saturday night was a french infested feline frolic featuring the lions of puxi cd launch at the dream factory and papier tigre at logo. i attended and enjoyed both. the lions are the embodiment of perfection and their reggae grooves are fantastic. papier tigre, with their no-bass-two-guitars-and-crazy-drummer line up, were somewhat more challenging and totally amazing. dan did a great interview with them last week, though he (pierre, the drummer) neglected to answer one of the most pertinent questions there – “How do you fill in the sonic range to keep the songs heavy?” A lot of arthur de la grandiere’s playing sounds like distorted bass guitar. how does he do it?

Hypothesis 1

- one of the guitarists is using an octave pedal to make the guitar sound like a bass.

not the case as eric pasquereau (guitar, vocals) had only one pedal at his feet – a tuner. and arthur (guitar, snare drum) had just a tuner and a proco RAT. also, arthur’s playing was very chordal at times and octave pedals can’t handle more than one note at a time.

Hypothesis 2

- one or both of them uses a really low tuning or possibly tunes one or two strings down really low

when i asked arthur what tuning he was using he replied “drop D”. this means tuning the lowest string down just one tone from an E to a D. i was expecting something extreme like B E A D F# B. i saw changing some tunings between songs, so perhaps his answer of “drop D” was just a quick answer to a more complex question.

Hypothesis 3

- arthur uses a combination of the RAT and the settings on his amp to make things as deep as possible and creates some kind of audio illusion.

this is entirely possible and quite impressive.

The other mystery of the night is what guitar was eric playing? first correct answer wins the adoration of all your friends, as well as all the dvds i’ve watched in the last few weeks (funny people, the taking of pelham 123, moon and many more). here’s eric in beijing:

and here’s a close-up taken after the show at logo: