French production outfit Aeroplane have been making large and repeated splashes with their remixes for the likes of Grace Jones and Robbie Williams. This week, Aeroplane main man Vito de Luca launches his debut album, We Can’t Fly.
Aeroplane’s bittersweet melancholic-psychedelic sound was a genuine labour of love.
The Aeroplane album is about my passion for late ’70s/early ’80s pop music. It was really how to achieve the same sound without it being a joke, and without just sampling an ’80s record. I wanted to sound like them so I had to force myself to work with the same limits. If you explain that to some people, they’re just like: ‘Why are you doing that to yourself?’ Music has been evolving with technology, so if you wanna sound like you’re from that era, you have to set yourself the same limits.
De Luca believes limitations drive creativity.
That’s the problem with technology. If you wanna put a reverb on something, you have 36 different reverbs that come with a thousand presets each. And you spend your time listening to presets and not working. When you only have one reverb, well, just deal with it. Make it sound good.
The album’s freewheeling direction was the result of De Luca’s split with former Aeroplane partner Stephen Fasano.
Basically, what Stephen was doing when we were still a two-piece was taking me back to a kind of club recipe that you have to play if you want people to react to your song. Every genre of music that’s made for clubs has a way to be done – you have the break for 32 bars, then you have a drop, then the bass comes in. It’s really codified. So that’s something I was able to give up on when I was doing my album, because nobody was meant to dance to it, you know? If I wanna put five bars, I can do it.
Needless to say, De Luca is enjoying his freedom.
You can be more relaxed about what you’re doing and you can concentrate on something else. Most of the great pop bands, like Pink Floyd or Fleetwood Mac, their structures were quite crazy, but everybody knows these songs so well, they don’t realise how freaky it is.
Although he’s happy with the album, De Luca sees it as a stepping stone to cinematic glory.
To be honest, I’m obsessed with movie scores. Some of the tracks are really are movie scores. Like ‘The Point Of No Return’ is really a movie theme – that’s the way it’s written. So I’m hoping I can put one foot in that world and do some work on that a little bit.
He’s certainly got good taste in influences…
Moroder is an easy number one. Faltermeyer, in his period, did a lot of cool stuff. Bill Conti, who did the Rocky soundtrack – a lot of the stuff he did is really mind-blowing. John Carpenter – he did a lot of electronic soundtracks that were amazing. I also started collecting library music soundtracks; all these guys who were stuck in studios all day just doing music for movies, and they came up with some of the most crazily produced and most original pieces of music of that era, and nobody really knows about it. They were putting these guys in a studio and saying, ‘Okay, be as crazy as you can’ – and trust me, they were pretty crazy.
Has De Luca made any inroads into soundtrackology yet?
No, not yet, because I’m not welcome there at the moment. I’m nobody. It takes a lot of time to actually be considered. I’ve been talking with Tom from Junkie XL, because we have the same management. Now he’s doing a lot of soundtracks but he was explaining to me how he is considered a really young movie composer, and he’s over 40. I’m 28, so I still have a long way to go.
