>>PREVIEW
CHAMPION
Exclaim! Spring Fling
Wednesday, March 28
The Warehouse
"I can’t imagine myself playing in a rock band," laughs Maxime Morin, better known as Montreal’s DJ Champion. "Playing the same songs the same way they were written, over and over and over. I would kill myself, it’s so freaking boring."
Despite what he says, Champion and his G-Strings have all the appearance of a rock band. They have guitars, after all – four of them and a bass, if you’re keeping track.
But as anyone fortunate enough to see them live knows, Champion and the G-Strings are unlike most any other modern musical act. If anything, they’ve brought back a tradition that hasn’t been seen since the heyday of James Brown, who would conduct his Famous Flames on the fly to keep up the energy in his performances. With an intricate form of sign language, Morin controls what and when his backing band plays, just as he controls samples on his mixer.
"The way I construct songs as a DJ is solely with volumes and mutes for each instrument," Morin explains. "When I first did a concert with the band, I thought I had to work the same way, because the songs were meant to be played this way. So it was just obvious for me to conduct them, because the structure had to be improvised."
That loose structure allows the music to straddle the line between the constant crescendos of dance music and the rawness of a rock show, an approach that’s won Morin accolades from audiences around the world. Not that he’s a stranger to accolades. Even before he was DJ Champion, Morin was part of the team that scored The Triplets of Belleville playing its theme at the Oscar ceremony. But the response he gets from an audience in a club means more to Morin than any Hollywood pomp.
"I was proud to play at the Oscars, please and thank you very much," he says. "But the first concert I gave with the G-Strings was so much bigger than the Oscars for me. We did the Jazz Festival in Montreal, the big event, we had 40 musicians onstage. That was so much bigger for me than the Oscars, you can’t compare those two things."
For Morin, it’s the difference between a day job and his true passion. Composing soundtracks seems like a dream job, but the more he reflected on what he was doing, the more Morin realized that he had become disconnected from the world, and needed to separate his work from his art.
"You can’t be a sensitive artist and a good businessman," says Morin. "You always come to the point that for business reasons, you have to make decisions that are very hard to take. And you have to do it in cold blood, which is not artistic at all. I know I can do it, because I’ve done it before, but when you’re in the mood of being the artist, the sensitive guy and the emotional guy, you can’t break that mood in a day."
Rather than have to constantly reconcile the two sides, Morin left his job to focus fully on being Champion. It wasn’t an easy decision, but Morin has no regrets. He’s no longer bored, and he’s no longer detached.
"I went to this cemetery on Mont Royal," he relates. "It was the first time I went there, and I was watching the sunset. It felt so good, I had this song in my head, I was working at a very nice project of mine, I was riding my bike on a beautiful sunny day in a beautiful country. I was looking west for the sunset, and I felt deeply, totally at peace. It felt like I was seeing further than the sunset, because I was everywhere at the same time. And I felt like, wow, I can die in peace." |
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