Michel “Away” Langevin has guided Voivod for more than forty years, shaping their sound from behind the drums while simultaneously creating the band’s rich visual artistic universe. I caught up with Michel to discuss their recent live album Symphonique, recorded alongside the Quebec Symphony Orchestra. He recounts the Orchestra’s initial call, the careful process of selecting and reshaping songs for an orchestral setting, the challenge of bringing those arrangements to the stage, and the powerful feeling of hearing them performed with a full orchestra for the first time. We also discussed the onstage tension and beauty, life on the road, the impact of losing guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour, and the long-running sci-fi thread woven throughout the band’s identity. What shines through is the same dedicated creative drive that has kept Voivod moving forward since 1983.
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How did the Symphonique project come together?
The Montreal Symphony Orchestra contacted us. Then we started to look through our catalog, and we realized that some of the songs could be a good match with an orchestra — mainly the songs that were more in the progressive rock mode. We picked songs that already had a modern composer’s style. We’ve been influenced by Penderecki, Shostakovich, Bartók, and we included a bit of this type of music into our music. So we picked songs that already had some of that in the arrangements. We tried to stay away from the very thrashy material, although we did pick “Nuclear War” from the very first album, because we thought it could turn into a scary military march with the orchestra, and it turned out very well. We also wanted to try “Astronomy Domine” by Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, and those also came out great.
Once we picked the songs that we thought would make sense, we chose the order according to what we thought would sound like a dystopian sci-fi movie journey. Chewy (Daniel Mongrain) was more involved with the orchestrator, Hugo Bergin. He teaches jazz music at college, so we could chart every song and hand that to the arranger, which was quite a head start. I remember that I gave the orchestrator some cues, like we wanted to have a vibe like the early cyberpunk movies; Mad Max, Terminator, Blade Runner. I also mentioned Planet of the Apes because it had some avant-garde music in its soundtrack. Chewy was giving the arranger ideas too. We worked on this project for a couple of years before we played the first shows in Montreal in early last year. Right after, we were offered a show in Quebec City with the local orchestra, the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, and that’s the performance we recorded. It was an amazing experience, although a bit stressful for me, because as a drummer, if I miss one beat or one bar, the whole orchestra gets lost. Since they were brand new arrangements, I had to be very focused.
What emotions did you feel hearing those songs transformed by a full orchestra for the first time?
During the show, it was hard to absorb the whole thing. I was really involved with supplying artwork that would be animated on the screen behind the stage, so I couldn’t really afford for the first show to look at the orchestra, look at the public, look at the screen. It was a different setup than usual because I was playing in a glass cage on the side of the stage, and we couldn’t have monitors, so we had in-ears with a belt pack, and we could adjust everything. It took a while to get used to it. By show number three in Quebec, which we recorded, I was able to enjoy the majestic side of the whole thing. But it’s when I heard the final mixes that I really felt like I had become a professional. It still feels like a dream. I could not believe we were playing with a full orchestra, like close to 70 musicians, I think. It was really beautiful. I was impressed with the conductor, Dina Gilbert.
Could you expand a bit on your experience working with her?
She is incredible. We worked closely with her for a couple of years, trying to find cues where she would look at me and I would look at her. There are many breaks in our music, so we had to find cues here and there. We’re going to do the experience again early next year in our hometown, where we formed Voivod in ’83 before moving to Montreal, and with the local orchestra. Dina Gilbert will be with us, and hopefully we’ll have her if we are to take this show on the road with local orchestras. Hopefully she’ll be with us all the time. She also really enjoyed the experience, and it’s funny, because at one point—I think it was the second show in Montreal—the crowd started chanting her name: “Dina! Dina! Dina!…” (laughs) It was pretty funny. She was not used to it at all. It was great.
You have done all the multimedia and art since Voivod’s beginning. What started you on that path?
