Orchestroll get paid the moment you buy their music on Catalog.
Things fall apart and make the most wretched, beautiful sounds. Synth pad euphoria, slave labor for superfoods, frequencies that feel good, thin wrists choked by metal, beauty in the struggle, termites in the picket fence, vitamins wrapped in plastic, propaganda as personality, shit-posting and genocide powered by the same blood minerals.
The dissonance required to live and the ripples of a scalped western wellness culture, so often sold not to heal but to pacify, pulse through Corrosiv, the second album from Montreal duo Orchestroll, released by New York label 29 Speedway. Every song is a universe: collapsing, contracting, congealing. May the crystals one day form blades.
We spoke with the two artists, friends, and Éditions Appærent leaders behind Corrosiv, Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Asaël Richard-Robitaille, about their album's creation, cultural mediocrity, eroding systems, essential oils, and much more. Thank you for reading, watching, listening, supporting. Stay safe out there.
Siber: Pour chacun d’entre vous, que représente le dernier envol?
Asaël: La mort tout simplement. Mais peut-être aussi une métaphore pour décrire la désintégration d’un organisme dans un ensemble plus vaste.
Jesse: Le dernier envol est aussi le début du prochain voyage.
Siber: What do you picture when you imagine the cop eater in track 11?
Asaël: A mean skull-faced freak eating cables… And cops.
Jesse: Honestly, I think I just picture a giant pair of teeth.
Siber: How did your roles differ in the crafting of Corrosiv? Jesse, what’s a timestamp or moment on the album that Asaël contributed that blew you away? Asaël, same question for you about Jesse…
Asaël: We come from different backgrounds. Jesse is entirely self-taught when it comes to music and sound technique. Over time and through various projects, he’s developed strong skills in mixing, mastering, and every aspect of music production, alongside a deep understanding of sound synthesis in all its forms. His approach is both instinctive and remarkably sophisticated. I’m a bit more of a muso: I played guitar for many years and studied contemporary classical composition at the Conservatory and also a bit of jazz. More of a late bloomer when it comes to electronic music. I’m also obsessed with things like harmony, organization and orchestration, things of a somewhat more traditional nature.
Through two different paths, we arrived at similar creative aspirations and a shared love for the avant-garde. You can hear it across the album: two distinct perspectives meeting in the middle, overlapping, and often working through the same processes. We’re both driven by a desire to dissolve boundaries between genres and aesthetics, always aiming to create something that feels challenging, inviting, and seductive at the same time.
Among the many things Jesse contributed to this album, one recurring element on Corrosiv is those deep, viscous, envelope-filtered basslines. You can hear them, for example, on "Astral Trepidation," "Nerveghost," and "Hypnoxia," another more subdued version in "Blistex" I’m a big fan of using leitmotivs and repeated themes throughout an album and this is quite a subtle and clever way of doing that. I think the one that really takes the cake is its last iteration, on "L’inaperçu nous traverse." It’s such a perverse and completely defaced rendition of that element — it adds a very stimulating layer of texture to the song’s narrative. Very corroded; in the spirit of the record. Timestamp: 1:47. Also, I think it interacts perfectly with Bernardino Femminielli’s deep voice.
Jesse: Even though our roles aren’t exactly interchangeable, Corrosiv came together through something closer to creative osmosis. Across its two-year creation, there are so many moments where I can clearly picture Asaël doing something I never would’ve thought of, or vice versa, but because of how we worked (eight-hour stretches, deep sessions, constant layering), it all eventually melts into one shared organism. We obviously have our own approaches to making music, but after all these years, that line between us, musically, especially in Orchestroll, has become almost imperceptible. I think that reflects the broader ethos of the record too. In the end everything congeals into a singular, infinite slurry.
That said, the two things that still sorta suck the air out of the room for me, in the best way, are the melodic themes in “Here Used to Be a Star” and “Lesio.” They’re so deeply Asaël to me. Both were laid down in a single take, no second-guessing, just pure intuition. The melodies appeared out of nowhere, and I don’t understand how he conjured them. They’re super eerie melodies that somehow transform extremely weird music into earworms. I could’ve never written them myself nor have sporadically thought of placing them where they are… That’s exactly why I love them.
