Motion interview

There is a mini French invasion taking place at the Prince of Wales this Friday and Vincent Courcot aka Motion is leading the charge. He'll be joined by countryman and partner in crime, Charles Michaud, the two of them forming the collaborative project Solead. Between them they have travelled the world and released, as separate projects, more than 70 tracks. Both individually and as a collective they've caught the attention of some significant industry names including Vitalic, Damian Lazarus, Dj Hal, Kasey Taylor and Minilogue to name a few. Jesse Kuch caught up with Vincent on behalf of Tranzfusion.

Hey Vincent, how are you- Can you give Tranzfusion readers a bit of background on yourself and your music-

Well, I'm 29. I'm living for the moment in a small city in the north of Paris suburb, quite charming.
For the music story, everything start at 5 with 15 years of studying classical piano. Then came the time of psychedelic rock band, with Charles from Triptych. Then came the discovery of the hard and underground techno movement, Paris clubs, and going to many different parties. I really enjoyed this 90's explosion of all kind of electronic music in France.

At the same time, due to my design study, I discovered computers and software and started to play with them both for design & music. It was a good way for me to keep going without piano in my student parisian flat. A few years after, having finished my study, I worked in a design agency and at the same time I started to get deeper and deeper into electronic music production during night and weekend. I'd like to say this adventure is happening naturally. There is no plan more than sharing passions, talents, fun with your friends. Now the music has taken over the design, but I think one day i'll bring balance between my two passions.

Tell me a bit about how you evolved from Tetraktys to the Motion/Solead sound. What distinguishes between the 2 new projects (Motion and Solead)-

Again, I must say it came in a natural path. My tastes are always evolving. I think because of my way of making music, I have to change and refresh my inspiration all the time. Otherwise i feel like I'm turning in circles and I can't stand it! I'm always searching for "new" music, sometimes just to have a listen to, just to know and also share with friends who are listening, something totally different. Some kind of other path of life. I like to have many kinds of influences. I feel it makes my music richer, I think. I'm also used to listening to many styles of music: classical to rock, electro, world, etc...

For Motion, maybe it started with the track Champagne on Tetraktys album. I must say that I had lot of fun to make it at this time. Then, slowly but surely, Motion's style grew up and took a bigger place into my mind ! I created Motion to keep a kind of logic. It's not really the Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hide story, it's more a different expression of creativity with some new sounds, singing parts and new ways of music arrangement. Today I can say that Motion is a kind of progressive house with some electro flavour.

For Solead we decided to work in many different ways: as an old rock band, we can work of course together, and also separately. We sometimes exchange files and tracks, bounce off each other to share and extend the vision of the previous version. Like this, we can bring fresh ideas to what the other team mate did. The first tracks we did were simply the addition of our different individual touch in Motion and Triptych but now Solead is probably a new exploration field for us, contrary to our solo projects that we know well. With our solo projects we keep the progressive and psychedelic work contrary to Solead. Even if we keep our influences, we try to escape from all the borders and genres of electronic music.

With which labels do you work- And where can we catch some of your releases soon-

We work with Citizen, french electro label from Vi Tags

• Motion
• Green Ant
• Solead
• Triptych