October 2025
There are musicians whose very name, or nom de plume, suggests flights of fantasy without sounding pretentious and invite the listener to investigate such an artist’s oeuvre, and Gilles Snowcat is one of those creative spirits. This Brussels denizen has a whiff of enigma about him, and his labyrinthine discography doesn’t make it easy to crack the artist’s code due to Snowcat’s stylistic versatility and his many records’ genre-defying diversity. Still, “something for everyone” – a fitting characteristic of Gilles’ body of work – can indicate his willingness to satisfy any taste, but that may also mean his audiences are always in for a surprise, even though some subjects travel from one of the Belgian’s platter’s to another. Which was the start of our chat.
– Gilles, your website motto is “Music doesn’t matter, lifestyle does”: do you, an artist, really believe that or it’s supposed to be ironic?
It’s half-ironic, half-true. It’s more about the music business, mostly in the rock and pop world. A great musician without anything exciting can play forever in his basement, while a mediocre one who has social skills and charisma can make it. I don’t complain, it’s just realism. I’m OK with that, since most fans want an artist they can relate to, identify with, and in that case music is secondary. It’s still important but, contrarily to jazz or classical world, it’s not the first thing that sells.
– Still, a lot of your songs are dedicated to lifestyle. How did you land on this concept?
It’s just me, actually. I link music with lifestyle experiences, whether it’s having a cocktail or driving a vintage car early in the morning in the countryside, or walking at night in a busy Asian city, all those things I love. Some artists are great at singing about their latest break-up or political stuff, not me. I write musical postcards, actually. I’d like to reach the level of Don Walker from COLD CHISEL. He’s one of the very best living lyricists.
– Creating musical postcards requires doing something concise, but emotionally endless. How do you approach this art?
By throwing anything that unbalances the song. But in most cases I don’t even think of that, the song writes itself without much struggle.
– Would it be right to call you a sybarite?
More a kind of gentle hedonist than sybarite. (Laughs.) I love good things in life, whether they’re expensive or not. Sure posh places are great and I enjoy them, but I also find pleasure in an old shattered brick house lost in the middle of the countryside, driving a smoky Massey-Ferguson tractor, or a local café with all the workers going to get their lunch. And when it comes to food, I even dislike when it’s too trendy or posh, you know the little piece of food surrounded by a drawing of sauce. I love real local dishes, especially in Asia, they’re full of flavors and you eat within a special atmosphere.
– Most of what you do sounds very summery: what about covering other seasons?
In music, seasons are in the eye of the beholder; we tend to link a season to the music we discover at that moment. If you discover my album on a cold December, you will always remember it as a winter album. But you’re right: some of my songs work well when it’s warm and people are more open, like in the summer. This being said, I need the whole set of seasons, and I find autumn a wonderful one especially. If I could collaborate with Anthony Phillips, I could write wonderful autumn music. Ant, if you read this…
– You live in Brussels, but there’s a Japanese angle to many of your releases. Why?
I’ve been to Japan many times, I even got an indie label that distributed some of my releases. They have ceased activity now, I may not have brought them enough money to survive, but I liked the experience, involving lots of evenings in local bars. Naturally, I came to write a few songs in Japanese, and later in Vietnamese. I love Asian countries in general, even though under the term ‘Asian’ lie a lot of different cultures. But the common point is the energy. You can feel that energy in some Chinatowns in the western world too, like the one in New York.
– You speak Japanese and Vietnamese?!
Enough to survive and have fun in a bar, or sing easy songs, but surely not very good.
– Your venturing into New Orleans music was unexpected. Where did that idea come from?
I was actually born on Mardi Gras day, so I’d be more honest to call it Mardi Gras music. I’m not from New Orleans and, even worse, I haven’t been there yet, so I’d be a pretentious snob to call it New Orleans music. Of course, Mardi Gras music has lots to do with New Orleans funk that combines some hypnotic grooves and a strange joyful feeling, like Dr. John or THE METERS.
– Did your career grow out of AWAKEN or this band and your solo work run in parallel?
It’s always been a bit confusing. It became clearer in Japan, since people there didn’t care much about the AWAKEN concept, they cared about human beings. And since I was the main human being in AWAKEN at that time, I became the focus and I liked it. There are other reasons too: I actually don’t like to be in a band, simply put. It’s comfortable and boring. And humanly speaking, there are more fun people to meet when I’m solo than when I was in a so-called band. Paradox!
