released October 31, 2021

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I lived in Halifax, the capital of the province Nova Scotia in Canada.

It is a very special city, it was partly destroyed in 1917 by an explosion between two ships. The most powerful explosion caused by human activity until the first atomic test in July 1945, it is therefore a real trauma for the city.

There is also another equally tragic aspect, it was the town closest to the sinking of the Titanic, there is an entire cemetery (which was next to my house by the way) dedicated to the victims.

In fact, it is the most Gothic city that I know (in the Victorian Brontë, Shelley sense of the term), it is very often drowned in mist and fog, overhung by a citadel. Victorian houses and the seaside side add a John Carpenter effect to the picture.

So obviously I felt very attracted and connected to Halifax and returning to Canada (I lived there smaller) was a real pleasure.

I had a huge urge to make music there but didn't have any instruments or contacts so I went to a pawn shop to start, and bought an old Washburn to plug into my Mbox, then I went to a store that rented instruments and rented a Juno for a few months, and recorded the whole album pretty quickly.



Regarding the history of the songs:

Pleasant Point is the first song I composed there, and it tells of the virtual exchanges by skype with my girlfriend, who left there three months before me, then our reunion hence its sad side for the distance and sensual somehow as well . Point Pleasant is the name of a beautiful park there so it's a shitty pun.


The name Absinth Colada comes from the liquors shop in Prague (where we ended our tour in 2012 with To The Happy Few my previous band).

We strolled there drunk with absinth to discover the magnificent Czech streets and it remains a great memory, foggy and innocent.

However, in Halifax and in North America overall, you cannot drink in the street, it is prohibited and therefore everything takes place in homes or in hiding. The parties therefore took place either in my apartment or in a huge Victorian house of a friend and his roommates.

My apartment was opposite a Masonic lodge. Nova Scotia was almost the first stronghold of Freemasons in North America, they are quite proud of it and are very open about it which inspired me for the lyrics of this song.


Driftwood is a song based on a guitar riff that I had before leaving and that I integrated with arpeggiators made on the Juno, mixed in an SP303.

It's a song that I find quite aquatic, which is inspired by the swaying of the waves from a sound point of view and in terms of the lyrics, I imagined myself to be a driftwood (Driftwood) rocked by the waves. and deposited here and there, according to the tides.

I also pricked, but modified a little bit a sentence from William Blake's collection of poetry "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The Argument".


Shag Harbour is a small fishing village located on the south coast of Nova Scotia which is said to have experienced the fall and immersion of a UFO in the water of the harbor on October 4, 1967. Since this affair has been part of folklore local and has become a source of tourist income, there is even a museum and this is all taken very seriously although no debris or pieces of wreckage have been found in the area. To this day, this case is still classified as “unexplained”. My song is inspired by this story.


Ocean Drive works on the same principle as Driftwood ie on the eddies of the waves and the trance side of the ocean, like a breath.


Blind Crest is the most narrative track because it tells a story, a little cliché horror storyline from Z series. It is inspired by a night spent in the woods.

We left a long weekend with friends for Cape Breton, a very wild region of Nova Scotia, bear territory. We rented a cabin in the middle of the forest and we had to find miles before an old man (Danny) to bring us to the scene. Once arrived on the scene, Danny invited himself to drink shots then once drunk and stoned it was unthinkable that he would obviously leave.

In short, if at the beginning he was a little wild but nice, the guy later turned out to be an aggressive lustful old man who pissed off our girlfriends by telling them really dirty things. So we had to try to calm him down but the guy got angry and said I'm going to get something in the car, he comes out of the cabin, slips and knocks himself on a gas cylinder that was outside . So we put him in a room alone. In the early morning Danny sported a huge bump, remembered nothing and was gentle as a lamb. He invited us to "his place" the same evening, we met his wife - in a very pretty house, light years from what we could have imagined - who told us that she was a little stuck with him because that given his age, his health and the isolation of the area, it was unthinkable to fire him and that he was helping with the chores of the house anyway.

A little sad in the end.


1917, as its name suggests, is about the catastrophe and the explosion, but in a slightly more pop style. They also have a great festival there called the Halifax Pop Explosion, and the bagpipe at the end, which is mixed with the typical sound of the Halifax zebra crossing, is played by my sister-in-law and her husband. I am lucky to have great Breton and Irish musicians in my step family.


Digby is a town on the Bay of Fundy where the tidal ranges are the largest in the world. The idea of the song and the lyrics is that life, moods, are a huge tide that comes and goes according to gravitational forces.


Secret Citadel is the name of a magnificent exhibit I saw by Graeme Patterson at the Halifax Museum of Modern Art.

At the start I had made the main theme to mess around on the guitar, a bit like Black Sabbath with distortion, then I said to myself that it would be fun to transfer it to the synth and more in my style. I always thought that was THE song on the album, I don't know what you think?


Nightflight is the name of the first track I wrote when I started doing indie pop around 16 so I wanted to end with that. I took a pretty turbulent night flight from Philadelphia to Halifax to arrive, hence the name. I ended the track with the sound of the train that I heard from home and one of my favorite album Beach Boys "Pet Sounds" also ends with a train, so that's a little wink.

Generally speaking, all the field recordings sounds are stuff that I recorded on the spot and that I wanted to integrate into the album.


Regarding the house that’s on the cover, this magnificent house that the Adams family would gladly envy was on my way to work, so I passed by every morning and evening, by bus or on foot and I never saw a soul enter or in come out in more than two years.

Since I was little, I've been quite a fan of horror films, so it was only natural that I fell in love with that house.

It is on a boulevard which had quite a bad reputation because it was said to be dangerous. There was also a kid, who was probably unfortunately having mental problems, who every time the bus entered the boulevard said all along "This is a bad street, this is a bad street ..."


Otherwise, the album is called "First Dance in Nova Scotia" in homage to the poet Elizabeth Bishop who wrote a poem called First Death in Nova Scotia, and which is about the death of a newborn (always the good gothic atmosphere of the area). So I replaced Dance by Death cos I do Pop and all this is very light.

I also hope that reading all this does not sound pompous or what because it is only a humble pop album.


As for my name "David Nothing", my favorite movie is Lynch's Blue Velvet, at one point in the movie, the main character Jeffrey hides in a closet and observes Isabella Rossellini who finally flushes him out and asks him to decline. his identity, by which he answers: Jeffrey Nothing.

Curiously and really in spite of myself, the artists who mean the most to me have David as their first name: Bowie and Lynch. and since I'm no one compared to them I thought Nothing was pretty consistent, then I realized that there were other consistency. My real name starts with a G and ends with an N unlike Nothing and both include the same number of letters. My father, who is a journalist, used young as a nickname Nihil ( "nothing" in latin ) so there is a real lineage.