Karl Gagnon thrives on chaos.
For nearly 20 years, since launching his musical project VioleTT Pi, he has walked a razor’s edge, channelling opposing energies into a body of work that resist definition. His music embraces noise without ever abandoning melody, blending punk and French chanson, violence and poetry, in equal measure.
“Chaos can be stimulating, but if you stay there too long, nothing really comes of it,” Karl says. “What I try to do is pull songs out of it, find some kind of meaning. I don’t think of what I make as beautiful or ugly. I throw everything in there: softness, intensity, even cheesy stuff, and I try to keep it all. At its core, what I do is kind of anarchy.”
A structured kind of anarchy, though. For all his resistance to intellectual rigidity, and however fragmented his music may seem, there is still a strong sense of structure in Karl’s work—a real cohesion. If there is a thread running through the ideas behind his latest album, Mythologie de la dérape, it may be found in its recurring imagery of drifting, slipping and veering off course. Karl asks questions without looking for easy answers, diving headfirst into the maelstrom before resurfacing with his eyes fixed on the sun.
Cover art for “Mythologie de la dérapage“.
“Conceptual art isn’t really where I live,” he explains. “I work entirely on instinct. For me, dérape (freely translated: drifting) is about uncertainty—not knowing where you’re going to land.” “Usually, a title just appears to me. Actually, while I was making my last album (Baloney suicide, 2023), I already knew the next one would be called Mythologie de la dérape. It was crystal clear in my head, even if it started as just a flash. Then, while I was writing, I realized it fit perfectly—it really captured the tone of the album.”
As we talk, a fascination with movement emerges (“It’s kind of like an action movie where the camera is mounted on the lead actor”), and Karl eventually draws a distinction between “Glissade”—the title of a song inspired by his daughter Kiwi—and the ideas of drifting or spinning out. “I think when you’re adrift, you’ve completely lost control over what’s happening to you. But my process is closer to a skid—lateral movement. To me, it’s the opposite of losing control. Making music means building something, then moving away from it, without ever losing sight of that initial flash to the point where you lose track of what you’re doing.”
To skid, after all, often means stepping outside the norm—leaving the beaten path behind, even if it means reinventing unlikely classics. Karl does exactly that with “Bébé Requin,” a 1967 hit by France Gall. The cover might seem odd, even unlikely, but it fits perfectly within the logic of VioleTT Pi. “I’ve always loved that song, and I think it already carries something close to what I do. In its themes and imagery, there’s this dark, almost violent undercurrent, but at the same time, it’s joyful and carried by a beautiful melody. Obviously, I changed the chords because I couldn’t really recreate it as-is. To me, it’s the kind of thing that naturally folds into my process without distorting it. But more than anything, it was just fun. There was something genuinely enjoyable about doing it.”
That duality has always been central to the identity of VioleTT Pi, which moves between pop and punk without ever collapsing into pop punk. Karl’s writing is raw and densely layered, but always shot through with flashes of light. On one end, there’s the romantic bliss of “Jeûner”—a dazzling pop duet with his partner, Klô Pelgag. On the other, there’s the darkness of “Guernica,” a hall-of-mirrors meditation on violence that invokes Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece condemning the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
“There are different kinds of violence,” Karl says. “To me, it’s just another colour on the palette. The sun is violent too—it’s fire, it’s radioactive. To quote Marilyn Manson, I didn’t invent violence. But if there’s one place where it belongs, it’s definitely in art. If it stayed there, everything would probably be fine, but humans decided to take it into their own hands and unleash it on one another. The whole principle of war is the law of the strongest, so with ‘Guernica,’ I figured that if I turned the volume up enough, I’d come out ahead. In that case, form and content become inseparable. Roland Barthes would probably say I made an intentional pleonasm. I wanted to underline violence by exposing how absurd it really is.”
Finding inspiration in the aisles
His songs also reveal a fascinating bestiary populated by mythological creatures (“Égrégore reptilien”) and a bat that seems to embody every singer’s worst nightmare. “I can’t hear my voice anymore,” he keeps repeating in “Chauve-Souris.” “What’s funny about songs like that is that they can come from seemingly trivial moments,” Karl explains. “A phrase like ‘I can’t hear my voice anymore’ might hit me while I’m grocery shopping, when the ambient noise is so overwhelming I can’t even follow my own thoughts anymore. Then I start exploring other meanings: bats are blind and navigate entirely through sound. So a bat that can’t hear its own voice anymore—that’s terrifying, because it’s going to fly straight into the wall.”
Karl’s own sonar, meanwhile, seems perfectly intact. With four albums released over nearly two decades, VioleTT Pi has quietly become something of a veteran act, and Karl looks back on the road he’s covered with a certain satisfaction. “I don’t know if the accumulation of everything I’ve done can really be called a career or a body of work. But I do think I’ve managed to glue together a bunch of disparate pieces and, to my great surprise, it’s still holding. Over time, I’ve become more precise—not necessarily about what I want, but about what I do. Honestly, I rarely know exactly what I want. But after creating for so long, I have a better sense of where to go. It’s almost like I invented my own Lego pieces to build my universe. I’m starting to understand the Lego blocks I created myself, and this album feels like a kind of collage of everything I’ve done so far. That said, I also feel like something is about to shift after this record—like I’m going to start approaching things differently.”
Mythologie de la dérape
VioleTT Pi
Label et publisher: LABE