VOIVOD's AWAY On Performing With Symphony Orchestra: 'It Was Quite An Exercise In Memory, And A Wonderful Experience'

In a new interview with the Talk Louder podcast, hosted by veteran music journalist "Metal Dave" Glessner and lifelong hard rock/metal vocalist Jason McMaster, VOIVOD's drummer and founding member Michel "Away" Langevin spoke about the band's upcoming album, "Symphonique", a special live collaboration with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra (Orchestre Symphonique De Québec),which is due on June 5, 2026 worldwide via Century Media Records. "Symphonique", which functions like an epic piece of cinema, showcases VOIVOD's pioneering futuristic metal with the strains of a symphony orchestra, and features a carefully curated VOIVOD best-of setlist composed of 12 songs across 73 minutes, recorded live on June 4, 2025, at the Grand Théâtre in Québec City, Canada.

Asked how the collaboration with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra came together, Away said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Oh, man. We wanted to do that forever, but I would have never believed that we would end up on stage with, like, 65 or 70 orchestra musicians. It was pretty intense. And we did try... Chewy [VOIVOD guitarist Daniel Mongrain], our guitar player, he has a lot of notions with transcribing charts. And so we did, on the album 'The Wake', we had the string quartet in the studio, and when we were invited to play the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2019, we had a brass quintet. So, Chewy was writing the parts for these people. And so he collaborated a lot with the arranger for the symphonic show."

Away continued: "It's actually a bit strange how it happened in the sense that there is this magazine here in Montreal that homeless people sell on the street corners to make ends meet. And I did an interview in one issue, 'cause I'm very involved with many organizations in town in Montreal. And so the musician from the Montreal Symphony Orchestra that plays solo bassoon saw it, and because it was also published online, posted online, he brought the article to the direction of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. And I came back from touring, and I had a message on my answering machine saying that the Montreal Symphony Orchestra were looking for me. [Laughs] So it was pretty cool. And so it was their original idea. And we spent a couple of years putting it together, really. Chewy was mainly involved with the arranger, but I was really busy with the graphics to be projected behind the stage. And so first we started trying to figure which songs we were gonna play that would match the orchestra. And some of them were a bit obvious, like 'Pre-Ignition', because we already, back in the days, put a lot of modern classical music into our songs, like Shostakovich, Penderecki, Bartók. And a lot of it came from listening to soundtracks from the Stanley Kubrick movies, actually. And so, actually we got busted by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. The musicians were, like, 'Hey, this is like 'The Rite Of Spring'.' [Laughs] And so we picked songs that were more on the proggy vibe and with many movements. Although we did 'Nuclear War' from the first album, 'War And Pain', because we thought with the orchestra it could become a very scary military march, and it worked very well. And we also really wanted to play 'Astronomy Domine', the Syd Barrett song, the PINK FLOYD cover, with an orchestra, and it turned out really good as well. Meanwhile, Chewy was giving ideas to Hugo [Bégin], the arranger, like 'Maybe the band could stop there and then the orchestra could keep going, and Snake [VOIVOD vocalist Denis Bélanger] could sing along with the orchestra,' and things like that, which meant that we had to be very focused because we were really used of playing these songs a certain way, and now we had to... On my end, it's pretty stressful because if I missed a beat or a bar, the whole orchestra is lost. [Laughs] So I was very focused on Dina Gilbert, the conductor. I was watching her a lot, and we had cues. It almost became telepathy, man, I swear. So it was a pretty cool and intense experience. But I remember that we were giving Hugo tips, like what we were looking for, mainly the vibe of early cyberpunk movies, 'Mad Max', 'Blade Runner', 'Terminator'. I remember I mentioned 'Planet Of The Apes', the very old movies, because of the avant-garde music they had in there. And so I think he really understood what we wanted, 'cause the first demos we got from him immediately sounded like a dystopian sci-fi movie soundtrack. And I was, like, 'Yeah, we got it.' And Chewy matched the original songs from the CD with the arranger's demos. And so we went into RadicArt Studio where we've been recording for the past 11 years, and we started building the show with the demos of the arranger. So, we did two concerts in January last year, in Montreal, and then we were offered to do the same in Quebec City with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, and this time we decided to record the audio for a release. We wish we could have documented it visually, but it's really, really expensive. If you want for a commercial release, you have to pay a lot of money to the union and all that. But even just the audio, it's pretty expensive. But the reaction to the first single, 'Forgotten In Space', is so good, I think we're gonna recoup."

Elaborating on how VOIVOD chose the songs to perform with the orchestra, Away said: "At first I thought, 'Ah, we can't really pick the fastest stuff from 'Rrröööaaarrr', but I realized after, these people are used to playing Paganini and very insane and fast stuff sometimes. And so, they probably, I would say, got the charts a week ahead or something, but it was perfect. All I was very impressed by Dina, who was conducting, because she has, like, 70 orchestra musicians and the band to direct from A to Z, and we didn't get lost. But I was watching her movements a lot, especially the first show, 'cause, again, I'm not allowed to make one mistake, so I was super focused. And usually I'm not nervous before going on stage, but for the first show in Montreal, I remember going down the corridor to the stage when the orchestra was doing the intro. I remember telling myself, 'You can do it.' [Laughs]"

He continued: "I think that the main thing we tried to do was, like, the orchestra was playing the intro of 'Tribal Convictions' or 'The Unknown Knows', and usually we are playing that part, and so we would kick in at one point, and then they would stop, we'd keep going, and so on and so on. I didn't change my playing on my end. I tried to be a bit more precise, and I learned a lot younger from [the drummer from] MAGMA, Christian Vander, or Robert Wyatt from SOFT MACHINE, but mainly Guy Evans from VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR. There are a lot of ghost notes on the snare, and I had to be a little more careful for these shows and hit with a frank hit. And so I changed my style a little bit, but all the parts are the same, except that, like I was saying earlier, at one point we stop in a song and the orchestra keep going, and so these were the parts where I had to be very vigilant."