Siber: How did you both first cross paths? Why do you think you’ve been able to work so well together as label partners and collaborators, and why do you think you were drawn to each other initially?
Jesse: Asaël and I had been orbiting the same circles in Montreal’s experimental scene for a while before we formally crossed paths. We finally connected through a show at WOMB, a DIY apartment-venue squat thing I ran at the time with my partner Madison and a few close friends. It sat above an Indian restaurant and the Anarchist Bookshop in the Quartier des Spectacles neighbourhood in Montreal, very chaotic, conflicting area and energy. Asaël was performing there as Bataille Solaire, running guitar, synths, and loops on a SP-808. I was immediately taken and confused by his sound and presence. There was something like… raw, magnetic, comical and witty about it. I also remember him bumming and chain-smoking half my pack of cigarettes that night.
I think we were drawn to each other because there was an unspoken understanding, even early on. A shared disinterest in convention, a sense of humour about the scene (humour is very, very important to me and it’s how I’ve connected with many of the people I've ended up collaborating with), and a solemn interest in strange sounds. Over time, these affinities turned into trust: first as friends, then as collaborators, and more and more as co-conspirators. It works out because neither of us is precious about how it develops; we naturally let things mutate which in turn just feels like an extension of our friendship. And we let each other be strange in our creativity in ways that don’t need to be justified or explained. In other projects it often feels like you’re on someone else’s time.
Asaël: We had friends in common, among them Francesco de Gallo and Bernardino Femminielli. I ended up playing at Jesse’s apartment-turned-DIY venue, WOMB, near downtown Montreal, so through that connection I guess. That was in 2011, I think. We all had DIY spaces and lofts back then, prehistoric times! Played some Steve Hillagesque guitar solos on top of some orchestral/ambient loops. Jesse’s right about me bumming smokes off him all night. After that I went to pretty much every event there.
Over time, we gradually grew closer, as friends and later musical collaborators. Friendship might be the number one criterion for me when it comes to making music with someone. It's something I find very hard to separate from the rest. With Jesse, I quickly felt that, despite some differences in personality and musical approach, our strengths were highly complementary, and there was a genuine sense of affinity between us. In a cultural context where minimalism sometimes felt a bit too dominant on the scene, I shared with him this somewhat over-the-top, virtuosic, and slightly maximalist approach, each in our own way. Feels like we were meant to deepen these likenesses. Gradually, our collaborations became more frequent and numerous. We were briefly bandmates in Avec le soleil sortant de sa bouche (Constellation Records), worked with the same artists in different configurations (like Femminielli/Femminielli Noir or Marie Davidson/L’Œil Nu), co-produced several albums for our friends and extended family, and did sound design and presets for VST and music software companies like Arturia and Native Instruments — tools we made that we’d eventually hear in other people’s music. Considering all this, it made perfect sense for me to be part of Éditions Appærent as a way to deepen and expand the threads of our partnership and in the long-run, new grounds to pursue collaborative work with like-minded artists.
Siber: You’ve described this project in part as a nonjudgmental force, neither critical nor in praise of. It reminded me of how a black hole’s destruction, or a shark’s attack, is often described as emotionless, unevil. Does Corrosiv function, at least in part, as a documentary?
Asaël: To me, it comes across more as cinematic than documentary — even maybe operatic, in the way themes and motifs keep coming back throughout. The non-judgmental approach toward New Age movements (and more broadly, current wellness culture) was a starting point for the project. In the end, I think it turned into more of a multifaceted, emotional, and poetic meditation on the subject, shaped by our own mixed feelings: sometimes drawn to it, sometimes critical. Those feelings show up through very subjective evocations of the topic, often by hijacking familiar tropes or distorting preexisting cultural references. What would have felt more like a neutral approach to me is if we had fallen into the trap of simply reproducing a cliché. A pastiche of a certain style, like meditative music without any edge or contradiction. Maybe then, it could’ve been seen as something closer to non-fiction, less aesthetically involved. The album has a dramatic structure and carries a lot of emotionally charged moments, which makes it feel closer to fiction than documentary. It’s still just music to me though.
