For the last 15 years the music ofThe Dears has been as close to the heart of the matter in all things related to matters of the heart and beyond. While they've endured shifting band members and record label musical chairs the Dears have consistently swung for the bleachers on each release with a cocktail of pop romantique drama, pathos and the kind of sonic grandeur that bands half their age can only hope to aspire to.
I caught up with enigmatic leader Murray Lightburn, amidst an onslaught of foreign press interviews for the release of their seventh album Degeneration Street, to discuss two inspirational albums of formidable influence for him: U2'sUnder a Blood Red Sky and Wendy Carlos' Clockwork Orange soundtrack. What follows was a fun, insightful and fascinating discussion that is much better served in audio format rather than print so put the headphones on or crank up the speakers and have a listen below.
They are one part cultural movement, one part art collective , one part Montreal ambassadors, but above all they are all parts musical maelstrom that seem to conflate all the best moments of pop music from the last 30 years and seamlessly blend them into one unique vision. Fresh off of a surprise Grammy Award for best album of the year, Arcade Fire is a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut who continue to redefine what it means to be a hugely successful rock band by following its own intransigent and independent minded creed. I chatted with Arcade Fire bassist, guitarist and vocalist Tim Kingsbury to discuss a classic Neil Young album, that despite its title, never gets old or rusty. Full audio interview is here or read the edited transcription below.
Sound, It Resounds: Tim, thanks for taking time out from your guys' busy schedule to chat. So what is the album we're going to be talking about today.
TimKingsbury: The album is Live Rust by Neil Young. I guess I picked up a cassette copy of it when I was 14. I was in Florida and I was sent to a church camp there and we had a day off and I think we were at some mini-mall in Daytona and there was a record store there and I decided to go in. I wasn't particularly familiar with much rock music really but there was a kid in my class who was really into Neil Young and I became friends with this kid. Basically when I went into this store I spotted the cassette (of Live Rust) and I bought it. We had taken the bus to Florida and we were taking the bus back to Guelph, Ontario where I was living and that was like a 20 hour plus bus ride so for a good chunk of the ride I ended up listening to that tape over and over and over.
SIR: On your Walkman I guess?
TK: Yeah yeah on my Walkman, exactly. That was kinda like my soundtrack in high school for awhile. I still go back to that record quite a bit.
SIR: That's quite a soundtrack to carry with you on a 20 hour plus bus ride
TK: Well it's such a cool album with the way it's put together.
SIR: Yeah and your definitely listening to it in a great context; it kinda starts out quiet and evolves over time into the louder stuff.
TK: It's funny because I remember Much Music was playing 'Keep on Rockin' in the Free World' at the time and I went into the store actually looking for that song and I saw there was a huge stack of Neil Young records and I noticed that that album (Live Rust) wasn't one of them and I was like, what? How could that album not be here. I was pretty impressed he had so many albums.
SIR: As a musician and writer I was wondering if there are any moments on that album that inspired you to make music eventually.
TK: With that album, especially when I got it, there were certain songs I was obsessed with and then it kind of evolved over time and it was also around the same time I started playing guitar so that was a heavy influence on me. But I think there's still one song that I always pick up the guitar and play is 'Powderfinger,' just out of habit.
SIR: So I'd like to talk a bit about where things are at with Arcade Fire, but before we get into that I was thinking about the first time I heard Funeral. I was immediately struck by the album's reference points. You guys seem to bring such a disparate batch of influences that far extend 10 or 15 years of pop music history. Can you talk about those seemingly wide range of influences and how that enriches the music of Arcade Fire.
TK: If you look at everybody in the bands' background, it's a fairly diverse group of upbringings and family histories. I think that has a lot to do with it. Like Win and Will (Butler), their grandfather was a big band leader and their family is full of musicians. For me, I grew up in a little town in Guelph, Ontario and in high school I'd go to see punk rock shows. And then Regine grew up in a different situation to that. She picked up the piano really early and she would just figure anything out she heard. She had a very creative side from a very young age. And Rich's family has a whole other story with folk musicians. So I think all that kind of comes together, coming from different angles, and when the band is at its best, that is what's going on.
SIR: I wanted to talk a bit about reconciling the “big” with the “small.” You’ve chosen to stay on a comparatively small indie label, Merge Records, yet you’re a huge band in the psyche of the music buying public. You’re physically a large band with 8 or 9 members yet you give off a sense of intimacy and humility in an almost familial way. I’m wondering if trying to keep a sense of small in an overwhelming sea of big is important to the band to maintain and keep it grounded in some way.
