Five Fits With: Music and Style Experimenter Yves Jarvis
Experimentation is par for the course with Yves Jarvis. He plays all the instruments on his recordings and takes inspiration from funk, folk, and psych alike. So it’s no surprise that the Calgary-based musician—born Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet—tried a host of different things with his latest album, All Cylinders, which released earlier this year. But despite the disparate elements, it feels entirely his own, suffused with his established language and phrasing.
An appreciation of music was entwined with Jarvis’s adolescence. Though his parents never played any instruments, they were music obsessed, taking him to concerts since he was three months old. And while Jarvis claims he isn’t technically inclined—there are some riffs on this album that beg to differ—it was his parents who put him in jazz, classical, and theory courses at the National Conservatory of Music.
“My theory background comes from piano, but my instrumental breakthrough was blues guitar,” he says. His parents would let him busk around cities while on vacation. “They’re stage parents but in the healthiest way.” Busking locally in Calgary and visiting a neighborhood record store led him to two local legends and musicians, Chris Dadge and Shawn Dicey, who would record him and helped him learn how to record himself.
“The Canadian scene is so close-knit. I felt like I knew everybody in the scene,” he says. “Before I was 18—just from bands coming into Calgary to play the festival there—I made a lot of connections.”
Below, Jarvis and I talk about writing and recording All Cylinders, his childhood and its impact on his style, three nonnegotiable albums to listen to, and more.
Fit One
Can you tell me about how the process for your newest album, All Cylinders, was different from your past work?
I’ve always been a person who spontaneously composes. I’ll hit record and make a song, freestyling or whatever. I’ve always had a very strong conceptual sense, but on this record, I wrote a lot of the material on the road, watching other bands while playing solo in support. I’ve never really toured with my own band much, only once or twice. So I was just watching these bands being so jealous of what they could do, thinking about audience dynamics and how artists play into them, what people expect and what they don’t expect. I was learning to bring that energy into the studio instead of just building a world. Usually I record where I live, so I’ll have my studio just be in my room or at my place. Because I was moving around a lot, some of the record was also done at my parents, or in sublets. I subleased a place that had drums, so I got to record a lot of drums there. My favorite thing is getting comfortable with the drums, because they drive the song. I’ll usually start a song with drums or bass. Unlike my other records where I was recorded in one or two places, this was recorded in six.
Fit Two
Was there a moment in which you first fell in love with music?
With life, you’re thrown into it and you’re trying to make sense of it. You don’t really know how to engage with it or what your role in it is. I’ve always felt like that with music. It’s always been this part of me that’s so close that I can’t see the forest for the trees. Ten or 15 years ago, it was the music I was listening to that made me feel really connected to or able to understand music. It’s like this English post-punk ethos that gathers everything up in a way beyond aesthetics—it gathers up music making, it takes it for what it is. It’s like this notion of being so experimental and avant-garde within a boundary or framework. … I grasp onto bands like Television, Captain Beefheart, Wire, This Heat. They blew me away. They would use standard rock instrumentation—guitar, drums, bass, vocals—and then they would turn it inside out and cut it up and chop it up and put it back together.
It just tapped me into this inexhaustibility of the format and that there’s so much freedom. I was like, “Wow, a rock band can really be an orchestra in that it could do anything. It doesn’t have to sound like rock.” I should go even further than that, though, and [reflect on the impact of] Women, which is a band from Calgary who remind me a lot of This Heat. I remember hearing them and it’s just out of nowhere. They sound a bit like The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the first Pink Floyd album—that record does this too—turning rock inside out, showing you can really express anything with these tools. Chad VanGaalen, another local Calgary guy, is a super well-rounded artist. He’s an animator and records himself. These guys were very influential for the pipeline of getting into this all, and they put me on too. I would play shows with these guys.
Fit Three
How did you first become interested in clothing and style?
I was raised to really care about translating your taste into how you look or how you want to present yourself. I’ve had this notion of identity and projection in that way all my life. I thought, “I need people to perceive me in a certain way,” and clothes are the easiest way to do that. It’s not even so much about style or individuality; it’s symbolism. I want to project a certain thing that maybe doesn’t even have anything to do with me. I used to dress funkier, for lack of a better word. For the past ten years, I’ve been recognized as an artist just because of how I look superficially. My hair doesn’t help. I just got even more of a sense of how I can project a certain image.
I started dressing up casually because people just treated me better. I love using fashion as a social tool. If I pull up in a suit anywhere, I’m treated differently. I don’t know if there might be other factors to it. I don’t know if it’s the case for everybody. I love being dressed up so that people aren’t suspicious of me. That’s fabulous. It’s a game that I’m happy to play. I’m not resentful about that. I love being able to just mold my image and project different aspects of my identity with clothes, but beyond that I just love textiles. Fabric really turns me on.
Fit Four
Is there a difference between how you dress on- and offstage?
I’ll usually dress more casual onstage than I do in regular life. There have been times where I’ve dressed up onstage, but then I always feel like it’s not the priority. It’s the one place where I’m less concerned about what I’m projecting. When I’m onstage, I’m performing. It’s not superficial. I know what I want to get across, so my clothes don’t really factor in as much as I have considered them to before. It could even impede my performance if I’m wearing something that doesn’t fit or that’s too hot.
What is the most recent thing you purchased?
I got Y/Project jeans recently. I got them because I wanted regular jeans, but then when I was looking at the price tag for regular jeans, I thought, They cost the same as cool jeans. Of course, having staples that fit in anywhere is maybe the better thing, but it’s less fun. I just bought these because they are weird. It’s close enough to normal, but again, I love this idea of working within a specific framework and tweaking it a little bit. These jeans are the kind of tight where they’re actually comfortably tight. You know? I love that feeling. I love the symmetry of knowing that my shit is proportional. I don’t like comfortable clothes. I would wear a corset.
Fit Five
Can you give me your nonnegotiable albums that you think everyone should listen to?
Porter Robinson, Nurture. King Crimson, Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. Fleetwood Mac, Tusk.
If you had to wear one outfit for the rest of your life, what would it consist of?
It would probably just be a suit, because that’s what I’m most comfortable in, but not the jacket.
So dress pants and a shirt?
Dress pants and a shirt and a tie. I would be comfortable on a desert island. With Versace Chain Reaction sandals. I have a pair that I wore to the ground that I can’t wear anymore because there’s a hole in the sole, but they’re really good. I’ve hiked in them. They look great, they’re high off the ground, but in a way that’s very comfortable.
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