Photos courtesy of Adélaïde Lannoije and Endless Dive
UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
After releasing three albums and performing over a hundred concerts across Europe, Belgian instrumental band Endless Dive faced a new challenge while creating their upcoming album Souvenances due to the departure of two founding members. This led them to shift from group composition to focusing on production behind a computer. Musically, this change manifests as a blend of classical guitar, electronic music, and field recordings sourced from old VHS tapes of their childhood, all with the aim of creating a post-rock sound that is completely different from what they have offered in the past. I had the pleasure of speaking with guitarist Pierre Van Vlaenderen and drummer Nathan Mondez about music production, childhood memories, and Pokémon.
This interview was conducted virtually in January and has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes.
Interviewed by Dana Badii
Dana: Your next album, Souvenances, is going to be out exactly a month from today. How are you feeling in the lead up to it?
Pierre: I totally forgot it was already in one month. It’s been like usual, not like a really long process. We finished recording in April or May [2024]. When it’s done, you’re happy but you’ve already listened to it hundreds of times. So for me personally, I took a step back from it. I haven’t listened to the songs for a few months. You’re always like a step above what people hear; when it’s new to the people, it’s already out to your ear. That’s why I’m taking a step back to get that excitement back when it’s released. But I didn’t realize that it was in one month, so I’m like, “Oh, it’s near!”
Nathan: I just listened to the test press from the vinyl seven days ago. It’s been a refresh for some songs. I didn’t listen to some songs for months, like Pierre, but it was a good surprise for some songs and others, where I feel like I could have improved the song. It’s always the same feeling when you create an album and listen to the final product. It’s weird.
Pierre: Maybe both our answers don’t seem like it, but we are happy.
Dana: No, I completely understand. For Radio, sometimes I’ve created show setlists. Even though we’re in college and everyone’s pretty accepting, I still think, “does the person tuning in right now want to hear sixty minutes of whatever I’m going to play next? But no, sometimes you really got to just step back and let the music speak for itself.
Souvenances will be your first album out ever since the departure of your previous band members Nathan Bonnet and Elie Pauwels. It has been said that this change led to the album shifting production techniques. Can you elaborate on that?
Pierre: You create music differently when you are two instead of four. When you’re four, everyone has their instruments. But when we were two, guitar and drums, you feel like something’s missing. So we’ve tried a lot of things, like with loops or something, but we needed to adapt. It’s different, but it usually begins with guitar; I recorded some stuff and then it was easier to just approach the music with a computer and electronic drums for that technical aspect. But also maybe we wanted to change a bit from the previous record as well. It’s not that we decided [it], but something that came to us naturally.
Dana: I noticed that with one song, “Rouge feu,” it was quite synth heavy in comparison with the rest of the album. Was there any particular choice behind that?
Pierre: I don’t know if you know the meaning of the words in English.
Dana: Red fire, I believe?
Pierre: Actually, the name, do you know Pokémon?
Dana: Yes!
Pierre: In France, the first games were Version Rouge and Version Bleu. Ten years later, they made a remake called Rouge Feu. The whole record is about our childhood, and we both loved Pokémon and the Game Boy. We wanted to make sounds that sounded like that era. Our song “Rouge feu” was very synth heavy since I watched some videos about how music on the Game Boy was made on a square synth at that time. I loved it and I wanted to do it. I think Nathan, on his drums, took some video game samples. As you said, it’s a good contrast between the rest of the record. We put it in sixth place on the album to refresh the sound.
Dana: What’s your favorite Pokémon and game?
Pierre: I still have my Pokémon Red edition [gets up and shows me the game card]. But my favorite Pokémon? The names in French are different, but Carapuce, the little blue turtle.
Dana: Squirtle!
Nathan: Pokémon Yellow with Pikachu was my favorite. I think I flushed it down the toilet.
Dana: Mine was Houndoom, from the second region Johto. It looks like a guard dog with two horns coming out of its head.
Pierre: I liked Pokémon Red, but the one after it, Pokémon Silver, had Johto and Kanto. Two regions in one, so it’s the best.
Dana: Souvenances was heavily influenced by childhood wonder and nostalgia. Were there any childhood memories in general that helped you create the mood of the album?
Nathan: “La petite danseuse,” has lyrics from my great-grandmother. I found a tape from her with lots of different songs. This one took my attention, and so we created the song around it.
Pierre: I think there’s plenty of them. In the second song, “Deux roues,” you can hear some audio samples that Nathan incorporated into it. It’s of my father teaching me how to ride a bike. It’s funny since it’s not a memory that I have, but I watched a VHS tape of it. I was four or five and didn’t have any memory of it, but rewatching the tape had me thinking, “Wow, this was the house I grew up in, my parents look younger.” Seeing those videos put me in my old childhood that I kind of forgot, and it was good to remember those moments.
Dana: Within this album and its marketing, the two of you have gone back to your personal pasts to create childhood wonder. For one music video in particular, “Petit bain,” it’s been said that there are 564 childhood photos of you and your fans. Talk me through why you decided to reach out to your audience for the imagery instead of inserting your own home videos like you did with the “Deux roues” music video?