Jesse: I think, for me, “in part” is key here. The initial conceptual throws and the affiliation with New Age cultural tropes on the album were nonjudgmental and more aesthetically driven at first. When you start conceptualizing and working with/within a specific cultural framework, you try to consider all facets of it. So there was, without a doubt, a point where it felt necessary to pivot from bastardizing tropes to exploring the more exploitative side of what they represent. Some of the early versions of these pieces had a soft, almost moisturized quality to them. They were nice, but there was no story to tell; we’d talked extensively about how to make them dry again. By metaphorically and technically adding grit, we found a way to make the material feel vital and interesting again. And since we’d now fully committed to dismantling the music through corrosion, the conceptual foundation had to evolve accordingly. For context, the earlier iteration of the album was actually titled Blistex, which says a lot.
At some point in the process, the act of degradation began to mirror how certain ideologies of wellness culture, initially presented as healing or empowering, start to unravel under scrutiny, revealing flagrant contradictions. That unraveling also touches on a deeper tension between imposed systems of reality and more mythic, ineffable alternatives. The corrosion reflects a slow disintegration of the technical metaphysics that shape contemporary life, where meaning is reduced to function and truth is measured by utility. Flattening. Within that prism, the album starts to feel like a gesture toward something more imaginative, a way of reclaiming the ability to construct meaning outside the demands of 'usefulness.' So If there’s documentation here, it’s not of a world as it is, but of one beginning to slip, glitch, and unmake itself, so something else, less 'administered,' more abstract, might edge into view.
In that sense, Corrosiv becomes less about making a statement and more about witnessing a process of breakdown where things start to reveal their true nature and texture under stress. For me, an essential part of Corrosiv was making music that actually sounded chemical, like it had been dissolved, burned, or synthesized into something unstable. I wanted each sound to feel like a compound in flux, corroded or curdling in some open petri dish, simulating reactions that dissolve, combust, or transform under pressure. Overall, I think the album feels like an attunement to decomposition and transfiguration, which have their own kind of intelligence. There’s a quality to it, like watching something rot under a microscope; not with cruelty, but with curiosity and attention. So yes, there’s a documentary aspect, but it’s closer to evidence than exposition. Less reportage, more residue
Siber: The album and its presentation (“cartilage smoldering in phosphor… crest of bile, churning ore, breath clotting into arsenic mist”) sounds and reads like its in the realm of horror to me. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear someone describe the music as “haunting,” and those words as “violent,” “foreboding.” But, then i think about the ‘neutrality’ you’ve chosen, and it reminds me that even the mere acknowledgment of fact in our North American societies, be it genocide or police violence or manmade climate catastrophe, is labeled ‘biased,’ ‘radical,’ even ‘in violation of civil rights laws,’ deportable. Do the politics of the album map to your own world views 1:1? Does anarchism live within Corrosiv?
Asaël: I’ve always seen trends, fashions as a form of cultural violence. To me, they seem to exclude or reject certain things to make room for others, which is a very hierarchical process. This always triggers the anarchist in me, who wants to see different elements coexist instead. In the past, it’s meant revisiting styles considered 'uncool' and presenting them in a new light, blending them alongside other influences in a somewhat contrarian way, by which I mean refusing to adhere to what’s currently considered appropriate or 'in.' It would also sometimes take a more silly form, like using only digital synthesis while everyone else is fetishizing analog gear, or leaning into bright, elaborate harmonies as a kind of foil when everybody is using dark and monophonic textures. Like I said, the goal is to blur the lines and challenge how music consumption is usually so compartmentalized. It turns into a playful, almost joker-like approach; deliberately breaking things at the worst moments, forcing stylistic collisions, or playing the wrong thing at the wrong time. It’s definitely something Jesse and I have both done in various ways throughout our respective solo work. Hypnotizing and destabilizing by messing with cultural expectation, all in the name of expanding how people listen to and experience music. To me, Corrosiv is no different from this process. Maybe it's a sneakier way of confronting issues, embodying rage in sort of calmer ways.
