There are many new indie artists out there, but Draumr really is one of a kind. With his new album Drawn-Out Daydream, the new figure of celestial pop delivers an incantation to dreams, where doubt, introspection, hope and self-love intermingle with a disconcerting depth.
While the future of live music in the near future is pretty uncertain at the moment, that hasn’t stopped artists from releasing hovering albums to help us escape or come to terms with reality. Draumr music is all about diving into emotions and not keeping them unexplained. Ranging from dream pop to synthwave, his new album Drawn-Out Daydream is a journey where dizzying rhythms transport us to a parallel universe, for a sweet hour away from everyday life. We got to chat with the man behind the dreamy art, Gabriel Cheurfa.
When did you start producing music and singing? Did a special event make you realise that this was the path you wanted to follow?
I started singing at a really young age, around five years old. I was in a choir, and I remember really enjoying it. As for my own music, I released my first solo EP ‘Nefelibata’ in 2015. I suffered from a disorder called ‘derealization / depersonalization’, where you constantly feel as if you were in a dream.
It makes people suffering from it really anxious and depressed, and you feel totally disconnected from everything else. After I sort of recovered from it, I decided to use my experience as an inspiration, fragile and sensitive as I was. The name ‘Draumr’ comes from an old Norse language meaning ‘dream’, in reference to the condition I was in, to exorcise the past trauma, and hoping to help others with my story.
Your new album Drawn-Out Daydream was released at the end of 2020 and it’s a masterpiece, congrats! Could you tell us a bit more about the story, production and inspiration behind it all?
Thank you very much, it means a lot. After two auto-produced EPs released respectively in 2015 and 2018, I decided that it was time for me to take this project to a new level. But I needed time, and a good story to tell.
After the release of ‘Ethereal Mildness’, my second EP, I felt the urge to write again, and to leave Paris, my hometown, for a quiet and remote place (Ibiza, in Spain, where I spent a lot of time in my life since I was born), where I could finally put my mind at ease, far from all the anxiety and tiredness that I had been feeling for the past 2 years.
I experienced so many things, and went through so many emotions, that the songs basically wrote themselves. I spent almost 3 months in Spain and composed most of the album there, and then, spent about a year working on the arrangements, additional production and lyrics in Paris, between my home and my recording studio. This album represents the path to hope and self-love, oscillating between fantasy and grounded truths. It is an introspective journey about love, dreams and solitude.
Where do you find inspiration and what is your writing and composition process, if you have one?
I find inspiration in my everyday life. Usually, a song title comes to my mind, a word, or a phrase that I fall in love with, and that I can assimilate to something happening in my life. And then, I try to write music on top of it, with the main feeling, tempo, mood, already set up because of the title. Even if I always have keywords and phrases here and there while I compose, I usually write the lyrics after the music, I find it more inspiring, and I always put a double meaning in every song, with one that is really close to my story and the other that is way more philosophical.
Your tracks sound very dreamy with their infinite variations of sounds and melodies. How do you personally describe your music? What terms would you use to describe it to a deaf person?
That’s a really tough question. I can’t assimilate it with anything that I’m listening to in general, weirdly. But I think it would be really close to the feeling of letting yourself float on your back on a mildly wavy ocean shore, on the shallow part of a beach. Feeling the weightlessness but also the sand scratching your back at times. All of that with your eyes closed, on a beautiful starry night, completely alone.
We listened to your collaboration with Dorcas, it’s really great! Would you like to do more collaborations in the future and if so, who is your dream collaboration?
Dorcas Coppin is an amazing singer, and I’m really proud and humbled to have worked with her! I will definitely do more collaborations in the future, it is so enriching, and it takes you away from the loneliness of the discipline.
I have so many people I want to collaborate with, going from Paul McCartney to Connan Mockasin, to Liz Harris (Grouper) but also the singer from the band Men I Trust (Emmanuelle Proulx), who was featured in the top 50 of the best albums of 2020. It is really hard to pick one, and hard to imagine it happening, but who knows!
What do you want your listeners to take away from your music?
Hope, love, dreams and solace. That is all I live for.
What are your greatest musical inspirations?
Paul McCartney is one of my musical heroes since I was a teenager, his music inspired me so much at so many levels, his songwriting is simply unmatched and never will be. He is part of me now, forever.
Pink Floyd, for the epic, progressive, and experimental side of my music.
Panda Bear, one of the members of the band Animal Collective opened a lot of doors for me too, the more psychedelic and unorthodox ways to write music.
Ariel Pink, for his genuine love for melodies, craziness, and glam/punk attitude.
And finally Grouper, for the ambient, melancholic, and ethereal side of my project.
Three songs you can’t stop listening to right now?
Yours by Maye.
Contigo by Paloma San Basilio.
Strobing Light by Ishq.
Did the current health crisis impact your creation in a positive or negative way? If so, how did you adapt?
It did yes, in a really positive way. I have been extremely productive this year. As an artist, being alone, facing your demons, without seeing anyone for a very long time, is kind of a common thing. You take the ‘fear of missing out’ out of the equation, and you get a very happy person! I wrote, produced, arranged and recorded a lot of songs, and wrote and directed a lot of music videos during that time. I tried to get away from Paris as much as I could, to be more at ease, and to focus on my work.
Any upcoming projects to share with us?
I am currently finishing the production and recording of a solo EP for Dorcas, that I have been working on for about a year and a half now. I also started working on new songs for a potential second album for Draumr for several months. And I am currently shooting a new music video for a song that is on the album ‘Drawn-Out Daydream’, but this one is very ambitious and is gonna take some time to be complete. I’m really excited for it, my team and I have been working on it for a very long time now!
Thank you so much to Gabriel for opening up about his inspirations and creation process. Covering heavy topics such as loneliness, anxiety and self-growth in such a dreamy and upbeat way makes the Drawn-Out Daydream project even more interesting and real. If you relate to this album as much as we did, we hope to have you on board for the rest of the Draumr project, at the border between dream and reality.
