Bassist and composer Floy Krouchi hails from the world of rock and free tekno, the kind you spell with a "k", whose free parties and teknivals she frequented in the 90s with her electro dub band Mafucage. In the early 2000s, she underwent a dual training program that profoundly reshaped her practice: in electroacoustics, at a Paris conservatory; and in Indian music, with a rudra veena master, Pandit Hindraj Divekar, in Pune. Today, she links these two teachings at the heart of her augmented bass project, the FKBass.

You're a bassist. How and when did you choose this instrument, which is usually associated with rock and pop music?
I started out as a self-taught musician. The bass is an instrument that's played a lot in bands that you put together with friends. I was drawn to it because I was influenced by two things: electrified music (pop in general) and reggae/dub, particularly dub, which had interested me since I was a teenager. In this music, I found both the presence of the bass, which remains a prominent element, and everything to do with sound manipulation.

Are you thinking of Jamaican dub, or what a band like Massive Attack did with it afterwards?
I'm thinking of both, Jamaican dub, and of course Massive Attack a little later, who helped to successfully blend everything: the electric, electronic and urban sound with the techniques and vibe of dub. In the eighties, I listened to all the dedicated Jamaican and English labels, Studio one 45s in particular, and Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound label, with the group African Head Charge. It had a big influence on me. But I've always pursued my research career in parallel with my career as a musician. I learnt harmony at the conservatory, I did jazz and free jazz, and I played in bands at the same time. I'd been integrating this experimental spirit since the late eighties: I worked at home on manipulating cassettes, walkmans, radios, sound volume... I'd already experimented with all the Schaefferian basics by tinkering with small equipment, in a playful way. I've kept a stock of cassettes from all those years.

You were part of a women's experimental music collective in the Nineties, Mafucage, which you say was in tune with the burgeoning electronic music scene of the decade. Can you tell me more about it?
I co-founded my first major band, Mafucage, with Mxr Koznen in 1994, which brought together all these influences. There were two of us (bass-guitar), later joined by drummer Krx Prince. The idea was that of an instrumental band: I've always liked the fact that there aren't necessarily vocals and lyrics, and just work with sound. We released vinyl records and played a lot of free parties in the late '90s. I love the indus dub-style tracks from that era, and I think they've never aged. Mafucage was my first major professional experience: we toured a lot, producing our records ourselves in a Do It Yourself (DIY) framework. Those were great years in Paris. I've never been an inveterate party girl, and in any case I've always been rather peripheral in my career. What interested me most was what was happening in the particular context of the free party. It was a wonderful movement: the possibilities of experimenting with sound outside, in contexts quite distinct from the official halls, at high volume.

Iwas very familiar with the free party scene in the same years. Was Mafucage attached to any particular sound system?
We were distributed by Toolbox. We produced our first vinyl in Grenoble with CORE-TEX labs. As we were downtempo, we used to play teknivals in the early hours of the morning, in the aftermath. We weren't affiliated with any particular sound system, but we often played with the English outfit Hekate: a superb sound system, for the vibe, the quality of sound, the experimental tendency. We also performed on more official stages during the period, big venues and festivals. I took part in a young people's challenge at the time: a scheme to set up an experimental studio, which I won, and I was able to equip myself with speakers, a mixer and an Akai MPC 60 sampler. I really got to grips with the world of samplers, remixes and sound manipulation. We also sometimes simply played the bass-guitar-drums trio, inviting performers, poets... It was a great collective, because we opened up the forms a lot. The field of sound and human experimentation has always interested me more than the group format, even if it's also beautiful in itself. This period lasted from 1997 to 2003. I also took part in the Planet Generation Global Move collective for a few vinyl records.

