The French force behind General Elektriks on how vintage keyboards, San Francisco and American R&B have influenced his new album, Good City For Dreamers.
| Five minutes into a conversation with Herve ‘RV’ Salters — aka General Elektriks, the funk-pop mastermind behind the new album Good City for Dreamers — and it becomes apparent that we’re in for a little gear-head talk and keyboard education.
Salters — who began playing the keyboard at age 14 — eventually |
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grew enamored with vintage keyboards like the Hammond Organ and the Fender Rhodes, the latter which he stumbled upon at age 18. “Some dude was getting rid of it because he was moving to Australia,” Salters recalls, “and I fell in love with that kind of feel. It bites back, you can feel the mechanism inside, and it’s got real personality as opposed to a newer synth.”
He continues describing the instrument, making references to its integral role in the Beastie Boys‘ Check Your Head album, before moving onto the Clavinet.
“It’s a late-60’s keyboard with guitar-like strings inside,” Salters says, his French accent (he’s a native of Paris) laced with fervor. “Underneath the keys there’s a rubber piece that hits the string, so as you’re hitting the key it’s like you’re tapping the guitar or slapping the bass. BANK BANK BANK” — he emulates the sound — “that’s what you hear. It’s the sound you hear on Stevie Wonder‘s “Superstition.” It’s very funky, very rhythmic.”
This is also the sound heard on track #3 of Good City for Dreamers, a lovely song titled “You Don’t Listen,” whose jazzy lilt is offset by what appears to be a wailing guitar.
But wait one moment…
“It’s not a guitar — it’s the clavinet thru distortion and pedals and stuff,” he says. “I like the idea of making noise and making a riot, and keyboards don’t always allow you to do that. I appreciate that these older keyboards have a lot of grit, and I don’t really see the point in just using them how they were used in the old days. I try to take those instruments into the future a little bit, take them through digital effects and tweak them through computers.”
Good City for Dreamers can indeed be best described as modern jazz for the digital era; a fusion of groove and sway combined with new renderings of vintage equipment and peppered with elements of hip-hop. Since Salters is a keyboard connoisseur, this instrument is, naturally, the backbone of the record. He makes it thunder like an intense bass on the lead single, “Take Back The Instant” and then transforms it into the aforementioned-singing guitar lick on “You Don’t Listen.
Good City For Dreamers is a love-letter to Salters’s adopted hometown — San Francisco, where he moved from France with his wife in 1999 (they have two children, ages 12 and 8.) He immediately became involved in the Bay Area music scene, starting a soul/pop trio, Honeycut, with musicians Bart Davenport and Tony Sevener in addition to playing keys for beloved alt hip-hoppers Blackalicious.
Working with American hip-hop artists, he says, has had a profound effect on his own music. “The attitude towards low-end and low-frequency in the mixes has had an impact on the way I envision [my music],” Salters says. “Working with hip-hop acts here in the past few years has showed me how the low-end has to be physical, it has to hit you in the stomach and move you, whereas in France, the low-end isn’t an important part of what you consider music to be.”
This is the second album under his General Elektriks moniker (surprisingly, there’s been no cease-and-desist letter yet from the corporate conglomerate; Salters says it’s a bit of “an Andy Warhol, Pop Art-type use of the corporate name, taking something that is well known and putting it under a different lens. And frankly,” he adds, “it rolls of the tongue really well!”) It was released first in France back in March (it dropped in the U.S. on November 10th) and he’s has been touring it for about six months.
The reaction on the road, Salters notes, has been appropriate.
“It’s funny, but depending on the country or city, people will react differently to songs,” he says. “Some people will say man, ‘this is such a great pop record’ and they’ll hear the pop aspects. Others will say, ‘dude, it’s like hip-hop with narrative’ or they’ll say, ‘I’m really hearing the jazz and the improvisations in it.’ It’s open to interpretation, and I’m pretty proud of that. That’s a compliment in my book.”