There are times when we publish a lot and everything is visible. And then there are others when we may seem a little quieter, while behind the screen everything is moving at once. For the past ten days or so, that is exactly what has been happening at FRED.
This return to work began with a lot of sorting out. Not the spectacular kind you photograph before and after, but the kind that means going back through the project song by song, world by world, and asking: where are we really? What is finished? What still deserves work? What should be released, and above all, what should not be released simply because it exists?
And when I say “we”, it is not just a turn of phrase.
The work we began together has continued since I came back from Korea. The kilometres are there again, but not the distance. Exchanges with the team continue, and so do our video calls, each of us from our corner of France, Korea or Japan, with songs to listen to, ideas to exchange, choices we sometimes put back on the table and others we finally settle. I will soon come back in more detail to that stay in Korea and what it brought to the project, because it deserves an article of its own.
Over the past few days, we have also done a great deal of work on the website. It has grown with the project, and it needed to become capable of telling what FRED really is today. The different worlds have become clearer, some songs have found their true place, and French, English, Korean and Japanese are beginning to form a much more coherent whole.
MIROIRS is taking shape too. The idea is to let the same song travel from one language and culture to another, not by translating it mechanically but by giving it sister works. Little by little, this is becoming one of the real axes of the project. Here too, it is collective work: a language is more than words, and a song even more so.
August was particularly fertile. A great many ideas arrived, some songs called for others, worlds expanded, and new directions opened almost faster than we could write them down. At this pace, the way we release music will probably evolve as well.
At the beginning, FRED moved mostly one song at a time, with a lot of singles. But with everything that exists now, and everything that is still being born, it is becoming fairly clear that releases bringing several tracks together will take up more space. Albums, of course, but also EPs from time to time. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, an EP is simply an intermediate format: more substantial than a single, but shorter than an album.
A point will come when releasing one isolated song every month, or even every two weeks, will no longer be enough to tell properly what is being built. Some tracks already clearly belong to larger sets, worlds and stories. And when several songs naturally answer one another, I find it more interesting to let them live together than to cut them artificially into a succession of singles.
Meanwhile, the music is obviously moving forward. Néon Noir keeps expanding, several adaptations are already under way, and others will begin over the coming weeks. We have set out a real working calendar so that we stop simply piling up songs and take the time to finish them properly. Some will move quickly. Others will need to be left alone for a few days before we listen again. That is part of the work too: sometimes knowing when not to touch anything.
And the next few days are unlikely to slow the pace.
From 13 to 20 September, the whole team will be together in France for a full week of work. After the video calls that have continued since I returned from Korea, we will finally be in the same place again, in the same rooms and, above all, in the studios.
It should be a particularly intense week, with a great deal of recording, listening, testing, retakes, choices to make and probably a few surprises that still exist only as ideas. That is also what I love about this project: part of it is prepared remotely, between France, Korea and Japan, and then there are those moments when everyone comes together and things suddenly take on another dimension.
And while all this is happening, the next releases are approaching. The Japanese version of Néon Noir arrives on 18 September. The FRED EP follows on 2 October. Then will come Prière rouge, Les veaux regardent passer le train, the first MIROIRS volume, Goût de fer… Little by little, the songs are becoming something more than a succession of tracks. They are building a path.
I think that is what I take away most from this September return.
I have always worked by following ideas when they arrive, and I have no intention of changing that. But around that freedom, we are building something more solid: a team that keeps working even when several thousand kilometres separate us, a rhythm, a method, worlds that are finding their identity, and songs that we are trying to give the time and place they deserve.
There is an enormous amount in preparation.
Not all of it is visible yet.
But the work is happening.
And not just a little.
FRED