by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Zach Condon's life changed with one phone call on the UNM campus.
"I received this phone call one day literally walking to class saying, 'Do you want to release this album?'" the Beirut front man said of his critically acclaimed album Gulag Orkestar.
The album is heavily influenced by Balkan brass bands and the musical atmosphere of old Europe.
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"I dropped out of school that day," Condon said. "The next day, I started preparing the rest of the album, and then I left for New York."
He had dropped out of three schools before that - first leaving high school as a junior to explore Paris.
"The parents, they were like, 'You can't exactly just get away with this scot-free, Zach,'" Condon said. "In my family, you don't do that sort of thing."
He's been moving around in a triangle through New Mexico, New York and France since he was a teenager. His European expenditures influenced his musical sensibilities.
"I'm a complete and utter Francophile to the core," he said. "I remember my brother sitting me down at a certain age, making sure I was raised on good films and not watching 'Rainbow' and 'Transformers.' At the age of 12, he was making me sit through (Jean-Luc) Godard films, which were painful to watch, and then I quickly started to love them, and the obsession started there. There's something about these French movies. You can't put your finger on it."
He started learning French by watching these films, he said.
"I started doing insane stuff, like I'd get all those old films I'd already seen, and I used to tape over the subtitles, over the bottom of the screen," he said. "I'd watch it over and over and over again, but I knew the plot, and I'd seen the movie before, so I had a starting point."
He said once he fixates on something, he gets into it so deeply that he can barely emerge.
"When I get through a musical obsession, it's pretty intense," he said. "Balkan music, I went really far into. I almost didn't come back from it is the way I see it. Imagine an entire year of me coming back from Europe, the second time, just playing nothing but Balkan music in my house and then writing the album."
He said people question his authenticity as a gypsy musician, and they also romanticize his life.
"You read Spin Magazine and they make it sound like I was some gypsy traveling around Europe with my trumpet," he said. "I mean, these people were getting such these romantic ideas like, 'Oh, this guy must live in a fantasy of rural Armenia and Macedonia and Serbia, where bands play and confetti just flies in from the air at all times of the day, and there's always a wedding or a funeral going on,' and all this shit."
He didn't go to Paris the first time for the music.
"I went to Paris to go to Paris," he said. "I almost went just to look at the place. I mean, visually, it's enough to keep you entertained for at least six months."
The first time he went to Paris, he was introduced to Balkan brass music.
"In the summer on the banks of the Seine, in the quays, there's kids my age, lots of them," he said. "They all pile onto the quays, and basically, you just walk in there, and you sit down, and they're French, and they're friendly, and they're all drinking lots of wine and bread, and they bring picnics, and no one knows anybody, but they all go. It's a community."
After spending time there for a while, a band started to appear every night.
"There was this band of brass musicians, and they'd show up with these pawn shop brass instruments, and none of them really knew how to play," he said. "They were playing Balkan brass music, which, when you see it live, is just amazing. I just got the gall up, and I was drunk enough to go up and talk to the guys. Eventually they handed me a trumpet, and I'd start playing with them a little bit."
He said the second time he went, his interest moved toward chanson, a French style of lyric-driven, cabaret-type music. His next album, which he finished last week, borrows more from chanson than Balkan brass. He prefers these styles to modern American music because of their sincerity.
"Some people were so happy to see something on the shelves other than guitar, bass, drums and some squawky guy going, '(Indecipherable wailing) houses and streets, houses and streets, (more indecipherable wailing) art school,'" he said. "I wanted to come from somewhere more genuine than that."
He also likes the live dramatics of drunken sing-along-type stuff.
"I hate to be some sort of elitist or something, but if you see fado on the street, or you see a Balkan brass band on the street, or you see a French singer in a bar, you walk out of that thing like, 'Holy fucking shit,'" he said. "Because our only experience of live music in our lives as Americans is often the local punk bands. It's all just like, 'Assault, assault, assault, assault,' which is a very American music thing. And then you go to this place, and it's almost like watching the New York philharmonic or something, because those people can sweep you away."
Condon, who had been living in Albuquerque for the past few months, moved back to Brooklyn, N.Y., on Monday to prepare for a third indefinite move to Paris.
"It's incredibly exciting," he said. "Now that I'm a musician, I can do what I do from wherever; it doesn't even matter. I am so excited to drink cheap wine and eat pÉtÇ and speak French again. God only knows, maybe I can convince the French government to just let me live there."