Pierre: I think we liked the DIY aspects. Most of our stuff, we try to make it ourselves. I don’t know about Nathan, but I’m more happy with the result when I take the things in my hand, because I want it to be like in my head, and for the idea to involve people. I had the idea with the French band Odezenne, which makes atmospheric rap music. During the lockdown back in 2020, they asked people to film their window to send in a video clip, and you can see some beautiful shots. You can do a lot through a window. I like the idea of asking people to send something to us and I feel like when you get involved in a video clip, it’s something that’s a bit special from another video, because you’re like, “Hey, there is my picture in it.” We wanted to create that feeling, so that’s why we asked people to send a picture from their childhood.
Dana: When watching the video, of course, I didn’t know all 500 or so people who sent in their things, but it really felt like those were people that I could have seen growing up in my classes, at the playground, or at the park.
Pierre: When I received the pictures and edited them together in the video, I saw pictures at the beach, at wintertime, and it feels like we all share the same memories. There’s a lot of children who have memories at the beach, from birthdays, and at school. And it’s funny to see that all people shared some same memories, no matter where in the world they were from. There was something quite special to see all of this.
Dana: Have there been any outside musical influences that have inspired you while producing in this new way for the album?
Nathan: For me, for the drums, it was $uicideboy$ and Ghostemane. It’s the same feelings, and inspired me for the electronic drums, but it’s absolutely not the same kind of music. Very different.
Pierre: For the guitar, several acoustic artists. Adrienne Lenker, a London-based classical music guitarist named Vraell, but the one who inspired me the most is Saya Gray. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her, but she’s a singer from both Canada and Japan. The whole production aspect was inspired from her, because she uses acoustic guitar with a lot of her production and has a beautiful voice over it. One of her albums has been my favorite album ever for the past two or three years, so she’s my main influence.
Dana: Nathan, you said that you got a lot of influence from underground groups like $uicideboy$, which doesn’t sound like anything you’ve put out. I can definitely see how, even if you don’t operate within that genre, there’s a lot of things from that genre, like synths, drums, and even vocals to a very small extent, that you can copy over for your own music.
Pierre: We just don’t really listen to a lot of music either. Before this record, we made two records who were maybe more influenced by post-rock bands and stuff. And I think we kind of want to be detached from that, at least for one of them, just to propose something new. And so yes, maybe that’s why that record sounds different because, I guess we have read different inspirations from it.
Dana: Endless Dive has stated that even though the band itself just has two members, now there will be extra musicians on tour that can still help play older materials. How did you find artists who could keep the spirit of how the old members played?
Nathan: We were just searching for people that we have a good feeling about, and after, I think it’s a lot of work to create this harmony.
Pierre: We needed to find another guitarist. It was kind of difficult, because when you play post-rock, you need some specific gear and you can’t ask any guitarist. We found a guy who has a lot of pedals and stuff that will handle it, he was more of a drummer who could play some guitar and he was a bit stressed. Like, “Okay, I don’t really know if I can do it,” but we were like, “Okay, but let’s give it a try, take the time it needs to you for you to learn the song and stuff,” and now he’s been more and more ready because we are performing in six weeks and now it’s getting really good because we felt like he wanted to. And in French, we say, “When you want, you can.”
Dana: What do you think that the new future of Endless Dive will look like with you two as the sole members?
Pierre: We still don’t really know, because we are mainly focused now on preparing the new [live] band. It took a lot of work to readapt the sets with them. After it, maybe we will get a little break to think about the future. Because now we are already focused and work a lot on the visual aspect as well, and it takes a lot of time. So for me, I can’t really project myself in the future right now because the present is really busy.
Dana: Honestly, that’s a pretty fair answer. If I was put in your shoes right now, where exactly one month from now I have to release this brand new piece of work that’s very different from anything else I’ve ever made in my life, I probably wouldn’t be able to think too much in the future. But sometimes, you really just have to create something that reflects how you feel right now, and that’s all there is to it.
Pierre: But tomorrow, we have a new video coming out with the band. So even tomorrow, we’ll be like, “Okay, now it’s over. Sure, we are four with the band,” so it will be like a new step for us.
Dana: Our unofficial tradition in UCLA Radio whenever we interview artists is that we always ask them, if they had a radio show, what would your DJ name be? A lot of us have shows, and have very crazy and silly names for on air. What would you two have as your DJ names?
Pierre: I want to be a DJ. I take some classes and stuff, and I like producing music. I found a name that would be funny, but it was like last summer in the Charli xcx period, and it was a nickname because my name in Flemish, in Dutch, the second language in Belgium, is Piet. I wanted to make it Brat Piet, like the Charli xcx album. But we will see if I get this name or not.
Nathan: I never thought about being a DJ; I have my own projects, but nothing on the Internet. But the name is called Rosiliane, and it’s the fusion of the two names of my grandmother. So it’s a name, but it’s more like a personal project too.
Dana: I think that fusion would be a good baby name as well.
Souvenances will be released on February 28th. Check out Endless Dive’s latest release:
