectless sexuality, camouflage, compensation, journeys into the void, multiple small deaths, resurrection, escape throughout time and space, gender or body change. Anything to feel alive. Imagined lives at first, as recollection mingles with projection, and the lines between parallel lives and memories blur. By drawing on memories, the multiple lives of a single person collide until they become one and the same."
Antoine Corriveau is a Montreal singer-songwriter. In the musical landscape since 2011, he broke through in 2014 with the critically acclaimed Les ombres longues. That album features the song “Le nouveau vocabulaire,” which won the Prix de la chanson SOCAN (by popular vote). Cette chose qui cognait au creux de sa poitrine sans vouloir s’arrêterwas released in October 2016, earning 4 nominations at the Gala de L’ADISQ, making it onto the Polaris Music Prize2017 Long List, being included among the ten finalists for the Prix Félix Leclerc – and winning the Prix André “Dédé” Fortin, as well as the Indie Rock Album of the Year award at the 2017 GAMIQ. By then the vast Francophone market is already closely monitoring Corriveau’s career, and he is picked as one of the five new voices to watch out for by Le Point (France): “He is often compared to Bashung. It is true that their voices, their writing and their looks are not all that different.” The Feu de forêt EP was released on the Secret City Records label in November 2018, thrilling critics, in addition to winning the Folk EP of the Year award at the 2019 GAMIQ.