I started to create the Voivod concept in the ’70s because I wanted to be a comic book artist, mainly for the magazine Heavy Metal. That’s where my first influence came from, which is pretty sci-fi. But when we formed the band in January ’83, we were looking for a name, and I mentioned Voivod, and the other guys asked me what it was. I explained the concept, and they thought it was really cool. We developed the concept through the ’80s over five albums. At first I was doing the art. I wanted to do something like Iron Maiden to attract the eye of the kids coming into the record store, so it’s sort of comic book oriented. But I studied science at university. I didn’t study art, so I didn’t have much notion.
I first started to do computer art in ’84 with an Apple II, but it’s really in ’86-’87 when I bought an Amiga computer to accelerate the processes, because I was doing acrylic paintings for the first four album covers, and it would take months, because I had no technique. That’s why I switched to digital art more than 40 years ago, out of necessity. I really kept up with everything that came up—Photoshop and everything—through the years. It really helped, mainly for animating my characters. I’m still doing that these days, but usually for the symphonic concerts I supply artwork to many different artists that would animate the art with AI, anything, any mediums available. Because I’m basically always on the road or in a studio with Voivod, to do the art, the covers and the T-shirts, it’s really useful. But to do the animation, it’s really time-consuming, so I usually have to rely on other people, although I did a lot of it in the past, in the ’90s.
Prior to joining the band, growing up, you knew that you had an artistic side?
Yeah, since I was a very young kid. I remember when I was super young drawing the animated character Atom, and I just never stopped. Although I do a lot of computer art with my iPad and a digital pen, on the road I love to draw with a normal pen, usually the notepad that they have in hotel rooms and the pen that comes with it. Sometimes the road art is red or blue—it’s pretty fun. I post it every night after my day. It’s sort of my expression of the whole day on tour. Every night I post one drawing with my view of the architecture of the town and the show. So even though I love to do computer art, I love to do traditional art on paper, freehand.
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What still excites you creatively after more than 40 years of making music with the band?
Musically, it’s great because the past few years we went back to prog rock mode, where the albums are very intricate, and we try to experiment with, let’s say, a string quartet or a brass quintet, or try to expand our sound. The last two studio albums, we won Junos for them, which is great. It gives us confidence that we are on the right path, and we can experiment even more, because people seem to really enjoy it. For the next studio album, I think we will experiment even more with different approaches and sounds. We have the luxury of being able to do that with Voivod because we have so many different styles combined in one sort of psychedelic metal. It’s also fun because we can tour with many different people. If we tour with a band like Midnight, the tour that’s coming up in the UK, which is more old school, we can play old school songs. If we tour with Opeth, like we did a couple of years back in Europe, then we’ll play the prog rock catalog. It’s pretty fun.
Your fans are famously passionate and loyal. What’s the most memorable interaction you’ve had with fans?
We’ve had many lately because we’ve been around for decades. Recently, my favorite is when the older fans who’ve been coming to the shows with their kids, and we’ve had many kids that are really young singing on the shoulders of their father, singing all the lyrics from all the eras. It’s amazing, and we usually get them on stage. They sometimes will stage-dive in the arms of their father. That’s always my favorite. Quite a few of them will hand me their kids’ drawings depicting the cover art of our albums. I have a whole collection of them.
Fans debate records like Nothingface, Angel Rat, and The Outer Limits endlessly. Do you have one album that you feel especially connected to personally?
We had five lineups, and I was the only one there all the way through, and I’m very proud of every album, all the lineups. I have one album that’s my favorite: Killing Technology from ’87, which we recorded in Berlin, because it sort of incorporated all these elements I was talking about earlier—punk, metal, prog, gothic, alternative. It’s all in there, and it’s also very representative of tons of events that marked us back then, like the Challenger explosion, the Chernobyl accident, the acid rain, ozone layer, the Star Wars project by Reagan. This album really marked me.
Losing Piggy was devastating for fans and internally. What was the emotional process of deciding that the band could continue after his passing?
