Despite this photo’s ominous setting, DJ Champion is all about good times

DETAILS

DJ Champion & the G-Strings
Gateway
Thursday, November 12 - Thursday, November 12

More in: Dance / DJ / Electronic

Resistance typically means opposition to some sort of external force. But for Montreal’s DJ Champion — street name Maxime Morin — it simply meant turning his back and walking away from an entire album of work.

“Most of the people talk of courage,” Morin says of his decision with a dismissive laugh. “But I don’t see it as courage. I see it as, I don’t know, maybe it would be pride.” After the success of 2005’s Chill ’Em All, a laid-back mix of guitar loops and electronic beats which featured the breakout single “No Heaven,” the Montrealer went back into the studio in 2008, recorded a followup... and promptly abandoned it. His reason: It sounded too much like the record that made him a hit in the first place.

“When I was a kid,” Morin explains, “My dad told me once, I was maybe 13 years old, and he told me: ‘Listen, son: In life, if you don’t go forward, you go backward.’ That resistance thing is about going forward, because I was resisting the easy way and the easy way was doing anything that was like Chill ’Em All.”

So he started again, motivated by the desire to prove to himself that he could still take risks. “The first exercise I did was using the crappiest guitar song I could find,” he says. “I really like Nine Inch Nails, that kind of music. But that type of guitar song, I hate. It’s very hard to play clean. There’s all this noise and you don’t really hear the notes. I think it’s shitty sound.” He took those shitty sounds and wrote “Clear Beach,” the first track on the album. “That was the first exercise [after starting] from scratch and trying to go somewhere else. Trying to go into unknown territories or uncomfortable territories.”

Ultimately the new, new album, understandably named Resistance, became consumed by the sound of heavy guitars, twisted into intoxicating dance tracks. Ironically, the song “Resistance” doesn’t encourage the same fortitude as its title suggests. Instead, the chorus argues, like the devil on your shoulder, “But I like it so much,” ostensibly referring to the heartbeat rhythm and cascading guitar loops. It’s the kind of song you have to give in to: Resistance is futile.

Live, the scene is just as infectious, thanks to Morin’s unusual performance style. As a DJ, Champion relies on not simply his laptop, but also on a living, breathing crew. Four guitarists, a bassist and a vocalist stand with him onstage, waiting for a cue to play the appropriate riff, exactly how an orchestra awaits its conductor.

It’s the live show Morin had in mind when he set about writing the lyrics, and though he calls himself “a man of sound, not a man of letter,” part of pushing himself meant becoming the dominant lyricist on the album — a first for the DJ.

“Work songs, protest songs — that’s the kind of stuff I like, so I looked at [them] and I tried to analyze [them],” he says. “But the problem is, I’m white, not black. I’m comfortable. I’m not a slave. We are in 2009, not the 1920s, and so I can’t write protest songs — I don’t have the right!”

He concluded that such songs, at their core, were simply about everyday life, as difficult and painful as that life was — so he decided to write simply about being alive. “When I’m writing lyrics,” Morin says, “it always starts from the music and it’s mostly the same thing: I compose the guitar loops, then I put the volume at 10 and I get up in the studio and I listen to it very loud, trying to dance and feel it.” He points to the album’s first single, “Alive Again,” as an example. “I was imagining myself playing it live, seeing all those people, and I was like, ‘Wow, that drives me, I don’t know... alive!’ And I thought, ‘Yeah. Driving me alive again!’ I don’t know if it’s English, but it makes me feel good.’”

Perhaps the ability to resist isn’t as important as the ability to know exactly what to strive against and what to succumb to. And though the line can sometimes seem indiscernible, Morin, luckily for us, is well aware of the difference.