BAND OF THE WEEK: Geneviève Beaulieu
First solo effort sees Menace Ruine musician pick up her first love again: the acoustic guitar.
(all photos by S. Lamothe)
After a long time of inactivity, the last couple of years have been a delight for all Menace Ruine fans out there. The Canadian duo, for a long time one of the most exhilarantingly unique-sounding, envelope-pushing entities at the fringes of several genres, returned with 2022’s ‘Nekyia’, one of the best albums of their career, and added a companion record to it a few months later, in 2023 already, in the form of Ghost Heartbeats, a collection of pieces that evolved out of drum sessions/field recordings recorded by Geneviève out in the wilderness. 2024 saw the surprising announcement of a couple of live shows (including an Amplifest appearance) after an similarly very prolongued absence from the stage, and hey, someone even managed to get a rare, proper spoken interview with Geneviève and S. where they opened their heart about their music and artistic inspirations like precious few times before.
We’re not worthy, but still, the treats keep coming. A few days ago, Geneviève released a solo album entitled ‘Augury’, where she returns to her first instrument, “the nylon-string guitar she fell in love with when she was 13,” as her Bandcamp explains. Through these six songs in just over 30 minutes, Geneviève’s haunting, hypnotic voice is clearer and cleaner than ever as it weaves itself around the equally fascinating guitar melodies. It would be easy to establish a sort of yin/yang, light/darkness duality kind of thing here with Menace Ruine to help describe the vibe of these songs, but it would also be overly simplistic and ultimately misleading. Anyone who has dived deep into not only ‘Nekyia’ but some of the past gems of their catalogue such as ‘The Die Is Cast’ or ‘Alight In Ashes’, for example, just to mention two of my favourites, knows that despite the apocalyptic firestorm that rages in many moments of such records, not all is darkness and noise and devastation in the band’s output - as Geneviève herself mentions a couple of times in the fabulous interview she was kind enough to grant us (down there after the jump), there is a lot of nuance to her music under the Menace Ruine guise, including in the interplay of her voice with the abrasive textures that usually are happening alongside it.
Similarly, not everything is peaceful pastoral contemplation (for peaceful pastoral contemplation, the Ghost Heartbeats companion piece would actually be your best bet within the Geneviève universe) in ‘Augury’ - the overall vibe is naturally more peaceful than what we’re used to, and it’s easy to just let yourself go be lost in the labyrinths erected by her fantastic vocal lines, but once you look around inside the maze, you’ll realise there are many shades here, lyrically and musically, distinct enough to make this a (perhaps surprisingly) very dynamic record in terms of mood and overall vibe. Not to mention a definitive confirmation of this wonderful Quebecois lady as one of the great naturally evocative singers of our age, as if any more was needed.
‘Augury’ is out now.
You can find Geneviève Beaulieu on Bandcamp and Instagram.
You can also find Menace Ruine on Bandcamp and Instagram, and Preterite - her project with James Hamilton - on Bandcamp.
Thank you to Geneviève for the brilliant conversation that you can read below.
“I felt a lot of grief and anger about human stupidity and evil, and I felt the need to “sing” this grief for the natural world, to address it more directly this time.”
— Geneviève Beaulieu
What was at the source of the idea to do an album like this, just you and the guitar, under your own name? Most of these songs are a few years old already, right? Is there any new composition among them, or are all of these pretty much what you had written back then?
Geneviève Beaulieu: When I composed these songs back in 2011-12, on guitar and vocal lines (no lyrics, just a few titles), I wasn’t thinking about an album under my own name. I just had a very creative reunion with my old ¾ nylon-string guitar. I came back to this instrument for practical reasons: I had just had hernia surgery, and my classical guitar was lighter than the electric guitar I was playing at the time in my project Preterite with James Hamilton. We initially thought of using some of this material with Preterite and even played a few songs together, but it was a very busy time in my life. Then S. and I moved to the woods and distanced ourselves from almost everyone and everything, including those songs. I had planned to record them someday, but in 2017, a musician I really like in Montreal invited me to open for his project, solo. I accepted, but as the cold weather returned, so did the joint pain in my fingers, making it difficult to play. My anxiety grew so much that I couldn’t work on the lyrics or prepare for the show, and I had to cancel. That was very hard for me. It felt like a failure, but I decided to use the practice I had done and recorded 13 songs on guitar and banjo the best I could, during the winter by the fireplace and into the following summer. After that, I put my guitar back in its case and haven’t played since, except for the ‘Ephemerals’ video. The lyrics didn’t come naturally as I’d hoped. It was the same with Menace Ruine’s last album, ‘Nekyia’—the lyrics took years to write. Something important was happening inside me, and I needed to address it so the creativity could flow again. I was finally able to finish the lyrics in 2023, and the arrangements followed. By then, it was clear that I would work on this material alone, and if I finished the album, it would be published under my real name.