It took about three years before… I mean, of course, back then Jason Newsted was in the band, and it really traumatized Snake, Jason, and me. For three years we were mainly focused on finishing two albums we had started in 2004, Catos and Infini. We didn’t think we would play live again. We were offered to do the first edition of Heavy Montreal with Mastodon, Iron Maiden and tons of bands. That was in 2008. That’s where we decided to reform with Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain from Martyr on guitar, but it was only meant to be one show. The word spread around, and soon enough we were invited to play in Tokyo with Testament, and then also Monsters of Rock in Calgary with Judas Priest and Ozzy, and it just kept going. We realized that people were just really excited that we were on the road playing the music, which most of it was written by Denis “Piggy” D’Amour. Right now we’re touring more than ever. It never really stopped since 2008, but it took three years of mourning before we decided it was time to go back on the road.
Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain had enormous shoes to fill as a guitarist. What qualities did you see in him that made it clear to you he was the right choice for the band?
We had seen him play a few times with a couple of different bands, and I was convinced that he was the right person to figure out the chords. He, Rocky, who plays bass now, and Chewy were at a Voivod show in 1990 when we were touring the Nothingface album. It was their first metal show, and they both decided to form a band. He was just the right person and perfect candidate. His style is not exactly the same as Piggy’s — Piggy was a bit old school, almost boogie in his approach, like Jimmy Page — but Chewy is more surgical. The spirit of Voivod is totally intact, and the way he writes music is a perfect fit. It’s just a great continuation. We’re very lucky to have him on board. Not to mention that since he’s teaching jazz at college, he has a lot of musical notions, so he can chart for string quartet or brass quintet, like for the Montreal Jazz Fest we did in 2019. He was also very involved with the arrangements of the symphonic album.
You’ve toured with everyone from underground extreme metal acts to more mainstream alternative acts. Which tours changed your perspective the most?
The first tour in ’86 with Celtic Frost in the USA was a culture shock. It’s really where we learned to speak English. We had to, and the first couple of albums, it’s Frenglish. (laughs) That was something that I will always remember. It was pretty insane. The first Euro tour with Possessed in ’86 was amazing as well. The tour we did with Faith No More and Soundgarden in 1990 was memorable, and also the same year we did a tour in Canada with Rush. We did a tour when Jason Newsted was in the band, he was also playing with Ozzy, so the whole year of 2003 we spent opening for Ozzy, and we also did the Ozzfest. That was really great. I have great memories of all of them. These days we’re doing some wonderful festivals and amazing tours. We were just playing across the USA with our friends Bat, and it was pretty fun. Last year we did across the USA with Prong, so it’s pretty exciting.
What was that like, touring with Ozzy?
It was pretty professional. Jason was doing two shows a day for the whole year of 2003, almost; he’s such a warrior. So he played with Voivod, and right after, had to play a long set with Ozzy. By that time, we played the last show with Ozzy, Ozzy was playing almost more than three hours because he wanted to beat Paul McCartney’s record. Ozzy was really hard to approach because he had a whole security team with him and a filming team. I believe this was the last season of The Osbournes, so you can imagine, a big machine going. I, accidentally, in an arena in Canada, it might have been Calgary or something, got lost. I was trying to go to the side of the stage from the backstage, and I got lost in this dark corridor, and I met Ozzy, who was lost in the same corridor. So that was my interaction with him. “Hey, Mr. Osborne, let me try to get you back to your backstage.” He was really happy, and I brought him back to his quarters, and his security team was really happy. They were looking for him. (laughs) It was a great experience.
Since you guys were so different than a lot of the more mainstream metal at the time, was it hard for things to come together in the beginning?
It actually happened very quickly, although it took a couple of years before we were able to tour internationally. We formed in January ’83 and the first album came out in the summer of ’84 on Metal Blade. The first couple of albums were in the vein of what was going to become thrash metal, so it was the right place, right time. We only realized that we were integrating more and more prog rock elements as we were learning how to play. We didn’t realize that we were very different before we started touring. We thought since it was so popular in Quebec, it was the same everywhere, but when we started touring outside of the province, that’s where we realized that not everybody knew King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant. It was not that difficult to be accepted, though. It was easier when alternative metal became popular in the early ’90s. We had that element already in us.
