With his third album, Montreal DJ/producer Robert Robert, aka Arthur Gaumont-Marchand, underwent a major artistic transformation. “I’d been doing electro since I was in my teens, but I reached a point when I felt that I needed to tell stories and that style of music wasn’t very well suited to that,” he tells Apple Music of his turn toward more traditional songwriting. Silicone Villeray, which features his own voice for the first time, began to take root in 2019 when Gaumont-Marchand was living in an apartment in the city's Villeray neighborhood. “It was a period in my life when I felt as though I was going around in circles,” he says. “I was asking myself lots of questions about my place in the world.” Here he tries to answer them as he walks through each of the album’s songs.
“L’été je m’ennuie”
“This is a track I composed one summer afternoon. I’d gone to see CRi, a Montreal producer, after spending time with other friends in a park. It reminded me of back when I was a teenager and I’d do exactly the same thing—in other words, not very much. That’s what inspired the lyrics for this symphony of dust and sunburns: a kind of synthesis between what I was going through then and how it is now, guided by the feeling of eternally living out my teenage years.”
“MP3 pour les fleurs de printemps”
“In constantly searching for my path, I came to realize that I’d distanced myself from some things that are important, like my family, and that it had been a long time since I’d chatted with my little sisters, Violette and Marguerite. I felt the need to open up to them, to talk to them about myself with greater vulnerability. And that’s what I do with this track.”
“Les gens”
“I felt like composing something that sounded a bit like house music, with a summer ambiance, that I love to listen to when I’m with friends. The kind of thing you can’t really listen to on your own. So it’s an ode to those times when you find yourself with a gang of friends, with the people you love, the people you trust.”
“Indigo”
“One of the things I least wanted to do was write something about lockdown, but in a way, it’s what this track does. While composing it, I realized that the beauty of songs is that you can talk about something without it having to be explicit. At the start of lockdown, I met the love of my life. With ‘Indigo,' we can picture our life together, but in a context of total freedom.”
“Quand je veux je dors”
“When I lived in Villeray, I worked as a dishwasher, and it’s the hardest job I’ve done in my life. I started to have this sort of fantasy of just dropping everything, of simply not showing up at work and never speaking to my boss again. The song expresses that feeling of not wanting to do something, like not wanting to go to school when we were kids.”
“Manger des coups”
“I wrote this track so I could talk about a feeling I have, and which I think other people experience too, and that’s the fear of taking risks. And yet, when we do take them, they turn out to be the times when we feel the most alive. This song, in a way, serves to convince myself to try my luck more often. To leap into the void, even if it means having to bounce back and carry on. The dubstep influence here is a little nod to that moment when I decided to dedicate myself to music.”
“Digital”
“It’s a song that talks about nebulous relationships that sometimes happen in between more official ones. The kind of romance that’s a bit blurry. I discuss the fact that we’re children of the internet and that it opens the door to a lot of ego clashes, to abstract or idealized ties. It started out as a ballad, but it became more energetic the further I got in the creative process.”
“Folie passagère”
“This one’s really easy to explain: I was thinking about a friend who, the minute he starts partying, goes a bit crazy. He does things that don’t make any sense, without hurting anyone. When I’m with him and he switches into that kind of state of mind, I like to follow him and experience it with him.”
“Plus simple”
“I’m someone who really dreams a lot. And sometimes this is expressed in a very abstract way, through movements, colors, and textures. This track, with its soothing atmosphere, recounts a dream where I’m on this gravel roof at daybreak. I feel really good, really happy.”
“De quel bois tu te chauffes”
“I wrote this track for a friend I grew up with, but who distanced himself and then disappeared off the radar. I knew he was alive, I just didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. This song describes the things I was wondering about him. The good news is that the person has now returned and he’s doing really well.”
“La nuit se plaindre” (feat. Hubert Lenoir)
“Initially, this track, which is about a passionate relationship I was once in, was really sad. The relationship didn’t come to a clear conclusion, and I got the same impression with this song. I couldn’t seem to wrap it up properly. Hubert Lenoir gave me a hand, and together, we changed the structure and added instruments, among other things. It’s crazy, that guy has so much talent! I could say that he helped me make peace with the episode in my life I was talking about.”