French Composer Chassol Offers Insight On Frank Ocean's New Record, Possible Rick Rubin Collabo

Back in March, Frank Ocean announced that he'll be rolling out his sophomore LP, tentatively titled Boys Don't Cry, which had all of the internets in a well-reasoned stupor of excitement. And while little if anything other than the album title and the month of its release is known, French composer and virtuosic pianist Chassolhas offered a brief account of his time in Abbey Road Studios with the reclusive r&b gawd, divulged in a recent interview with master curator Giles Peterson on his BBC 6 program this past weekend. The interview, while comprised mostly of a performance, finds Chassol speaking on his time with Frank, painting a lively picture of his setup (decked out in pictures of contemporary art and architecture) as well as the time that the legendary Rick Rubin walked into the studio, unbeknownst to him. You can read the full transcript of Chassol's commentary below and hear it for yourselves by hitting the link. One thing is for sure, July better get here and fast.

>>>Listen To Chassol's Full Interview w/ Giles Peterson (via BBC 6 Music)

"Ocean invited me to Abbey Road to record on his album. I asked him when I came, how he heard about me. He told me his friend Diplo was listening a lot to Indiamore, and they started to listen to it, and they were wondering how I was doing the speech harmonization, so he called me. He asked me to do some speech harmonization on a song with him. After a while, it was cool and he was like, ‘yeah, but we have to find another way because you already did it.’ The guy is smart. He’s really smart. The way he works in the studio is really cool. He has a printer, he has a lot of pictures of architecture, contemporary art, a lot of pictures of different kinds of things.

So we start to work on a track and he says, this track is this—that car that you can see. He makes me work on a song, and I’m like, ‘oh this sounds like Pino Donaggio’s score for ‘Blow Out’, by Brian Depalma. I start to work on a song and five minutes later on the pro-tools screen you have the movie, the score, stretched to fit the song—just to try. I’ve never worked with that much money in music. It’s good sometimes to have money, because you can try things…At some point, a guy came into the studio, a guy with a long beard. We start talking and then he leaves and they tell me it’s Rick Rubin! I didn’t know the guy! Sometimes I’m the only one who doesn’t know the things."