The coffee is strong, the music is relentless and there’s a steady stream of semi-famous people wandering around. This is the Red Bull Music Academy.
We’re at La Gaîté Lyrique, a digital arts and modern music centre in central Paris in early November, where the academy’s annual travelling roadshow has set up shop for a month. Part of the building dates from the mid-19th century, but what’s happening today is a thoroughly modern expression of creativity.
Dozens of up-and-coming musicians – bursting with ideas but with little money or means to implement them – have travelled from the four corners of the world to network, play and collaborate.
It’s easy to be cynical about corporate-branded events, but spending time with the academy, which was founded in 1998, and its participants, you get the sense something positive is happening. Numerous state-of-the-art studios and equipment have been made available for use, and various well-known mentors are here to offer their expertise, including genre-hopping Austrian composer and producer Dorian Concept and techno producer “Mad” Mike Banks.
A cafeteria serves plentiful food and coffee. There are chill-out areas to chat and swap ideas. A radio station broadcasts from on-site and there is inspiration in every corner. You could spend days in here without seeing daylight.
Outside of the academy, dozens of concerts take place throughout the month-long festival. Following the Paris attacks, the RBMA has, following advice from the French authorities, stopped hosting shows until November 19th.
Secondtime lucky
For this year’s Irish participant, electronic musician Great Lakes Mystery, aka Gareth Anton Averill, it is a case of second time lucky, after he applied for last year’s event in Tokyo. “I didn’t get in, and it’s a brutal application process; it’s all handwritten. It’s like a personality test,” he says, laughing. “I really recommend that people don’t get scared away by it, though, because this is the real deal.”
Averill has a family background in music (his father Steve was a one-time Radiator from Space who designed U2's artwork over the decades, while his cousin Alan fronts metal band Primordial), but his work as Great Lakes Mystery has not been informed by his relatives. He was initially enamoured with film scores and studied film at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Even today, he works as a sound designer and has composed for numerous films, including Irish skateboarding documentary Hill Street and feature film Love Me Do.
He has drummed with numerous Irish acts over the years, too, but it wasn’t until 2011 that Great Lakes Mystery began to take shape, after he made a video for Richie Egan’s band Jape.
“I was making music at home with no agenda; I wasn’t really doing film stuff at that stage,” Averill says. “I was living with my parents. I didn’t have to push myself to work. Then Richie said, ‘I’m stuck for a drummer for this tour – can you drum?’ And I said, ‘Sure’. I had a gig in Dublin – my first ever Great Lakes Mystery gig – lined up, and I hadn’t figured out what to do. He said, ‘Well, why don’t you support me as well?’ Two weeks later I was playing this tour, figuring it out as I went along. It was a hot mess.”
It has taken until now, and the buzz of the music academy, for him to get his rear in gear. “I did a lot of ‘ones to watch’ shows, and I enjoyed it, but I never really fully knew what I was doing,” he says. “I think I was absorbing too much of what I was listening to, or thought I wanted to make. Really, I shelved it until I had to do this, the academy, and I had to do a show.”
Averill has immersed himself wholeheartedly in the experience. “I’m pinching myself every single day with the people they’re putting in front of us,” he says, nodding enthusiastically. “Apparently they’re setting up the drums now for Sheila E, so that should be amazing.”
On that note, we head into the lecture hall – a small room with space for perhaps 60 people – where seats are at a premium for an interview with Sheila E. Although she is best-known as drummer, percussionist and former musical director for Prince, she has achieved so much more than can be packaged into that soundbite over the course of her 41-year career, both solo and with other artists.
Over the next two hours, she imparts advice and tells stories from her career, from her Latin jazz family background to playing with the likes of Marvin Gaye, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson (Quincy Jones famously "forgot" to include her credit on Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough. It's enthralling, and is topped off with a short demonstration behind the kit. Oh yes: they might not teach this stuff at school, but they teach it at the Red Bull Music Academy. "No doesn't have to mean no," says Sheila E. " 'No' means opportunity. 'I can't go through that door? Okay, I'll go through the window.' "
When it comes to straightforward advice, it’s simple. “Be on time,” she says, looking around the room and waving a cautionary finger. “Be considerate of everyone and treat people nicely. Just be a good person, man. It really helps.”
The Prince talk is kept to a minimum, but when a clip of Erotic City is played, she is quick to point something out about her vocals on the track.
“I did not say that word,” she says, as laughter fills the room. “I said ‘funk’. F-U-N-K. He said the other one.” If you don’t know the song, you can hazard a guess at what the other word is.
Sheila E is just one of the “lecturers” to share their wisdom to academy attendees this term. Last week, Laurent Garnier, Michel Gaubert (composer for fashion designers such as Karl Lagerfeld and Balenciaga) and American record producer Craig Leon donned their metaphorical tweed blazers.
Studio sessions
After each lecture, participants get to spend time with the gurus in studio sessions. After lunch, Sheila E will host a session alongside Grammy Award-winning mixer and engineer Andrew Scheps, a regular collaborator with Rick Rubin, who has worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adele, Jay Z, Audioslave, Kid Rock, Metallica, Beyoncé and, heck, even Hozier. Where Sheila E’s interview touches upon songwriting, Scheps is landed with nerdy questions about how to get the best out of a mixing desk.
Later, ensconced in one of the studios, Scheps tones down the techie speak as he waxes lyrical about the collaborative nature of the music academy.
“It used to be [that] to make a record, you had to involve other people. You had to find a place to record and someone would record you. There were very few people who could make a record completely on their own. Now, everybody on the planet can make a record completely alone. I think forcing people to collaborate is almost imperative, because otherwise everyone would never talk to anyone else. [Music] is such a collaborative process.”
Scheps speaks about the importance of being so close to the artist or band that he feels as if he is an extra band member.
“Yeah, but I’m always the least important one,” he says, chuckling. “My opinion is most important because I’m the only one outside a band that’s got eight people in it, so it ends up carrying a lot of weight. But if the band don’t want to do it, we don’t do it, period. I don’t have a problem with trying to make a record better; that’s why I’m supposed to be there.”
Averill’s intentions sound similarly single-minded when asked if Paris has been as transformative as he expected. “I just wanted to cleanse my palate, not come here with an agenda,” he says of his two-week visit to the academy. “But really, I’ve had an epiphany here. People have been saying, ‘You need to record some music and release it, from a publishing point of view,’ and I’ve found that really hard, because if I took two weeks off work in Dublin, I’d still be in the same environment.
"Just being here, and being in Paris, and being around different people and getting these lectures – it's been really, really liberating." Great Lakes Mystery's RBMA session can be heard at ttp://www.ris at www.rbmaradio.com/shows