Away added: "Prior to doing the symphonic concerts, we were touring the province of Quebec, and we were adding songs bit by bit towards the symphony show. And so we had the songs down when we got to play the shows with the orchestra, but then we realized that the arrangements were a bit different, and so we had to sort of reprogram ourselves for these shows. And [it was] quite an exercise in memory, and a wonderful experience."

"Symphonique" track listing:

01. Experiment (Symphonique)
02. Holographic Thinking (Symphonique)
03. The Unknown Knows (Symphonique)
04. The End Of Dormancy (Symphonique)
05. Into My Hypercube (Symphonique)
06. Forgotten In Space (Symphonique)
07. Cosmic Drama (Symphonique)
08. Pre-Ignition (Symphonique)
09. Nuclear War (Symphonique)
10. Fall (Symphonique)
11. Tribal Convictions (Symphonique)
12. Astronomy Domine (Symphonique) (PINK FLOYD cover)

VOIVOD previously played two shows with the Orchestre Symphonique De Montréal on January 29, 2025 and January 30, 2025 at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletie in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Mongrain, who previously wrote an eight-minute arrangement for the brass quintet that performed with VOIVOD at the Montreal International Jazz Festival (Festival International de Jazz de Montréal) in June 2019, called the collaboration with the Orchestre Symphonique De Montréal "a dream come true."

"I never tried to write for a whole orchestra," he explained. "I know a little bit about it, studying orchestration at university and knowing my music theory and all that. But what happened is that my help with the project was to provide the music sheets to the arranger, Hugo Bégin. He did an amazing work. He took the music sheet that I wrote for guitar and bass. So he had a template to work on. And so he orchestrated it for the whole orchestra and added his own color to it. And it's very efficient. It's like a movie soundtrack, like the movie we used to watch, like 'Planet Of The Apes' and 'Ben-Hur' and 'Mad Max' and all that. VOIVOD has been influenced since the beginning by those movies, so you can hear it, but with the whole orchestra, it's very exciting. So I exchanged a lot of e-mails and messages with Hugo, the arranger, and we worked really hard on it and he was really, really fast and efficient…. It's a dream come true, but it's so big that you only imagine something like that in your wildest dreams, but you know it's not gonna happen. So this is just a life-changing experience, a bonus in a career."

VOIVOD is a Canadian heavy metal band from Jonquière, Québec. Their musical style has changed several times since the band's origin in the early 1980s. Starting out as a speed metal band, VOIVOD have added a mix of progressive metal and thrash metal to create their own unique metal style, and are credited as one of the "big four" Canadian thrash metal bands, along with SACRIFICE, RAZOR and ANNIHILATOR. They are considered by many as one of the most influential metal bands from the '80s, influencing and gaining praise from multiple bands and across numerous genres.

VOIVOD found mainstream success in the late 1980s with their fifth studio album, "Nothingface" (1989),which is the band's only album to enter The Billboard 200 chart, peaking at number 114.

VOIVOD's long-awaited official documentary, "We Are Connected", received its world premiere on July 29, 2024 at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, Quebec. Canada.

"We Are Connected" dives deep into the 40-plus-year legacy of one of the most original and influential metal bands in history. From their explosive beginnings in Jonquière to their groundbreaking global journey, VOIVOD's story is one of unparalleled creativity, resilience, and evolution. The film covers VOIVOD's history from unlikely origins in northern Québec at the height of the Cold War to underground success to sharing tours and stages with IRON MAIDEN, RUSH and METALLICA. Included in the documentary are high and lows throughout those 40 years, from major-label support and Billboard recognition to seismic lineup changes and an event many critics claimed to be the end of VOIVOD: the death of co-founding guitarist and composer Dennis "Piggy" D'Amour.

Directed by Felipe Belalcazar and produced with full access to the band's archives, this film features exclusive insights and appearances by metal icons like Tobias Forge (GHOST),Mikael Åkerfeldt (OPETH),Jason Newsted (METALLICA),Zach Blair (RISE AGAINST, GWAR),Tom G. Warrior (CELTIC FROST, TRIPTYKON) and Ivan Doroschuk (MEN WITHOUT HATS),among many others.

VOIVOD has been touring in support of its latest album, 2023's "Morgöth Tales", which was released via Century Media, The Orchard and Sony Music.

The band's 2022 release, "Synchro Anarchy", garnered significant acclaim, winning the 2023 Juno Award for "Best Hard Rock/Metal Album" in Canada.

Once more recorded and mixed by Francis Perron at RadicArt Studio, mastered by Maor Appelbaum and produced by VOIVOD, "Morgöth Tales" includes fresh studio re-recordings by the band's current lineup of nine especially selected, not-so-obvious picks from the band's hyper-classy and extremely diverse back catalogue (between 1984 and 2003) as well as a brand-new song and the album's title track, "Morgöth Tales".