Jesse: Well, music, to me, is always political. Even when it’s abstract or instrumental, the worldview behind it finds a way through. My values... anarchist, socialist, leftist, whatever, are instinctual. That said, I’m not interested in clarity for its own sake. Nor am I interested in making something 'dark' for dark's sake. There has to be mystery, room for listeners to project, reinterpret, inhabit the work with their own experiences. Corrosiv is intentionally opaque in places, because opacity can be a form of resistance. The idea that every work has to sort of declare its allegiance in plain language feels like another mechanism of control, of that flattening effect I mentioned earlier.
What’s really horrifying to me is how often, in Western societies, smashing a bank window is treated as more violent than ecological collapse, colonial genocide, ethnic cleaning, or systemic police terror. These forces should induce collective dread, they should scare the living shit out of you, but instead they’re re-coded as neutral by the powers that be, while acts of refusal or rupture are immediately pathologized as radical, dangerous or extreme. If someone were to describe the album as haunting or violent, I’d understand it on a surface, aesthetic level. But I think those words are loaded; misfiring. Maybe they’re describing our world, not the music. Corrosiv doesn’t feel scary or dark to me… The real terror is the engineered disposability of entire populations, technocratic cruelty; the spiritual famine that’s been branded as social order. In contrast, the impulse to disrupt, to erode, to disobey is where real beauty begins to flicker.
There’s something in the album that gestures toward a prophetic energy, in the way imagination rises when meaning begins to collapse. That act of corroding becomes a kind of refusal, a clearing-out of dominant systems that try to iron-out experience into efficiency and utility. For me, these cracks create spaces for new parables to take root in. If Corrosiv reflects my worldview at all, it does so by refusing the most current terms of reality and suggesting that beauty might reside in breakdown, in the glitch, in the parts of us that still resist administration. To insist that other worlds remain possible is, in itself, a kind of survival.
Siber: I felt drawn to the couplet, “Severance bloom / a prisoner of my refusal” on “Here Used To Be a Star,” and I was curious about the decision to ‘conceal’ the lyrics on the song itself with the vocal approach — is that verse performed using the soma? Are the album’s moments of intervention and fragmentation reflecting your own instincts, or is there also a mapped, paced narrative you deliberated over?
Jesse: Haha, well, see about that… There’s a couple things going on in that section. Asaël is sort of agonizingly pretend-screaming into a big metallic thermos can, which we miked using an Axiom contact mic and processed live in the computer. At the same time, I’m sorta reciting a poem overtop. The lyrics feel concealed because, in a sense, they're imaginary. What you hear, though barely perceptible, are actually early drafts of lyrics that would eventually end up in "L’inaperçu nous traverse," but were originally written for "Lesio." At one point, we had asked Femminielli to record vocals for "Lesio," but in the end we felt the piece should remain in its original form. Instead, we built the final track of the record around his recording. There's something strange happening in that handoff though. Bern had tracked his vocals wearing open-back headphones, so you can hear "Lesio" bleeding into the mic. We kept it that way. So now there’s a trace of "Lesio" in "L’inaperçu," a trace of "L’inaperçu" in "Here Used to Be a Star," and a trace of "Here Used to Be a Star" in "Lesio." It created this unintentional loop or imprint, like the songs are ghosting through each other.
