AUTRE NE VEUT with EMPRESS OF at Wrongbar (1279 Queen West), Friday (July 19), 10 pm. $15. RT, SS, TW.
Autre Ne Veut emerged in 2010 as a shadowy figure with an album full of brainy, off-kilter R&B and no available bio.
Since then, a whole breed of mysterious “alt-R&B” acts from Rhye to the Weeknd have followed a similar path.
But according to Arthur Ashin, the 31-year-old Brooklynite behind the French moniker, his anonymity had nothing to do with mystique. He just didn’t want his music to jeopardize his academic career.
“I was in a double bind situation – I wanted to be both a musician and a clinical psychologist, but I couldn’t go all in on either without sacrificing the other,” Ashin explains over Skype.
“Psychology is such a conservative field. If I’m doing something inappropriate onstage and it ends up on YouTube – I couldn’t have that be the first thing that pops up in a Google search,” he says.
“For the sake of feeling whole, I needed to choose one or the other. Music was the unlikely choice, so I made that one.”
Ashin now has his master’s, and he’s given up worrying about the consequences of Autre Ne Veut. Recently, he even rallied his Twitter followers to create a Wikipedia page for him. But he’s also found ways to marry psychology and the music.
His sophomore album, Anxiety (Mexican Summer), is heavily influenced by psychoanalysis his falsetto-soaked tunes flip the themes of R&B to reveal the motivations beneath them. He’s also hyper-aware of the situational strangeness of live performance.
“When you’re in a room full of other people, it’s easy to forget that they’re all human beings and I’m a human being onstage,” he says.
“We’re so inculcated with cinema and this notion of staring at a monitor that we tend to superimpose that onto our real lives. So the onus is on me to remove that experience by breaking that fantasy wall. Otherwise, why not just stay home and listen to the record?”
Ashin may have sacrificed his anonymity, but he hasn’t abandoned his alternate career.
“I could go back in some capacity someday with a story to tell, because that is the one thing that flies in that field: I needed to go through this process, psychologically, in order to be a clinician.”
music@nowtoronto.com