– How many instruments do you play?
Fewer and fewer! (Laughs.) I used to play some guitar and bass, but I didn’t improve much and I still sound the same when I do something on these instruments nowadays, so I kind of put them in my garage and focus on keyboards. I’m not technically great either, but I can add some colors and a little groove, which is what I need. I’m like David Bowie: I play keyboards but for the complicated parts I hire real pianists to do the job. Oh, I used to play some notes on flute in a faraway past, but I sure was no Ian Anderson.
– Which of those instruments do you usually write on?
I like to write songs that are already written in my mind. You know, like precious stones trapped in rock, you guess their shape without seeing them, then clean around and the song appears. I mostly use keyboards to translate it into music, sometimes guitar. Some ideas came by messing around with the bass guitar, too.
– You seem to prefer singles to albums. Do you think a message should be bite-sized for better digestion?
I love to do an album every now and then, like every five years or so, and in between it’s fun to release singles: it can be new versions of album songs with different musicians, or trying a song that wouldn’t have fit the album for some reasons. I love both formats, they really complement each other. And yes, nowadays people need bite-sized releases, but somehow there have always been music fans who preferred the single format – just look at the Sixties.
– You’ve covered many of other people’s songs, and some of those choices felt quite unexpected. How did you bring such different things as Philip Glass and DEEP PURPLE, Matthew Fisher and URIAH HEEP pieces into the context of your own albums?
Very easily, since they’re all strong influences of mine. So in the back of my mind, they belong to the same category of music: music that excites me. Some people may have troubles with being influenced by URIAH HEEP, Philip Glass, EARTH WIND & FIRE and Frank Sinatra at the same level, not me. I remember having a cassette tape, during my high school days, with some Mozart music on one side, and the other side was filled with MOTÖRHEAD. They’re different kinds of music, since classical is mostly taught music, with a highly skilled master teaching secrets and technique to the apprentice, when rock is more self-taught, and classical takes years of sacrifice, when rock ‘n’ roll takes years of having fun drinking whisky and beers. That’s why I chose the latter, so I’m not being condescending here.
– You also recorded quite a few Al Stewart numbers – but you also played live with Al. How did that come about and what did you learn from those concerts?
Long story short: in 1999, Stewart did a few gigs in Belgium, and I met him then; he remembered one of my albums on which I covered “Last Days Of The Century”… I asked him if he could play that song at the next show, and he replied that, since I had covered it, he would play it if I came on stage to sing it the next day, in Holland. I thought it was a touch of Scottish humor, so I didn’t think much of it, but I went to the Dutch show anyway and, as soon as I entered the venue, there was Neville Judd, his then road manager, who was checking on people, and who called me to rush backstage to rehearse the song with Stewart. It was funny: we did a verse and a chorus and Stewart said “OK, just wait in the first row, and I’ll call you.” Which he did. It was meaningful, I was thinking “Wow! I sing, and the guitarist who backs me is Al Stewart!” We did it at the next show too, and that was it, the tour ended anyway. This being said, I heard the recording later, a kind of official bootleg, and my vocal performance was amongst the worst I ever did.
The lesson I’ve learned: always meet your heroes! Meet the artists you admire, drive the cars you dreamed of in your teenage years, visit the places you’ve been attracted to, date the girl your fantasies are about: do it! As long as you are aware and accept the fact that there will be differences with what you expect, you won’t be very disappointed. And at least you won’t be frustrated on your deathbed by all the things you haven’t done. OK, I sound like a personal development guru here. Maybe I should write a book (Laughs.)
– Do you enjoy facing the audience, or is it necessary evil?
I enjoy it! Actually, I enjoy the whole process, from the first idea that there could be a song, then writing the song, then recording it, releasing it, promoting it, until the moment it’s on stage and we can have fun with it, improvise on it, give it different forms – all of this is exciting. I’m going do something with the new album, though I still don’t know exactly what, I’m thinking of a casino event or something oriented to cocktails and lifestyle, you see.
– You mentioned writing a book – but you have one out already! How much of your own experience went into the “Are you such a boring musician?”?