As with a lot of your work (I’d say more or less all of it!), there is a very deep connection with nature and your surroundings, right? More than any artist or instrument, I like to think that that connection is almost your main source of inspiration and influence.
Geneviève: You’re right. That connection is what allows me to continue making music, even though music feels a bit less necessary to me now. It feels more like I’m participating in or co-creating with the world around me. Our surroundings constantly invite themselves in our visuals, photos, and videos, but also with their sounds, glimpses of them on the recent albums, and from beginning to end on ‘Ghost Heartbeats’. Menace Ruine isn’t exactly natural in sound and feels harsh in the quiet world we live in now. Sometimes I feel guilty about making all that noise, even for my own ears. But the project has a powerful evocative quality and takes me places I couldn’t go with any other project. Around the time of ‘Nekyia’ (and ‘Augury’), when we moved here, I felt a lot of grief and anger about human stupidity and evil, and I felt the need to “sing” this grief for the natural world, to address it more directly this time. Themes like nature’s destruction, species extinction, animal exploitation and the collective shadow were on my mind. Living in nature has made me more attuned to its rhythms, more sensitive to everything that happens here. Nature doesn’t express itself with words, so it inspires me on a deeper level. I needed that connection so much when we began Menace Ruine in the city. I was getting my creative oxygen through solitary walks on Mont-Royal and in the nearby cemetery with music in my ears to block out city noise. It may sound silly but I believe my work with Menace Ruine, particularly the albums ‘Alight in Ashes’ and ‘Venus Armata’, helped lead us to the woods. Moving here felt like the fulfillment of a wish I’d had for a long time, even though I never thought it would be possible. But as we were expelled from both our apartment and rehearsal space, we had to find a solution and this old house for rent just showed itself to us in a magical way. We did not even know the name of the village at the time, and did not have a car, but we knew it was our home.
That deep connection is also apparent in the lyrics, isn’t it? Would you like to talk a little bit about them, maybe a couple of songs that you’d like to pick and give us a few more details on what’s behind your words to them?
Geneviève: Certainly! ‘La Chanson de Coyote’ was the first song I composed. The title came to me instantly with the music, and over the years, I had to solve the lyrical puzzle. It’s about the trickster archetype, someone we can either fall prey to or, like the Fool in the Tarot, who can inspire us to take leaps of faith into new adventures. Sometimes those leaps are for the better, sometimes not. In the case of this song, not so much… But as with all bad experiences, the key is to learn from them.
‘The Longest Trail’ speaks to the difficulty and isolation of following your own path. You never know where it will lead, but you accept being lost for a while, maybe even a long, long while.
‘Ephemerals’ was inspired by flowers that bloom briefly in early spring and die within a few days. I relate to that as someone who seems to thrive more in darkness. The fear that spring may never return, (which is almost a real concern here in Quebec with its endless winters) is a recurring theme in my lyrics, as in ‘Marriage in Death’ from ‘Venus Armata’. I find the myth of Persephone and Demeter to be ever-inspiring. At the end of the ‘Augury’ booklet, I included a quote from Cicero about the Eleusinian Mysteries, which celebrate that same myth. He said about it that initiates learned "how to live in joy, and die with better hope", so how to make peace with their own mortality. In ‘Ephemerals’, I ask for inspiration and for the fire to burn again, and it was meant to be a song for Brigid, calling for her help. The sketchy self-portrait I published on my Instagram came from that. The song evolved to include multiple layers and images of that same wish for life to begin flowing again, so I could move forward with my music, among other things.
‘Waning Sun’ and ‘Sink My Own Boat’ might seem like the darkest songs if you take them literally, but don’t! I was a bit worried people would misinterpret them and think I wanted to die. While death is certainly present throughout the album, it’s more symbolic. It’s about making peace with the past and moving forward. Death has always been present in Menace Ruine’s music too.
‘Severed Head’ took its title from the beginning, and I wove it with the story of Medusa, exploring themes of being an outcast and the fear of the feminine. It’s the witchy song of the album, I guess. We actually have a few snake companions around the house, some even living in the walls! They’re beautiful and fascinating. When I send pictures or videos of them to people, I’m always struck by how much fear they provoke. I think it’s because people don’t take the time to observe and see their beauty, they just react. It’s sad. There’s also the theme of death again in this song, with scavengers. I’ve become a bit obsessed with, and admiring of, nature’s way of recycling life and death—something humans aren’t very good at.
It is mentioned (and we have briefly discussed it in the podcast episode too) that ‘Augury’ is “the first part”. Can we expect a second part soon, then?
