interview by: Larissa Glasser

Seconds into “The Getaway,” the first track off of the new Voivod release, Katorz, it becomes obvious that the band has triumphed over the loss of their guitarist, Piggy (Denis D’Amour). Each Voivod release stands out, but there is something entirely transcendent going on with Katorz. It’s as if a soaring, Nirvana / Beatles / even Motown-spawned melody has joined the moshpit and intertwined its soul with Voivod’s signature dissonance. This is accomplished in a way that may lure the uninitiated to the Voivod banner, while alienating none of their sizable fan base.

Songs like “Mr. Clean” and “Odds and Frauds” retain vocalist Snake’s (Denis Belanger) seething and intelligent portrayals of dystopia, while compelling your foot to stomp along to the driving beat. Jason Newsted’s bass playing is much more distinctive and driving than before, particularly on “Dognation,” “After All,” and “The X-Stream.”

Away’s drumming has retained its usual heaviness and prowess, and then of course, you have Piggy’s guitar playing. Last year, the metal world lost a true innovator from among its ranks. However, as revealed by Away in this interview, Katorz does not mark the end of Piggy’s music, nor of Voivod.

Away is an interviewer’s dream. Affable and kind, humble and straightforward, he is a total blast to speak with. As we blabbed about everything from Piggy’s life to the influence of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer on early Voivod, the relevance of our interview date, June 6, 2006, became all the more irreverent and celebratory.

Maelstrom: Katorz is a very energetic album. I think you have a classic on your hands. Every Voivod record is unique, but there is something really infectious about this one.

Away: Well, excellent! There are 13 other songs actually, which we need to finish off. They were written in the same sessions, so they’re very similar. But it’s something we’re going to record next year.

Maelstrom: You apparently have a whole lot more material that Piggy recorded.

Away: Well, we’d actually written 23 songs with Jason (Newsted, ex-bassist for Metallica, Flotsam & Jetsam), and we recorded 10 of these for Katorz, then the remaining 13 we’ll record next year, then there are about 25 more that Piggy recorded professionally. But it was his music, it wasn’t written as a band. So after the next album we’ll have to sit down and listen to it, then we’ll see who will want to be involved in it, I guess.

Maelstrom: Piggy sounds like he’s right there, playing with the band in the studio on all of Katorz.

Away: It was fairly hard to achieve. Glen Robinson, the producer, did a very good job at making it sound like we were all in the same room at the same time. It was recorded in separate studios at different times. Next year, Snake (Denis Belanger, vocals), Jason, and I will try to work together in the same studio.

Maelstrom: One thing that struck me about the new album was Piggy’s acoustic interludes. They’re very haunting, because apparently these were the last things he recorded.

Away: Yeah he made these recordings when he was very sick, so we debated for a while. We didn’t know if it was just too personal to include on the album, but it was just so beautiful and melancholic that we decided to build interludes out of them. There are more of these small songs that we are going to use on the next album, also.

Maelstrom: They sound like part of the written songs, never distracting or inappropriate. This is actually the first Voivod CD during which I caught myself humming along to the tracks. They’re really contagious and memorable.

Away: Well, Jason brought a lot of groove to the band, his playing is very Black Sabbath, and we have to sit on the music a little more. We used to be a little more syncopated.

Maelstrom: Yes, the songs are still complex, but there isn’t as much gear shifting on the last two albums as with say, Dimension Hatross.

Away: The flow is important, and that used to be a lesser priority. Jason’s a big part of the Voivod sound after five years in the band. So this album is a continuation of the last one (Voivod, 2003), but we brought back a lot of the weird chords and the darkness of the music because Snake’s lyrics are angrier.

Maelstrom: I’d like to go really far back and ask about how you met the band, how Voivod first formed in Jonquière, Quebec.

Away: We met in high school in the ‘70s, and we shared a love for heavy music like Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, AC/DC, Judas Priest . . . but it was in 1980 when Motorhead’s Ace of Spades and the first Iron Maiden album came out, along with a bit of hardcore from England, and we were all drawn to the same music. But we had learned to play progressive rock in the ‘70s, also, because it was so big in Quebec. So we started hanging out, and I started playing with Piggy in ’79, and a year after, we started jamming with Blacky [Jean-Yves Theriault, bass]. But it’s only in ’83 that we really got together with Snake, who I’d known from school. So that’s when we decided to really form a band, and call it Voivod, and transpose the Voivod mythology I had created from my drawings into music.

Malestrom: Like “Korgull the Exterminator”?

Away: Korgull is a second incarnation of the Voivod, on the second album (Rrroooaaarrr!) every album was a new incarnation, an improvement on the Voivod.

Maelstrom: Yeah, so first he was a soldier on War and Pain, then became mechanized on the second album. Then, on Killing Technology, he went into space, then on Dimension Hatross he went even beyond that.

Away: Eventually, the fact that we were going with this one concept didn’t please everybody in the band, and around 1990 we decided to explore other fields. So it wasn’t until Phobos (1997) that we continued with a sixth chapter of the Voivod saga.

Maelstrom: How would a Voivod song come together?

Away: There were many songs that we’d improvise and record, then Piggy would go home and build songs from there. So Piggy was pretty much the arranger, but everybody was always involved in the writing. There were also songs that Piggy would complete and bring to us, so he was the maestro.