The main idea came when, every now and then, some musicians were asking me for advice about this or that. I thought it was quite unwise to ask anything from me, but the little entrepreneur in me told me to write a book and sell it so I could fill the tank of my car without getting into debt. So I used some of my experience, and compared with some masters, and analyzed the paradoxes of the rock world, all that stuff. It became “The Rock Star Paradox” and, later, “Are You Such A Boring Musician?”. Boring is the image and attitude, not the music. There are great musicians around that completely spoil their chances to be noticed, by using stupid words to promote themselves, like “We are a pop-rock band with Celtic influences.” When I see such a bad promotion, I don’t even care about listening. If they had said “Our music is created on the mistiest day of the year by disintegrating a dolmen with a handful of ionized mushrooms and translating the sound into melodies,” I’d stop everything I do to listen to them. (Laughs.)
– What’s the story behind your latest offering, "Don't Leave Your Mistakes Unattended"?
At first, I wanted to do an album related to a place called “The Marzipan Bar,” so the artwork would be all in marzipan, every musician would be a marzipan figurine, and once the CD is done every musician would eat his own marzipan doll. But I got bored of it because I didn’t want to do a concept album. I even thought of destroying my work, to have a kind of Brian Wilson moment, tortured artist and so on. But strangely, one day I was walking in a park, the grass was wet and muddy, and there were holes here and there that I had to avoid walking into. And suddenly the sentence came, like whispered by a heavenly voice: “Don’t leave your mistakes unattended.” I imagined it said by a voice in an airport, and that was the spark – now I knew what my album should be. And since then, it became what you hear now. It’s like I had solved a puzzle. That’s why I like to trust my unconscious mind, it makes better decisions. The conscious mind comes only to set up some limits when needed.
– It’s a pseudo-concept album. Is a concept important or is it just a framework for pieces written within the same period of time?
Unless an album is really conceived as a concept – like “The Wall,” “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway,” or “Generation 13” – a concept is in the ears of the beholder. It’s like a house full of various things that are not linked to each other initially, but since they’re under the same roof, they unavoidably become family, they are related to the same story, although they were not made for that purpose. Some albums have a strong conceptual feel for me, though they are not concept albums at all. You know “Salisbury” by URIAH HEEP: in my heart I feel it as a concept – from the first C minor notes of “Bird Of Prey” until the last suspended organ chord of the title track, it’s a whole trip. I like to see records as trips, and that’s why I don’t like “Best Of” albums, unless they are recorded live. I always recommend people to listen to my albums as a whole at first, which was hard when I overfilled them with seventy minutes of music, but now, with only thirty-four minutes, the new one is a perfect conceptual trip, although not a concept album at all.
– You offer the Nekokawa Hypnosis and Massage services, basically music for relaxation. Did you research these techniques?
I recorded some massage music, because in Chinese massage salons in Europe the music is usually random cheesy piano stuff: sure, it’s relaxing, but I wanted to try something more related to massage. Of course, the kind little devil in my wallet told me I should sell the music too, which I gladly did. (Laughs.) Same with self-hypnosis music. There’s a great technique that consists in saturating your senses to get into trance. It’s easy to saturate visual and kinesthetic senses, but the audio one is a totally different animal. You may want to concentrate on the sound of cars passing in the street but suddenly there’s no car for a few seconds and you lose your trance, or vice versa. So I created some audios based on music, but focused on anything that can saturate your auditory senses.
– How does all this go hand in hand with the humor of your songs?
I must be the only one not seeing humor in my songs. (Laughs.)
– What do you think of letting AI into the creative process?
My guess is that AI will be extensively used for highly commercial music, whose fans don’t care about instruments or anything like that. And on the other side, there will still be a tight scene of real bands, real musicians, for people who reject AI vigorously. So I don’t think AI will replace musicians, at least not everywhere. Look, there are still drummers around, they have never been replaced by drum machines after all. And while synthesizers can be fantastic, they still haven’t replaced real pianos. From a personal point of view, as I love to create things by myself, AI could never take that much space in the process, but if it gives me advice on mixing or fixing a frequency problem, I will use it without shame.
– You’ve always avoided probes into who Gilles Snowcat really is. Would you want to finally delve into this mystery?
Gilles Snowcat is a complicated mix of accumulated stuff, a bit like an attic full of memories that we think are useless but are actually very useful. Or something like that.
