The Haiduks project officially started in 2010 playing on a dock, beside a little river in the Bahamas. I was playing guitar and looking at the tropical fish most of the days during my stay. With only a small tape recorder, I sketched and wrote "Diamond Drops" and "I'm Still Here". They were both (and most of the album "1968") about dreams I had. Consuming a lot of 1960s music all my life, I decided to make my "post-modern" homage to that era of music. After my trip, I wrote a bunch of songs and recorded most of "1968" during 2010 to 2011.
While doing so, I met my friend Einar Jullum who was living a block away from my apartment. We both hit it off and played tones of music together. He recorded and arranged some parts on the album and shortly after, Einar went back to live in his formal country, Norway.
During that time, I put out a song called "Use Up My Time" for the net label Beko-dsl in collaboration with Hobo Cult Records and it made quite an impression on people. That week was great and it motivated me to make a good record. I had a great interview on the German blog: No Fear Of Pop and I felt like the album was going to do well!
Not long after, I started Kinnta Records (2012) with my friend Nicolas Lê Quang (The Yesteryears). I was very ambitious and I dreamed to have my music on wax. We decided to put out 1968 on vinyl. Probably due to my lack of experience at marketing myself and no one really knowing us, the record sold very poorly and pretty much destroyed my budget. I wanted to have a nice imprint, shoot for quality and make things right, but I didn't really know what I was doing. It was impossible to follow my turbulent dream, so I decided that it was better to keep on going with the label by myself. I felt more free and less responsible if I made mistakes.
Around the same time, I met Matt LeGroulx (Expwy), a guy I played music with during a session 5 or 6 years before. He introduced me to Ian Jarvis (Chairs) and Daniel Gélinas (You Yourself &I). Einar also moved back to Montreal. We all had our own projects and we wanted to be able to play all of our music live at the same time. We formed a "supergroup" and we called it "The High Dukes". We basically played a couple of Einar's song, a couple of Haiduks, Chairs, Expwy, etc, making a good set to promote our bands. We played tones of gigs, all playing in each others bands and performing mostly in Montreal, Ontario. Some of the guys went all over Canada. We played Wyrd Fest, Pop Montreal, loft parties, bars... From 2012 to 2015, we did that and released all the other tapes up the Chairs, "Drawn Into Mazes" album.
Having a full time job, the label, the bands, I had a burnout in 2015 and got laid off work. I hit depression and isolated myself. This is when I started learning electronics and built my first DIY synthesizer modules. After Matt released "Deep Joy", I started discovering 1970s power pop and got super excited about it. Maybe because I was super depressed, I think it just cheered me up. Dumb music, "guitarmonies" and most of all, the worst misogynist lyrics. I didn't really enjoyed that macho aspect of it. I wanted to make an album like that and sing about the shit that got me angry like: the environment issues, corporations, space travel, ... as opposed to "little girl songs" as they sang about. Piak! What a bunch of tasteless idiots!
So I wrote "Lazy Sundays". Einar participated more on the music writing. It felt more like a band type of thing. Matt came to record the awesome guitar solos and it felt like it was less personal and more like a collaborative project. In that frame of mind, I decided to have my friend Al Isler to mix and master the album. The album came out and it also sold very poorly. I was disappointed, discouraged and this time, I felt defeated. I decided to sort of quit everything and cave in even more.
I had already put aside my Élément Kuuda project for awhile to focus more on Kinnta and rock bands. All that fell apart for me, so I guess I had to kill everything and start over again. Einar left back again to live to Norway, so we quit our common projects. Matt and Ian are still making their music and collaborating on stuff sometimes.
2014 to 2017 was pretty dead for me in terms of releasing music. I lost most of my contacts in the music world and focused on building my synthesizer. Learning electronics, being more of a loner and listening to a lot of music, made me a stronger music maker. I got more in touch with the music I was doing earlier as Élément Kuuda and realized that I enjoyed being at home and carving my music in peace. The social aspect of it appeals less to me these days. Rock was fun, but it's more of a fantasy than what I really am.
In 2016, I sent a couple of "1968" LPs to Burger Records and a letter to ask them if they were interested in distributing a bunch of them. They agreed, sold a batch and reissued it on tape in 2017.
I started playing guitar in 1992 when I was 12. Had my first "grunge" band in 1994. Switched to bass in 1995. Made my first tape in a band called Plaster in 1996. Made my first show in 1997. Discovered drugs, post-rock, electronic music, experimental/noise shows in 1998. Bought a 4-track tape recorder. Started performing with my post-rock band called Pasta Orgasmae. Fell deeper into "IDM" shit and computer music. Started Élément Kuuda in 1999. Released my first self-produced album (Pasta Orgasmae) in 2000 and then the band split.
I was still living in my birthplace Ottawa-Hull. I focused on my project Élément Kuuda and I performed my electronic sets in local galleries in Ottawa. We were a bunch of friends and we founded a collective called Sul Pont. We performed a lot and played a few gigs with our favourite artists at the time, such as Tim Hecker, Polmo Polpo and people in the same kind of musical "movement". Computer music was for me, some kind of freedom. I could do whatever I had in mind. Included my fantasy rock band that I never really had in the 90s.
Just for fun and in secret, I started making grungy/pop songs. They just sounded like weird alternative songs with alien sounding vocals. I didn't really know how to sing back then and I just sang gibberish. My friend Nathan from "If Then Do" wrote a few poems and I shaped the song "On Air" and "Ooz", from the "Fluorescents" album. In 2004, I left Hull and moved to Montreal.
I kept making Élément Kuuda and recording these rock songs on and off. It took a few years to come up with "an album", but in 2006, the Fluorescents was done. It was supposed to simply come out on CD, but my friend Eric Bond suggested that we make this into a stop motion anime sort of band and make it into a concept thing. We worked on it for a while but got discouraged and never released it.
Recently, I was going through my old backups and I listened to these recordings. I felt like it was a good time to put them out in the world and kind of close a chapter of my life. I remixed the songs really quickly and put it together. I also decided to make "Demos and Whatnots..." To show the process of my work for this project. I'm not sure if I will ever perform or make an album as "The Haiduks" again, but I'm very happy about what's out there and what I achieved with this. I hope you enjoy it!
Christian Richer
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