So much of early thrash metal was grounded in aggression, but Voivod has always sounded futuristic and alien. Where did that obsession with sci-fi and dystopian imagery first come from?
It came from the Heavy Metal magazine. There were also quite a few movies that influenced us — animated movies like Wizards, or my favorite, Fantastic Planet, but also very weird movies like Eraserhead, and made-for-TV movies like The Day After and Threads in the early ’80s. There was a documentary called If You Love This Planet by the National Film Board of Canada that also influenced my concept. At first it was a bit more Dungeons & Dragons, and I saw the name Voivod in the book Dracula by Bram Stoker. Early cyberpunk movies like Mad Max, Blade Runner, and Terminator were big influences. One of the scariest movies that influenced me the most is Colossus: The Forbin Project from 1970, where a supercomputer takes control of nuclear weapons. All these movies really influence my art in general.
You said you wanted to take Symphonique around the world?
Yeah, that’d be great. We have to do it again early next year in our hometown with the local orchestra. That’s the way to do it — to go around the planet using the local orchestra. What they need to do is rent the charts from the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. I really like the Asia album called Symfonia: Live in Bulgaria with a local orchestra. Although we would love to have the same conductor, Dina, at all the shows.
There’s something poetic about a band once considered too strange or futuristic for mainstream metal now performing with a symphony orchestra. Does that feel validating at all?
Oh yeah. It’s definitely the highlight of my career, but it was also the biggest challenge, because it’s an ultra-professional setting and you can’t fool around. Hopefully it’s the beginning of an adventure for us.
When did you start getting into drumming?
It began when I was a kid, about 10. I saw the movie Help! with the Beatles, and I saw Ringo banging on his drum kit, the cymbal shaking, and so I decided I wanted to be Ringo. (laughs) Then I discovered Kiss, and I became a bit heavier with my approach. Then Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple. Punk rock came about when I was in high school and I added a lot of thump to my style, became more tribal. But it’s really when the New Wave of British Heavy Metal came about — the first Iron Maiden album, Ace of Spades by Motörhead, British Steel by Judas Priest — that I decided to become a heavy metal drummer. Around 1980 I started to rehearse a lot more on my own. All through that I was listening to a lot of prog rock, of course.
You’ve survived lineup changes, shifts in the music industry, and entire genre movements. What do you think kept the band alive when so many of your peers have disappeared?
It’s hard to tell. The people into Voivod are very loyal, and I think the fact that we keep supplying them with projects — like we have now a video game called Nuclear War in the works coming out soon, based on end of ’80s, early ’90s aesthetics of video games. We just released a big book by Jeff Wagner called Always Moving. It’s more than 500 pages. We also have the documentary We Are Connected coming out soon. The people who love Voivod are always happy that we keep supplying them with live albums, studio albums, and other types of products. One aspect of the band: we grew up in the Cold War and we’ve been describing the destruction of this planet for a while. Maybe we never stopped being relevant over the years, so that might have helped us.
Do you think the fact that you’ve remained accessible to your fans has also contributed to your longevity?
Yes, we called the fan club the Iron Gang. People were really proud they got a membership card. I ended up closing the PO box around ’98 because by then we had moved the Iron Gang online. But it was actually pretty fun to answer letters from all around the world. I remember getting a letter from a soldier from Russia. He was in a submarine under the ice of somewhere, and under the polar ice for six months, and he only brought bootleg cassettes of Voivod and a Walkman. We had letters from Chile, where, when there was still Pinochet controlling the country, and I couldn’t really discuss politics at all in the letters. These were interesting times, and I made friends with a lot of people from the Eastern Bloc in Europe that I was only able to meet in the early ’90s when we were finally able to play shows in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia. In a way, l’ve been very lucky to have all these experiences happening to me for decades now, because it really forged my culture.
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Symphonique is available now via Century Media.