Maelstrom: How did Piggy feel about playing Ozzzfest in 2003?

Away: Actually, it was a great experience. We were a bit scared in the beginning because everybody on the bill was so nu-metal, except for Cradle of Filth and Ozzy. But finally, everybody showed up and we were very well received. It was a great experience all the way through.

Maelstrom: I’d like to ask about your artwork, Michel. The fans stare at your album covers for hours. You’re aware of that, aren’t ya?

Away: [laughs] I certainly spend hours making them. When I first started painting I’d only done our first four album covers, and I soon realized that to be a painter, you really have to work at it for hours a day. So with my drumming, I decided it might make things easier if I bought a computer, which I did around ’87. Then I started to do computer art. I usually start with sketches which I then scan and rework them. I still do that to this day.

Maelstrom: What graphics software are you currently using?

Away: I use Photoshop and Illustrator for art, and Flash for animation.

Maelstrom: Yeah, I remember the videos for “Psychic Vacuum” and “Tribal Convictions” had some of your computer animation looping in segments.

Away: That was old technology. I used a Commodore Amiga, which was the first computer I bought. It was multimedia, so it let you take a frame of video and blow it up into a piece of CD art.

Maelstrom: I see you’ve recently been doing CD art for other bands like Behold... the Arctopus.

Away: Yeah, I made a mechanic warthog for that one. [we both laugh]

Maelstrom: Do you have any new artwork planned?

Away: Well, I actually just finished the booklet for Katorz. I do as much artwork as I can for other bands, I did the Probot CD, a T-shirt design for The Hellacopters, and right now I’m working on a cover for a compilation of bands covering old Nintendo Games music. Yeah, I’m trying to get plenty of art going because it doesn’t look like I’m going to be touring that much with Voivod anymore.

Maelstrom: I understand about the touring. Piggy is pretty much irreplaceable.

Away: Yeah, right now it’s sort of confusing. We can’t really picture a stage without Piggy, maybe after we’re done with the next 13 songs, we’ll think it over. But anyway, we have plenty to work on in the meantime. We’re going to re-release the ‘80s albums with bonus CDs through Sanctuary. Metal Blade already did that with War and Pain. The End Records will re-release Angel Rat (1991) and The Outer Limits (1993), and we have to finish the DVOD-2 DVD, which will cover the Eric Forrest period (Forrest handled bass and vocal duties for Voivod during the mid-‘90s). Also, there’s a documentary being made about Piggy and Voivod.

Maelstrom: Oh, the one being made by Sam Dunn? He directed that documentary “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey” (2006).

Away: Yes, there’s a trailer of it available on The End Records website. So that’s in the works, then there’s DVOD-3 next year, and I’ve got a book of my artwork coming out, so there’s plenty of work to get done.

Maelstrom: A graphic book?

Away: Yeah, I might call it Voivodian Art.

Maelstrom: Do you know when it will be available?

Away: Well, I actually missed my deadline last winter because I was pretty devastated.

Maelstrom: Yeah, it’s really tough when you lose a founding member of your band but also such a close friend. But the new album is such a fitting tribute.

Away: Yeah, and just the fact that it was recorded professionally at his home on a laptop, the delivery was perfect. It tells a lot, because he wasn’t thinking in studio mode then, but rather that he was working on a demo. But it’s album quality, so it’s quite unbelievable. He actually warned me that some of his performance in the sound files might not cut it because he didn’t think of it as being the album, that he just winged it. But we didn’t do cut-and-paste at all. We just re-amplified the guitar and bass tracks, and Snake and I re-did our own tracks because they were poorly recorded.

Maelstrom: So the songs were already composed and arranged?

Away: Yes, we’d been working on 23 songs since the end of Ozzfest in 2003. So we had the songs on demos. I just didn’t think that Piggy had recorded all of the solos and everything. So in August 2005, Piggy gave me a call and asked me to come to the hospital right away. So I went there, and he told me he had one week to live, and that he couldn’t fulfill his contract with the label [The End Records], and he was pretty bummed. So he told me about the sound files on his laptop, and that maybe I could work with it, but he was scared that his performance wouldn’t cut and the sound would be bad. But after his departure in August, I didn’t really listen to the tracks at all for a good month. I didn’t want to, and didn’t know if we could work something out of it, I didn’t really care actually. Eventually, I gathered enough courage to go into the studio with Glen Robinson. That’s where we realized the tracks were very well recorded, the rhythms were doubled, the solos were there, and the effects were intact. It was really well done, which makes us think that maybe he knew what was going to happen. He already had a history of cancer from way back in ’88.

Maelstrom: I remember Piggy had a very close call with a brain tumor in 1988. Did he have to keep taking drugs his whole life to keep the cancer down?

Away: Yeah, and he actually had to spend a lot of money every month because he wasn’t covered. But he was the type of guy who would always be at home recording guitar, which is why we inherited so much of his archive.

Maelstrom: Is there anything you’d like to tell our readers, in closing?

Away: Yeah, I just want to thank everyone who bought the albums and came to the shows for the last 23 years. We never take them for granted. They’re the reason we keep going.

The End Records will release Voivod’s Katorz on July 25, 2006.