There’s no Soma Pipe in "Here Used to Be a Star." Dan (Heith) plays the pipe on "Lesio" and "Blistex." But yeah, the intro to "Here Used to Be a Star" is very much driven by narrative intention. We wanted to loosely represent the soul of someone trapped in stasis, caught between planes of existence, reflecting on their inability to transcend. The vocal performances here are meant to feel like a kind of grief ritual, as if echoes from the past are surfacing to remind that soul why they never moved forward. I picture it as the soul of someone who caused deep harm during their life, now caught in a suspended loop of recognition and regret. To me, "Here Used to Be a Star" plays sort of like a post-life ballet, a cosmic exchange staged in slow motion… feels almost holographically fractalized in its unfurling. So to punctuate that I decided to write a fake poem for that section; some sort of afterlife non-transcendence acceptance mantra that isn’t actually 'performed' outright, if that makes any sense. So yes, the interventions and fragmentations are ultimately instinctual, but we shaped them with a kind of internal rhythm in mind; and there’s a pulse to that rhythm’s cadence but it’s not outright guided by linear narrative; I imagine it spectral.
Siber: There's a field recorder in the credited tools used to make Corrosiv... thinking back on that source material, are there a couple particularly resonant places, memories, ‘natural’ (unplanned, in-the-wild) sounds that come to mind for you both?
Asaël: The bulk of the field recordings were all made on the same hot summer day a few years ago, during an excursion on a small island just north of Montreal called Île-de-la-visitation. Around the remains of an old abandoned watermill and under a huge overpass near the river. It was actually the baptism of our newly acquired Zoom recorder. The same recordings have been used on probably all three of Orchestroll’s releases, extensively featured and heavily granulated on Tintinnabulation ChXss (our collab with Pierre Guérineau aka Feu St-Antoine), as well as on other projects like on Lash’s House of Women (which I co-produced with Jesse, released on É.A.). Some of it will appear on our next release as well. These field recordings are very dear to my heart and there is so much vibe to them. We captured such a wide variety of spaces and materials: woods and open park ambiences, birdsongs, empty plastic bottles crushed or kicked around, rattled fences, scraped woodbeams on concrete, tunnel like reverberation under an overpass, gentle waves from the river, cascade and other whitewater sounds caught at the watermill, hum of a subway escalator on the way there. etc etc. I've great memories from that small urban trip.
Siber: As cofounders of Éditions Appærent, what considerations are you thinking through when it comes to choosing a partner like 29 Speedway for an exclusive license? What physical cost structures, splits, etc have felt right to you as both artists and operators the longer you’ve released music?
Jesse: To be honest, at this point it’s a mix of things happening naturally and wanting to work with someone who’s actually willing to take on the risk of bringing the vision of weirdos like Asaël and I to life. Most underground labels are stifled, backed up, tired, or simply stretched too thin to put real energy or funding into a project like Corrosiv. The music landscape feels more and more arid, like you have to sacrifice artistic vision at every corner to get something released, let alone with care. We know an hour-plus long record in 2025 isn't exactly something everyone wants to take a risk on, but it was important for Azy and me that the record be exactly how it is now, and Ben understood that right away.
That said, we’ve always leaned into a kind of intuitive approach. Once in a while we’ll send demos to a few labels we genuinely respect, but rarely hear back or get any interest in collaboration. With Ben at 29 Speedway, it wasn’t like that. There was no feeling of having to pitch, explain ourselves, or shop the record around. His enthusiasm and willingness to invest and work on this with us, on something this strange and elaborate, means a lot, and we’re honestly just really grateful for that. I think there’s something that translates, that feels connective to Ben’s own work here. I love long-form albums and think they’re the best way to mull over and fully exercise a fully fleshed-out musical concept. It’s something I’d love to do more of through ÉA as well, supporting other artists in that way, but it gets harder by the day to stay on top of everything, both creatively and operationally.
Asaël: Yes, from the get-go Ben pretty much said, “This should be released as is — and this should be a double LP!” Most of the other labels we sent Corrosiv to thought it was maybe too risky to release as a whole thing in one album and asked for a more concise version, but Ben immediately got what we were going for and backed the full, uncut vision. We’re very grateful for that!
