Foto-© H. Hawkling
Am Tag, an dem Michelangelo Dying – Cate Le Bons beeindruckendes siebtes Album – erscheint, erzählt sie uns, dass sie ursprünglich alles daransetzte, dieses Album gar nicht erst zu machen. Um sich vor Herzschmerz zu verstecken, wollte Le Bon eigentlich eine ganz andere Platte aufnehmen. Doch egal, was sie versuchte – diese Songs über Verlust und Schmerz lauerten ihr einfach immer wieder auf.
Um den rohen Moment des Herzbruchs einzufangen, schrieb Le Bon, wie sie sagt, „in Echtzeit“. Das Album ist also wie ein Foto, aufgenommen, bevor sich der Staub gelegt hat. Sie beschreibt Phasen, in denen sie in Gedankenschleifen festhing – und genau dieses Gefühl spiegelt sich auch im traumwandlerischen Song About Time wider, der sich um eine hypnotisch schimmernde Gitarrenschleife dreht. Auf Ride bekommt sie dann Unterstützung von keinem Geringeren als John Cale von The Velvet Underground. Es ist auf seine Weise ein zutiefst berührender Moment – zwei Stimmen, die gemeinsam in den Schmerz blicken.
Auch geografisch war es ein weiter Weg bis hierher. Die ersten Aufnahmen entstanden auf der griechischen Insel Hydra, bevor Le Bon die Songs mitnahm – nach Cardiff, London und schließlich nach Los Angeles. Fertiggestellt hat sie das Album mit Co-Produzent Samur Khouja in der endlosen Wüstenlandschaft von Joshua Tree, Kalifornien. Und man fühlt dieses weite Himmelszelt in der Musik. „Find me here, I’m eating rocks“, singt sie im mythisch anmutenden Opener Jerome, während die Instrumente wie heiße Wüstenwinde umeinanderwirbeln. Le Bons Sound wurde oft mit Brian Eno verglichen – und tatsächlich erinnern einige Momente an die Weite von David Bowies Berlin-Trilogie. Die Saxophone und Synthesizer auf Michelangelo Dying fliegen wie Sternbilder durch die Nacht der Wüste.
Le Bons besonderes Gespür für Klangtexturen hat sie auch als Produzentin gefragt gemacht – etwa für Wilco, Devendra Banhart, Deerhunter, Horsegirl, H. Hawkline und andere. Außerdem ist sie auf dem neuen St. Vincent-Album zu hören; Annie Clark bezeichnete sie sogar als „meine absolute Lieblings-Songwriterin unserer Zeit“.
Cate Le Bon war schon immer jemand, die ihr ganz eigenes Ding macht – und das nicht nur in der Musik, sondern auch in Kunst und Selbstinszenierung. Als wir mit ihr gesprochen haben, ging’s aber, ganz unvermeidlich, zuerst um eins: den Herzschmerz.
The accompanying text for the album describes Michalengelo Dying as ‘an attempt to photograph a wound before it closes up’. What is in that feeling you want to capture? And how do you make sure when you make you the album, you don’t accidentally close the wound?
I suppose that the nature of heartache is that it’s railing against its own perma-nence. You want to put it down; I wanted to put it down. I had been trying to out-run it for such a long time. Experiencing it through music, making a record, and looking it in the eye, it’s trying to capture it in real time before the wound closes up. In rolling up my sleeves and taking it on, it becomes a much more intense period of experiencing the heartache in this big, all-consuming goal. But it also helps the healing process, too. So, you’re picking at it, but also — turns out— it’s a bit healthier to really sit with it and take it on.
How does the phrase Michelangelo Dying come into that emotional process?
It’s the artistic expression of an emotional process. It’s experienced through music and through lyrics. There’s a lyric on the song ‘Love Unrehearsed’ where the title comes from. I suppose that song speaks to the single-minded, selfishness of an artist with a subject on the pedestal. This pedes-tal—you become almost in competition with it. But then the title itself is also a nod to the death of the fantasy, the death of the pedestal. There’s a tongue-in-cheek grandiosity about it. There’s also the acknowl-edgement that — whilst I’m singing about someone doing that — I too am doing the same thing in making a record that is head-down, all-consuming heartache. And it’s quite a universal thing to experience that through art. So it’s a lot of different reasons why that became—and felt like—the title of the whole body of work.
You just talked about singing about the end of the pedestal, which in itself is about the pedestal. Your work often feels about construction. And in particular, your lyrics always seem to be aware of the construction of words. How do you approach writing?
I don’t think about it too much, in the sense that I don’t have a repeatable pro-cess. It’s very real time. I guess searching for a kind of set of conditions where you can reach that enormous I moment of just being open and porous to allowing things, feelings and emotions to attach themselves to words that feel right. As long as it feels right and it feels real. There are times when I don’t necessari-ly fully understand in the moment what it is, but I know it’s attached to something real, and so I trust that. And often afterwards, you know… there’s the writing of a record—that inward-facing part for me—and then there’s the outward-facing performance of a record. And it’s often in those moments that things I didn’t quite understand, but knew were real, will reveal themselves to me. So it’s a lot of disappearing to the point where you’ve annihilated inhibitions and you’re able to write very freely.
You mentioned a set of conditions and wanting to write freely. I’m really in-terested in how place figures into that for you. The album was started in the Greek island of Hydra, then finished in Joshua Tree. Is there a certain kind of place that you need?
