Artist News

Pianist Christophe Chassol discusses working with Frank Ocean

By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 26 May 2015

French pianist Christophe Chassol has spoken about working with Frank Ocean at Abbey Road Studios recently.

Speaking to Gilles Peterson on 6 Music, reports the NME, Chassol said: “Ocean invited me to Abbey Road to record on his album. I asked him when I came how he heard about me. He told me his friend Diplo was listening a lot to [Chassol’s 2013 album] ‘Indiamore’, and they started to listen to it, and they were wondering how I was doing the speech harmonisation, so he called me. He asked me to do some speech harmonisation on a song with him. After a while, it was cool and he was like, ‘Yeah, but we have to find another way because you already did it'”.

I Googled ‘speech harmonisation’ so that I could give you a definition, but I just got this speech from some guy at Deutsche Bundesbank and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.

Who knows though, it could have been one of the many things Ocean apparently printed out in the studio. Chassol continued: “The guy is smart. He’s really smart. The way he works in the studio is really cool. He has a printer, he has a lot of pictures of architecture, contemporary art, a lot of pictures of different kinds of things. So we start to work on a track and he says, this track is this – that car that you can see. He makes me work on a song, and I’m like, ‘Oh this sounds like Pino Donaggio’s score for ‘Blow Out’, by Brian Depalma’. I start to work on a song and five minutes later on the Pro Tools screen you have the movie, the score, stretched to fit the song – just to try. I’ve never worked with that much money in music. It’s good sometimes to have money, because you can try things”.

As previously reported, Ocean is expected to release a new album in July.