You went on to study electroacoustic music at the Paris Conservatoire in the early 2000s, which enabled you to work on the "musicality of recorded sounds". What led you down this more "academic" path, a little later in life?
After that nine-year period with Mafucage, I wanted to go deeper, to find out where the origins of our work came from, and to turn to a more "scholarly" knowledge of sound practice since Schaeffer, even if there had been other experiments before him. I wanted to go further into the manipulation of recorded sound. I found what I was looking for in Gino Favotti's class at the Conservatoire du 20e arrondissement in Paris. It was a very free class that suited me well. It was attended by film-makers, poets and electro-acousticians from a variety of backgrounds, providing a real forum for artistic exchange. We played our pieces in an acousmonium, which was a delicious moment. This loudspeaker orchestra fascinated me with its beauty, far superior to that of simple multiphonics. It's a real instrument. I gave up bass at that time. I attended the class as a sound manipulator, with the aim of increasing my vocabulary in sound composition. Like all rock bands, Mafucage clashed. I'd given a lot, so I needed to do something else, in the realm of pure sound. I received a commission from the GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales). This allowed me to leave the purely underground alternative scene and enter a more academic world, even if it's not completely academic. As long as the artistic expression is interesting, I'm willing to experiment with different environments. Certainly, electroacoustic music, which is a branch of contemporary music, is very different from the world of free parties. However, I feel that pop music is also a place that encourages a great deal of sonic, technological and technical invention, and I don't want to separate these worlds.

Today, borders are much more permeable, and your career is living proof of this.
Yes, I am. What interests me is the crossing. The difference with the world of pop and folk music in general (including traditional music) is that there's little or no writing and we don't work with scores. It's on this point that the clashes between these worlds occur: writing versus orality. But a large number of composers, including myself, are opening up ways of writing between improvisation and notation.  

It also marks the start of your travels to India, where you've been visiting regularly since 2003 to study traditional Hindustani music and the art of ragas. Why are you so interested in this country and this music in particular?
I went there with the Planet Generation Global Move collective in 2000, to play a live electro show between Goa and Bombay. We were told about the master Pandit Hindraj Divekar in Pune, who played a four-stringed instrument, the rudra veena, which is very similar to the bass. We went to meet him and I fell head over heels for the instrument. After a series of recordings, I matured this discovery. Three years later, when Mafucage split up, I felt the need to find him again. A cycle comes to an end and life needs recharging, a new breath, which I found both in the electroacoustic class and in a new instrumental practice inspired by India, pushed to its extreme slowness. I went there with a Fender Precision fretless bass, as I'd changed instruments in the meantime. I was discovering new possibilities in terms of microtonality and glissandos. The rudra veena is the ancestor of the bass, with its four strings. It is considered the oldest and most sacred instrument in Indian music. It is the instrument of meditators. It has an extreme resonance of seventeen seconds. A great deal can happen within a single note: passing notes, filtering effects, pitch, all within the resonance, without any new attack on the sound. Its low frequencies are very interesting, amplified by two large resonators consisting of two dried pumpkins. The ear is glued to the instrument and picks up only the low, round sound that turns, passes through the neck and returns from one resonator to the other, on the principle of an infinite, figure-of-8 movement.

And all this takes place, I believe, at a very low volume. It's really the instrumentalist who receives the most sound effects.
Absolutely. During my work with Pandit, I sounded him up, because I couldn't hear him enough. I fitted him with a pick-up like for a bass, with an amplifier. It is said that this meditation instrument was played in cellars and caves, in naturally resonant atmospheres, at a time when silence was very great. This low volume explains why it was disappearing. Today, it is enjoying a revival. It's an instrument with magical properties, a yogi's instrument that accompanies the musician's own meditation. It is said to have been given directly to man by Shiva, and to possess the forms of Parvati, who represents the concept of energy. Its function changed when it found its way into palaces, where it accompanied the dhrupad, the oldest form of Indian singing. The strings drawn from the rudra veena are in fact very close to the vocal chord. Its sound properties are incredible! It's not a virtuoso, dazzling instrument like the sitar. It doesn't make many notes, but it's inside that some very interesting things happen. I didn't learn the rudra veena. I used to sit opposite Pandit with my bass and learn ragas the Indian way. I insisted on keeping my own instrument. It wasn't my way, I was already in my thirties and I preferred to work on the encounter between these two instruments rather than learn a new one. 

So it was this encounter that gave you the idea for a bass solo?
There were two things that came into play: first, I realized that the bass is a very beautiful melodic instrument, especially the fretless ; then there was the idea of the hologram when listening to the rudra veena, that incredible richness within the sound that seems to reconstitute the ear, to bring a presence, to make us hear something unheard of, but that isn't there. I made the connection with the question of unheard sounds in electroacoustics. It took a long time, and I produced a lot of radio pieces during that period, as well as other projects. I came up with the idea of an augmented bass solo, using electronics to get me out of the rather narrow spectrum of the bass and open it up both downwards and upwards. For me, instrumental practice allows for richness of nuance, and electroacoustic practice for richness of spectrum. The idea was to combine the two.