I think there is, but it’s always shifting. I like to escape, and I like to go and make a record somewhere that is away from familiarity and away from routine and away from distraction. You can become all-consumed by the making of something and not be interrupted. But when I made Pompeii it was the lockdown, and found myself in a situation that was the complete opposite. Renting this house off a dear friend — it was a house I’d lived in in my early 20s. The decor hadn’t changed. It was amazing how the familiarity of the house was still stored inside of me instinctively. I knew where all the light switches were, without really thinking about it, and knew where all the mirrors were. And so (making Pompeii) depended upon me finding that escape in a differ-ent way: in meditation and daydreaming, and being quite strict with myself in terms of a routine within something familiar that was very much tied to the making of the record and nothing else. With this record, we went to Hydra, an island in Greece. But what I was trying to escape from really was what I was carrying with me. The making of the record be-came the escape and the detaching from something that I needed. So I went to Hydra, and it was really lovely, and I realised … I went back to Joshua Tree to my friend’s Samur Khouja’s studio, to be in the desert emotionally. The record was tied to my healing process as well. Going back to somewhere fa-miliar was really what I needed to put the record to bed and to put some things down. Once I think I’ve got my process or the conditions I need figured out, some-thing shifts. It’s very dependent on the type of record that you’re trying to make. I just try and remain porous and not impose a set of conditions on myself that I have to rail against and feel like I’ve gone off-piste in a bad way. I think it’s just embracing the chaos of what a record will demand from you.
I’ve never been to Joshua Tree. I’ve seen amazing pictures of Andrea Zittel’s artworks there. How would you describe the place? What is it that you go back there for?
The first time I went to Joshua Tree, I couldn’t believe it existed as a place — let alone a place where people live. The landscape… It’s like being underwater. So alien and so hostile, in a way. But there’s this beauty of living and embracing that kind of hostility — I think this is a really beautiful notion. And for me there’s this overwhelming feeling of nothing else existing when you’re there. I find that reassuring. And also your impermanence and how insignifi-cant you are — again, something I find very reassuring. It holds you. It’s porous to your emotions. It’s wild, and once you leave, it’s as if you completely imagined the place.
To switch back to the music: with Reward, you made a chair that represented the album. It was this amazing Donald Judd, hard lines, black chair. And then with Michalengelo Dying: there’s pink fabric on the cover, the music feels softer. Did you want to try something different stylistically?
Again, there was no hard agenda going into it. I initially did have this idea that I needed to write a record because that’s how I expunge things. But I was trying in my life to sidestep sitting down with this heart-ache. I kept trying to not make this record (Michalengelo Dying). Because I didn’t want to make a record about heartache. Because I did not want to sit down and look this pain in the eye. But when you reach that beautiful moment — when you’re making something — of complete abandon. When you’re not watching itself, you’re just living it. I would always veer towards these songs. And so the music and the lyrics and the production — everything was informing everything else in real time. So it became an echo chamber of its own. Samur and I have worked together for years. We have a really beautiful work-ing relationship. All the groundwork has been done. We can walk in, start working with each other in the session, and know that we will find what we need to find. That we will remain porous and will be able to respond and change course if nec-essary and try different things. There’s no fear when I’m working with Samur that we’ll do something that doesn’t chime with what the song demands. It’s just a very beautiful, instinctive working relationship. And there was a Collette Lumiere installation that I’d become quite obsessed with. There was an article about her in a magazine. There’s this installation she made called ‘Real Dream’ of a woman lying in a room that is beautifully ornate and soft and she’s resting next to a mirror. I just became really overwhelmed with the feeling that this installation gave me. It served as this really beautiful tool to both Samur and me: ‘this is how I want the record to sound’. And because we’re (Cate Le Bon and Samur Khouja) so close, because he’s emotionally in tune with the world and me, and as a dear friend, he’s been there throughout the break up — which was more like an amputation. That was enough of a map without us being encumbered by something more solid or structured.
Often when you talk about music, you refer to non-musical forms of art. I want to ask you about one of those: clothing. In your music videos, you wear amazing clothes. In ‘Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?’, you’re cycling in these incredible black robes. There’s the video for ‘Remembering Me’ where you’re in those bright dresses. I was remembering ‘Rock Pool’ with the big headpiece. What is your approach to style and how you dress yourself when you’re making this art?
I don’t know. Again, whatever feels real and instinctively feels like it’s connect-ed to the music and the work. There’s a latex dress I’m wearing on the cover of the record. I was looking for a latex dress, but not like a sexy latex dress. It looks like marble to me. There’s a young designer Oliver Haus a stylist we were working with found. This piece he had made and it was beautiful. It hung like … it looked like marble. But there’s also something really grotty about it. It felt grotty and sad, it felt like some of the undertones of emotions. The juxtaposition with that and the soft fabric of the cover — it really touched again the two really conflicting feelings of this heartache. It’s being in tune with this little world you’ve made with the record, and then being quite discerning and selective about the things that are attached to it. That is the only way I can describe it.
I remember when you were doing interviews for Pompeii, you spoke about how Lina Bo Bardi, the Brazilian architect, was a lynchpin of how you were thinking at that time. Were there any other texts or figures that came to shape the world of this album?
I think really that Colette Lumiere piece was. Heartache-y, you get quite obsessive and you get stuck in loops. I didn’t really have much appetite for reading or even listening to music that wasn’t ‘go’ music. I was either frantically trying to write in real time and work on the record, or I was trying to switch my brain off and not ruminate and distress myself with just these repetitive thoughts that were either memories of the future or fantasy poi-soning past memories. It was very much that installation. And then listening to a lot of Éliane Radigue, which is probably the musical equivalent to being in the desert.
Cate Le Bon Tour:
12.11.25 Berlin, Säälchen
13.11.25 Hamburg, Nochtspeicher
14.11.25 Köln, Gebäude 9