Geneviève: I’m not sure about soon, but yes, there are seven more songs from the same guitar recording sessions. I still need to write lyrics and arrangements for them, and I see them as the second part of ‘Augury’. Whether I get to that depends on the level of interest in this material. It’s a lot of work, and starting something new sounds always more exciting. But I am still inspired by those songs so, there is hope!
You mention on your Bandcamp that this is a return to your primary instrument – to play and record these songs, did it make you in some way return to your early teens when you first fell in love with the guitar? What was your music taste like back then, did you have any particular “heroes” you wanted to emulate in some way?
Geneviève: Hopefully, it didn’t bring me back to my teen years! I didn’t really try to play other people’s music back then. I mostly played classical guitar repertoire, which I loved. It’s a shame I don’t remember any of those pieces now, and I’m too lazy to read sheet music again. One of the few artists I do remember playing songs by with this guitar is Leonard Cohen. I love his music and listened to his early albums quite a lot. I’ve always preferred fingerpicking to playing with a pick and never felt comfortable with electric guitar, even though I switched to it for band projects later on. I didn’t enjoy playing loud, and I can’t say I ever had guitar heroes. I’ve always preferred singing to playing guitar. Strangely, I never thought I would sing in a band. When I started creating songs with my first partner, I wrote the vocal melodies but imagined I would just play guitar, and we’d have a male vocalist. I loved deep voices like Cohen’s, or singers from bands I listened to at the time, like Joy Division and Bauhaus. Maybe that’s why I loved Nico so much, her low range. I like to sing low sometimes too, though it’s not my most comfortable range.
“It would be a dream to rearrange some of Menace Ruine’s repertoire
with a small orchestra or string ensemble one day.”
Does it also feel in any way that this music is very complementary to what you do with Menace Ruine? You sing differently, and obviously the instrumentation and arrangements are quite different in approach too, but the vibe and the atmosphere obviously comes from the same mind and heart. It’s like two sides of the same coin.
Geneviève: Yes, we can see it as complementary, like ‘Ghost Heartbeats’ was to ‘Nekyia’. ‘Augury’ is part of the same world, and so will be the next Menace Ruine album. It may seem different, but ‘Augury’ is as dark as Menace Ruine, at least lyrically, even though it has a lighter sound. It’s definitely the same heart and mind, and the same voice. With Menace Ruine, I have to sing "louder" or with fewer nuances because the details wouldn’t be heard anyway. It’s frustrating sometimes. People often say I sing melodies over noise, but that’s a bit simplistic. They don’t always realize the subtle harmonics created by distortion and the richness of the sound, or at least not as I hear it. Some people do, but others just hear harshness and miss the nuances, which can be off-putting for them—like my family! I understand it, though. Sometimes I wonder why I’m making this kind of music, but I always come back to the answer: because I like how it sounds. These songs wouldn’t exist without the sound that inspired them in the first place. It would be a dream to rearrange some of Menace Ruine’s repertoire with a small orchestra or string ensemble one day, to bring out the melodic interactions and subtleties, along with the voice. That’s what ‘Augury’ allows me to do—cut the noise and let the music in without causing pain or a reaction. I was curious whether Menace Ruine listeners would follow me with this new music. I thought maybe those who liked it for the noise and loudness wouldn’t, but perhaps those who liked my singing would. I received a beautiful message about ‘Augury’ that confirmed for me that my voice can draw people to it, and to Menace Ruine even before the music. I don’t think Menace Ruine fans will be too disoriented by ‘Augury’.
Have you thought about performing these songs live? How do you think it would differ, in your mind, from a Menace Ruine concert, in terms of feeling? Would it be harder for you, would you feel more vulnerable perhaps?
Geneviève: I’m not ready for it yet. I’m not sure I ever will be because of my fingers. These songs require more skill to perform, and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable enough to do it. Menace Ruine was a way for me to make music when I couldn’t play guitar or didn’t enjoy it anymore. Playing the ‘Augury’ songs live would create a more intimate atmosphere than a Menace Ruine concert, but I don’t think it would be less intense. These songs are powerful in their own way and just as emotionally charged. I would certainly feel more vulnerable, though in my experience, I feel the most vulnerable when I’m singing without an instrument. It grounds me to play guitar or synth while I sing. We performed a Preterite song live, the first one from Pillar of Winds called ‘Oath’, where I just sang while James played harmonium. I felt totally exposed, like I had no control over my voice, and it was a bit scary.
After the Menace Ruine shows this year, what are your musical plans, if you have any already in place that you’d like to share?
Geneviève: After returning from Amplifest in Porto, we’ll most likely continue working on the next Menace Ruine album, which is well underway. I had planned to record the vocals this fall, but that timeline was a bit unrealistic. Once the Menace Ruine album is done, S. and I will both focus on our individual projects. S. has music and videos on hold for his project Quogne, and as for me, I have a few possibilities, including the second part of my guitar material. I’ll see how I feel when the time comes.