You say that this discovery brought you a new apprehension of music, new writing processes and a way of plunging into the heart of sound to help it evolve. Can you explain this in more detail?
First of all, there's the question of listening very precisely to the inner workings of sound, which is the same thing we're experimenting with in electroacoustics. We focus on micro-tonality. Indian scales are based on twenty-two microtones (shrutis). There are more in reality, with passing notes and the way certain notes are played in certain modes, over or under. In India, sound is considered to have created the universe, through the primordial vibration of the om. Sages are said to hear all sounds. In fact, we know scientifically that everything is indeed vibration, and this question has become crucial for me, at the heart of my thinking. The spiritual dimension brought to me by India poeticizes a physical phenomenon with which we in the West are all too familiar. I like to think of the links between these myths and the scientific theories that measure the resonance of the sound of the big bang. The other contribution is that of ragas. Raga is very similar to modal jazz, which I had already practiced. There's a dialogue between fixed forms and total improvisation. And ragas are linked to nature, to the cycle of the seasons, to the cycle of the day. Everything is linked in India, the food, the instruments... For example, the drone of the tanpura will evolve with the day. The musician tunes his instrument at sunrise. Then the temperature changes, and the second raga is slightly lower. In the same way, in electroacoustics, we become aware of the resonance of a space. Nothing is an isolated phenomenon. All these things feed my music, they live in me.

You tell me that all this took time to mature. When was your first bass solo?
I've been making solos with effects pedals for the whole period, but my first Bass Holograms with an augmented bass dates back to 2012, on a commission from CNCM Césaré in Reims, with a Westone bass, characterized by a very long sustain and active pickups that allow you to go into the very low and very high frequencies. There were three layers: instrumental playing; electricity and microphones; and virtual lutherie. Césaré is co-producer of the new FKBass project , started in 2017, which adds the level of electronics control, via sensors.

The FKBass is in fact equipped with over forty assignable controllers driven by an internal microprocessor, some touch-sensitive, others in the form of sensors.
Yes, ultra-sonic sensors, a gyroscope and accelerometer on the head, screens, the lighthouse... This is one of the great questions of contemporary music: how to bring electronics to life as much as instrumental playing, and as finely as we can control an instrument by gesture.

Every controller is assignable. Do you change the assignments depending on the songs, or do you stick to one system that you master for all?
The FKBass was completed at the end of 2018. Up until then, I'd been studying, particularly in India. I've tried a lot of configurations for different movements. On the first solo I'm going to write, I'm going to build myself a slightly more fixed instrument and impose certain limitations on myself, to be able to get into the finesse of sensor play. I may allow myself two or three different states of configuration depending on the movements, but I'll try to write something transmissible, clear and without too many changes.

When you look at a pop band, you see the drummer, the bassist, the guitarist with all their pedals, which is still manageable in terms of sound, but the keyboard player still needs his notes to find his way around his synthesizer, to fix his memory and find his sounds. There's a paradox between the immense richness of its timbres, which seems to open up a certain freedom, and the constraint of having to find them to exploit them; between the direct, sensory and organic aspect of playing, and the brake of technology.
This is one of the biggest challenges. With instruments like the FKBass, the sound palette is gigantic, opening up new worlds. It's a big gamble to be able to let go of the computer completely. I'm not there yet. We're still in the infancy of augmented instruments. I shouldn't have to look at a computer. The day when you can play a complete composition, a real solo lasting an hour, without having to get out of your game to look at the screen and make adjustments, things will have come a long way. That's why I put so many sensors on the FKBass. It's a gamble, but it's a long process.

This is the paradox of a controller: a potentiometer, a control surface or a switch doesn't give you a precise idea of the sound you're going to get, unlike a string, a bow or a fingerboard.
Yes, it's like learning a new instrument. That's why you have to narrow down the possibilities, while retaining the richness of the sound palette: you have to learn how to use them properly, you can't doubt the gestures you're making, it has to remain organic.

