Photo by Adrian Welch, layout by Micol Raab

Lucien Désar (pronounced "Loo-see-in Daay-Zarr "), is a Romantic – a musical poet for the modern age. Unrestricted by a conformist attitude to pop conventions and standards, this 29 year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist explores the mystical and mysterious through his moody compositions.

Ultimately music is a way for this artist to explore personal themes as well as send out positive messages to his listeners, even when tackling morose, and sometimes morbid, subjects. Whether performing a melancholy piano sonata or a moody rock song, Lucien Désar seeks to illuminate the darkness around him and transform it into an invigorating listening experience.

One of the earliest memories from my life was when I was in my baby crib at night, with these lizards crawling all over the crib. I was yelling and screaming for my parents to help me and they never came. I think that feeling of helplessness is what I feel is the most terrifying. [Throughout my life], I have always felt like there is this mysterious presence just lurking behind every corner to grab me if I happen to fall.

I think music has always comforted me. It’s like this person to me that will always be around no matter what happens. I really think I would have committed suicide if I didn’t have music as a means of a release throughout my teenage years. So by creating certain pieces that are haunting or slightly off-base, or disturbing, I lessen the strength of these past fears that have always existed below the surface level of my consciousness.

I was two years old, and my parents had a piano. My sister would place me on her lap, and I would bang the heck out of it with my fists. My parents then bought an electric organ, and I was scared of it.

What were your early solo albums like? Were they similar or different from your current musical output?

They were similar in that they all had either a piano or keyboard synth as the main instrument. A few people compared my playing to Herbie Hancock during the 1980’s or Frank Zappa.

At what point in your musical career did you begin to embrace diversity? What inspired this?

I think I embraced diversity somewhat from the start. I was raised in a European family that was moving constantly every year until I was 12. It made me inherently appreciate diversity in people, anything really. I find doing one musical style for too long to be rather boring, and it places a strain on my creativity. I find that when I do something that is really difficult and different that I tend to do it rather well as opposed to something easy, which I tend to do rather poorly.

I think the audiences have been readily accepting it. The gothic crowd appreciates anything that is from the historical elegant era. Neo-classical, or the western classical-defined structure of music, is one of the foundations of all music in the western world. I use strings in most of my gothic rock pieces, and I apply the same exact harmony structures used in traditional music theory. Now with the neo-classical styles, I cut all the excess parts and just deliver a pure raw form of my musical ideas and dreams.

I draw a lot of my solo piano pieces from what is going on in my life. They are the most personal aspects of myself. Things that I never tell people are released and poured out within each piece. I have trouble listening to them at times because they instantly take me back to the moment it was composed. Although I can’t say all of my pieces are just about me.

Of all the pieces I compose I think the piano is me or it’s part of my identity. If I go more than a day without playing I get really irritable, I can’t sleep, I get depressed. I know it’s obsessive, but I don’t care [because] it’s the only thing that I know I can do well. Everything else in my life I consider myself mediocre at best.

They are both difficult actually! But lately I have been finding piano solos to be more difficult to compose. I have created so many pieces I feel that I have to create more and more complex and difficult [works]. I am a huge critic of myself, so while I can create 7 to 8 pieces [in a given period] I would say only 1 to 2 ever get recorded down in the studio.

Ensemble pieces are getting easier for me. You start with the most simple part, that is the main melody, and then you layer different voices and/or instruments with it. I often allow the musicians to find themselves within the piece. Also, the pressure is off of me having to do all the work during a performance. I am still learning. I haven’t composed a symphony yet, so I am sure I will change my opinion, which is more difficult once I start.

Very important. Every time I start to compose a new piece I create a scene or story in my head that was inspired by a particular artist and then have the story evolve in my head. I guess what I am really doing is creating the soundtrack for a scene in my head or trying to deliver that feeling and emotion that the characters in my head deliver. I love looking at art. I can stare at a painting for a really long time and try to grasp the reason or what it was like painting the piece. The same goes with poetry. If it’s good, I tend to read it over and over and each time come away with something different each time.

I honestly don’t think I have had that moment yet. I am scared when it will come, because then I will start to think that I have reached my ceiling and begin to spiral downwards and crash. Although each time I have the music I composed played by a different musician, it always gives me chills because it’s like the piece is breathing and living on it’s own.

These new releases represent a different change of pace with my music. I feel like I have "grown up" more, and in a sense, these pieces were ten times more difficult to produce than any of my previous material.

The "Alice in Wonderland Suite" was an idea that I fell into by accident one day. I was lying in bed, depressed at everything in my life, when I heard this word whisper gently in my ear "Alice…." The voice repeated several times in my head until it repeated the word again and ended in "In Wonderland!" I bolted out of bed and was very oddly disturbed by the whole notion.

I tried to ignore what happened until Alice in Wonderland references kept showing up in my life. I would be in a bookstore and a book would fly out of the case and fall on the floor – it would have the artwork of Alice In Wonderland – or someone out of the blue made a reference to "Through The Looking Glass". I kept ignoring it until it became almost a daily event. I wasn’t even surprised anymore when it occurred because it was so frequent.

So I decided to buy the book – I had never read it completely up until that point – as well as biographies on the author and everything I could lay my hands on. Someone or something was telling me that I needed to create something with it. So I decided to create a suite that was similar to Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter & The Wolf, in which each character in the story would be an instrument. I quickly came up with several major scenes in the book and worked from there. So in a way I never found Alice. I really think Alice found me.

The trio I formed, Musa, is comprised of cello (Stacey BenBen), violin (Claire Smith) and piano (myself). The scores I have composed for it have started to take on a dark Victorian-era theme. I have been inspired by a lot of Victorian literature and artwork and based all of the [Musa] work with it.

On the horizon I am anticipating more neo-classical work, but I might also release another pop album as well. I have been recently been getting into gospel music. I think if I changed on every other album between rock/pop and neo-classical, I can balance both worlds and not have my creativity stifled at all.