As previously reported, Worlds Away: VOIVOD & The Art Of Michel Langevin is ready for advance pre-sale order. The book -limited to 3000 copies - is hard cover, large 9” x 12” format, full colour throughout on premium stock, with hundreds of photos and artwork, many previously unseen, explained and contextualized for the first time.

An exclusive excerpt from the book reads as follows:

Chapter 4: “My friend gave me a frame”

Voivod stepped up their game with Killing Technology, evolving much like the prog greats from the ‘70s Piggy and Michel admired for their exploratory zeal and digital dexterity. If the snarling brawn of Rrroooaaarrr could be viewed as the intensified, combative twin of the debut’s testosterone-charged chaos, then Killing Technology has to be positioned as the “all-in” blueprint for the thoroughly high-minded fourth album, Dimension Hatross. Killing Technology would see Voivod tour heavily in the states and Europe with Kreator in both territories, a fitting bill, given that both bands were operating at the technical and savage extreme of what was still allowed to be called thrash during this golden period for the genre.

Mused Michel back in 2002, “It’s strange that you bring up Killing Technology, because yesterday I was watching TV and there was a special about the Challenger explosion, and right above the TV is my painting of Killing Technology, based on that. This is my favourite Voivod album, because it dealt with a lot of heavy topics happening at the time, like the Challenger explosion, the Chernobyl accident and Reagan’s Star Wars project - all that stuff was really inspiring in a strange way of course. Plus it was the first album we recorded in Berlin, and that’s where I discovered actually, my sampling technology. We were just hanging around in Berlin and picking up scraps of metal from junkyards and banging on it to see if it was a proper sound. And the Berlin Wall was still there, so all of this made for a very interesting, almost activist album. And it was also a good crossover. We started touring with DRI and COC and Agnostic Front and the Cro-Mags, so it was good times for us, enlightening. It took us to a new level. From the start with the Dead Kennedys, Broken Bones, GBH and Discharge, we were aware of the nuclear stockpiles all over Europe. But it was the first European tour that really opened our eyes to new politics. So after that, it was all shouting against nuclear problems of the day. Because with the first couple of albums, it’s all about nuclear war, and with Killing Technology, we had other technologies and other politics and new social subjects to talk about.”

And Snake’s views on the band’s third? “Well, War And Pain, our first album, was kind of naïve but so interesting, even now when I listen to it,” begins the enigmatic vocalist, establishing some comparatives. “Back then we had no money, nothing, and it’s so funny that we created that album with so little production. And it was naive because we were just getting together. I think we did it six months after I got into the band, so it was really quick. Then Rrroooaaarrr was when we got into the scene, with the real metal attitude. People were getting heavily into thrash metal. We weren’t Satanists or anything but it was that period of time. So finally, Killing Technology was more technical, really complex playing. We wanted to make an album that stands apart from other albums in the market.”

“There are usually mainly little poems, with drawings around it,” adds Michel, asked about the band’s methodology album to album, “and those I would show to Snake and Piggy. And the two of them would write lyrics and music. We always worked close together. Snake and I were more lyric-oriented, and Blacky and Piggy were more music-oriented. Everybody was really involved, and that’s why everything seemed really cohesive and connected together, because everybody was involved in the whole process. So it was a very good collaboration. Dimension Hatross was the one where I really wrote the whole thing down in the story line, and Snake wrote the lyrics. And I did that again with Phobos much later. Musically, Piggy was the main writer, but Blacky brought a lot of ideas to the mix, because he was listening to a lot of contemporary music, and so was Piggy. But the two of them were huge fans of Bartok, Shostakovich, and actually took parts of these pieces from these composers and turned it into metal for Voivod. You can recognize bits if you know Bartok and Shostakovich and stuff like that.”

Prokofiev, Baird, Schoenberg…?

“Yeah, I remember that. But mainly stuff like Boulez, things that were really avant garde, but also stuff that was not avant garde like Bartok.”

Specific to the record’s artwork, Michel points out that, “With Rrroooaaarrr, we started touring and thing started to get much better. So by the time we did Killing Technology, a year after, I had bought a compressor with a small airbrush gun. And as I said, for Killing Technology, my friend gave me a frame (laughs) and something professional to paint on, and again I did it with acrylic, and I did the planets and a few things in there with airbrush. It’s faded a little, and the guy who did the frame for me, Gilles Gravel… his name is on the back. He is Piggy’s friend, his childhood friend, best friend. He’s the one who stayed by his bed at the hospital the whole time. He’s a very good artist, that guy; he studied art, and he built that frame for me because he was really insulted that Rrroooaaarrr was done on cardboard. He’s like, ‘Man, you’re doing a painting for something that is going to be distributed worldwide, and you’re doing it on a pizza box?!’ So yes, that was my early attempts at airbrush, with the planets and the space, but all the rest was done with brushes.”

There is actually a quite accomplished picture Michel first did with airbrush before he embarked on the new record’s cover art. “Yes, and it’s pretty funny, because I was told that it looks like somebody sitting on a photocopy machine. I always thought, wow, that’s hilarious, but it’s supposed to be a ghost.”

For more info visit www.voivodbook.com.