However, and this seems to be a not inconsiderable part of the pleasure you find in it, the instrument guides you as much as you guide it, which means that you get surprises, and that they are quite profitable for you, in a playful relationship.
Of course, this is because I love improvisation! My forms are semi-written, semi-improvised. Everything comes out of the bass, but I can have a passage based on a looper with random parameters. So I have to wait, listen and let myself be guided, as if I were playing with another person. It's also an aspect that comes to me from India: when I play a note, I listen in depth to what's going on in the space. This guides my playing. Sometimes I feel like the captain of a big ship, and I have to play with latency and movement.

This surpassing of the instrument and its sounds is something I often heard when I was working on the world of tekno and free parties, as told by its musicians; but never from electro-acousticians, who instead claim control over their tools.
Absolutely. We claim this absolute control in written composition, which in my opinion is not entirely true. I'm sure there's surprise to be found in this field too. Brian Eno played a lot with the notion of error. American composers like John Cage reflected on the question of the unforeseen, the already there, the random, the game. They were much more advanced than us on these points, detaching themselves from this cerebral perspective of control. And the world of pop has also brought a lot of innovation through error and chance.

What is your relationship with your instrument, the bass?
I'm first and foremost a passionate listener. I love the bass, of course, but I'd say the ear is my second instrument, or recorder. I'm also interested in the anthropological dimension of sound, not just the instrumental.

What is your relationship with technology in general?
First of all, I don't use very sophisticated technology. It's relatively simple: I make do with analog sensors, I'm not in virtual reality (VR) or 3D ambisonics, I stay in stereo, I can play on a small ordinary system. I'm not advocating ultra-technology, but a poetic use of the technologies available to us. It's a tool, just as we once experimented with the exquisite corpse on sheets of paper. I try to create a symbolic universe that corresponds to me and to share it, with today's tools, which it's good to appropriate. But I'm also capable of soloing with my bass and three pedals. I'm not obsessed with technology, I'm human-sized and I think about the music above all else.

Between December 2019 and February 2020, you will take up a residency in Pune, India, with the support of the French Institute and Ircam sound engineer Robert Piechaud, to model certain characteristics of the rudra veena for your FKBass. As Pandit Hindraj Divekar will pass away in May 2019, you are meeting several other masters of the instrument. Why such an interest in modeling the characteristics of an existing instrument, when with the FKBass you could embrace an infinite field of possibilities?
The FKBass concept comes from the rudra veena. The aim is not to make the bass sound like this instrument, which would be impossible. It's an opportunity to approach it in a more scientific and technical way. The rudra veena is at once very traditional, but also very contemporary in the way it is listened to. I'm convinced that everything that is profoundly archaic meets up at the other end of the circle with contemporaneity. I wanted to explore the question of dissonance and analogy: what can separate these two worlds, and what can bring them together? It doesn't seem paradoxical to me, because I don't want to create a virtual rudra veena, but to add a more acoustic-sounding module to an electric, microphonic instrument capable of generating digital transformations. We've added, for example, sympathetic string vibration simulations. Above all, I'm aiming to get closer to playing processes, not to sound modeling, which would be impossible to achieve.

You've never wanted to directly augment a rudra veena rather than your bass. Why is that?
I have a lot of respect for the men and women who play them and carry on the tradition. It would be up to them to consider this work if necessary, but that's not my path.

What's the premise of FKBass Solo I, the piece you'll be premiering at Musique Action on October 1?
This piece follows on from the series of studies I carried out in India on the FKBass. I'm currently in the process of composing it, and for the moment I'm proceeding as usual: in a very written way, I create large forms with different intensities, movements, passages, transitions and routes; and the improvisation takes place within this progression. It's a mixed form. For example, if I write the idea of a large mass moving towards a rarefaction at the note, everything is detailed in the writing of the movement, but the interpretation is entirely free. Here we find the idea of the Indian raga, at once fixed and highly improvised.

I'm also reminded of an idea developed by Yann Gourdon in an interview, concerning the steps of the bourrée, between imposed figure and freedom.
That's the beauty of tradition: to be guided and to be free.

When I listen to the Bass Holograms projects or the FKBass studies, beyond the Indian influence, I can't help but hear a rock base, notably in the bass sounds, but also in the use of distortion and certain repetitive structures. Am I right?
Yes, you are. I've been very influenced by industrial music. I clearly come from urban electric music. The bass is an instrument embedded in rock/pop culture, and that's where I come from. It's one of my undeniable influences.

Interview by Guillaume Kosmicki