Siber: There’s this stateside perception that Canada’s government has a lot to offer artists directly, in the form of grants, and universally, in the form of healthcare, as one example. To what extent do you view that as true? What role have government funds played, if any, in your arts careers so far?
Jesse: It's misleading, because the grant system here used to be a lot more nuanced and accessible, and there used to be more money circulating. In the past, we've benefited from grants in some form, whether through personal research grant support or by being involved in collective grants where we played a role in someone else’s project and were compensated for it.
But now, the framework feels completely broken. A lot of the people running these programs, as well as those on the councils and juries, don’t seem to understand what actual art is. With the recent overhaul in how grants are distributed, it’s become extremely difficult to receive funding. One major issue is that your "peer jury" is no longer composed of people in your field. You end up having your sound art project evaluated by a puppeteer or a painter, which shows a total disregard for the specific knowledge and craft of each medium. On top of that, funding has been cut by millions. The government seems more focused on bankrolling superficial, half-baked, streamlined, arts-and-crafts-style projects. We’ve gone to Canadian Art Council seminars, spoken directly with program heads, and have literally been told to "dumb down" our proposals. That kind of suggestion wouldn’t be made if the projects were actually being reviewed by people who understood the medium.
There are still good projects getting funded, so it’s not impossible to get a grant, but it feels more and more like a crapshoot. It's incredibly demoralizing to spend days working nonstop on a proposal, paying a professional grant writer to help tighten it up, gathering letters of support, intent, recommendations, and supporting documentation — only to wait six months for a rejection notice that says “you did everything right, but there wasn't enough money”. It feels like spec work or lottery. We've had proposals that received the highest possible evaluation scores and still didn’t get funded, even for something as basic as travel.
Asaël: Quebec’s (the province we both live in) healthcare system is showing clear signs of decline. Fewer doctors, longer waits, and more reliance on private care make public services feel less available. What used to be a basic right is starting to feel less guaranteed. There’s also the risk of healthcare becoming privatized.
More recently, the same can be said for tenants’ rights. With recent changes made to housing laws by Quebec’s current, very right-leaning government, it feels like things are shifting more and more in favor of landlords. Protections that used to help keep rent stable or prevent unfair evictions are being weakened, and a lot of people are feeling less secure in their own homes. Not to mention the sharp rise in rent since the pandemic. What once made Canada feel like a somewhat idealized place in the eyes of some of our American neighbors now seems to be slowly falling apart. With the rise of the right and a more aggressive form of capitalism, that image is fading.
Going with that, what used to characterize Montreal — a city affordable enough that you could be a starving artist without starving too much, working part-time and still having the freedom to focus on your art — is slowly waning. Honestly, I’m a bit worried about what the future holds here.
Siber: What non-passive systems inspire you, give you optimism, present an alternative forward?
Jesse: I think we both agree on all things from grassroots organizing, boycotts and mutual aid networks to forward-thinking music and art systems, experimental publishing initiatives and labels... structures that resist extractive logic, and offer alternative rhythms of being, creating. Also drawn to more intimate gestures: personal rituals, constructed myths, poetic defiance. Agitate, educate, organize. Narrative metaphysics, the ludic, games... Magic.
Siber: What’s the best defense against mediocrity?
Jesse: Everything we’ve already touched on applies here, but I’d add this: the best defense against mediocrity is building and supporting structures that reward risk instead of punishing it. That means giving time, space, and resources to people who’re willing to go beyond the template, who are making work that challenges rather than flatters. It also means at least partially shifting funding away from safe bets and algorithm-friendly circuits. Stop over-investing and obsessing-over vapid-ass DJ culture as the default expression of underground music. Start supporting artists, collectives, and platforms that are actually trying to do something politically, culturally disruptive. Mediocrity thrives in systems that reward laziness and repetition and I think that’s why despite no lack of talent here, Québec and Canada feel behind.
Siber: What’s one part of wellness culture you’d keep?
Jesse: I’ll keep acupressure. :–)
Asaël: Essential oils for me, please!
Orchestroll get paid the moment you buy their music on Catalog.