TK: I think it's kind of impossible to function, on a personal level, as big all the time or any of the time for that matter.
SIR: Well I wonder if you guys ever pine for those days of being able to be more in touch with people on that smaller level.
TK: Well hopefully at some point I might have another opportunity to play in another band and play to a smaller group. When we started off , it would be like OK there's 20 friends here and that's awesome and we're gonna have fun and then maybe we'll go play soccer afterward or something. That's just not possible at this point. But I guess my priorities are different now too then when I was 22.
SIR: What are the next plans with Arcade Fire
TK: We toured for most of last year so we're taking a bit of quiet time off. But we're going to tour through the summer starting in April at least until the fall. We're also starting to do a bit of writing and working on some new stuff a bit.
SIR: Tim, thank you again for taking time out to chat. Best of luck with touring, with the band and yourself.
In the liner notes to the 1963 release of Missa Luba, a record performed by a young Congolese boys choir who go by the name of Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, none other than legendary author and historian Studs Terkel wrote "These young virtuosi feel so patently free."
After chatting with Katie Lee from Braids and hearing her describe both the gravitational pull of this album and the process that she and the rest of her Braids bandmates enlist in creating their sound, it was clear that Missa Luba could be a metaphor for the bands empirical and pure approach to music.
I chatted with Katie and discussed Missa Luba and the value of living outside ones comfort zone as well as the long but ulimately rewarding process that went intoNative Speaker. Listen to the full audio interview here or the edited transcription below.
Sound It Resounds: So Katie thanks for joining me today, really appreciate you taking the time as I'm sure you guys have a crazy schedule coming up. Tell us about the album we're gonna talk about today.
Katie Lee: So the album I decided to pick is called Missa Luba and it's sung by (excuse my french – laughs) Les Petits Troubadours du Roi Baudoin, it was arranged by Pere Guido Haazen who is a priest from Belgium and it was recorded in 1958. They had taken traditional Congolese songs and turned them into Latin mass church songs and sung by a Congolese choir with I believe about 30 or 40 boys from the town of Kamina. So yeah it was a bit of a find; I did not grow up with this album at all. A friend of mine had it in his record collection, the cover looked amazing so I decided to put it on and to my surprise it was really really beautiful.
S.I.R: So when did you actually discover this record
K: I discovered this about 2 years ago. My friend is a huge record collector and the packaging of this album is really beautiful with a great screen print and nice booklet inside the album so I was curious as to what the sound was. After listening to it only once, I kept on thinking about it but I never took the time to listen to it again but then I moved in with the friend who owns the album so I just ended up playing it everyday.
S.I.R: It's amazing how vinyl has this serendipitous quality that you don't get with CD's a lot of time. You were saying how you stumbled upon it at a friends place while flipping through their records and you were struck by the design and package. That doesn't happen too often with CD's
K: Definitely, definitely agree. It's funny you know because they say don't judge a book by its cover but this one is a totally opposite example of that.
SIR: But you can often do that with vinyl and I think that's one of the great things about going through peoples record collections . There's a whole process and a bit of religion of going through a vinyl stack to see what kind of pops out and exactly for that reason because of the album cover a lot of times.
K: I did some research on the album afterwards and I came across a lot of famous artists who have referenced it including the Clash who referred to it in the song 'Car Jamming' on the album Combat Rock.
SIR: Has it influenced you musically or as a person?
K: Both I'd say. The harmonies in this choir are absolutely amazing and the way it's arranged is so beautiful. Each section ebbs and flows into each other. I think a lot of the music and the parts we tend to write flow into each other and there is not one distinct part; the entire sound as a whole is what makes the song itself. And Missa Luba does that beautifully with just pure voice, no electronics and it's super minimal and I can really appreciate music that uses just voice and drums to make something that sounds big.
Taylor in the band has lately been having trouble finding inspirational music and he's been kinda in a bit of a slump. I showed him this album and he said this is the first time in like months that has made him feel good inside.
SIR: It's really important, especially living in a very indie-centric world of listening, and sometimes that can become a bit of an aural ghetto, but sometimes you just need to listen to something outside of your comfort zone.
K: Yeah exactly. You know I think definitely the last couple of years we've been involved in that indie community and sound but I haven't come across an album like this in awhile that has made me feel like I want to make music.
SIR: I'd like to talk a little bit about Native Speaker. Can you talk about where and how the album was recorded?
K: So Native Speaker took about 2 ½ years to write starting in Calgary. 'Glass Dears' and 'Lemonade' were written in Calgary before moving to Montreal. This was also a time when we realized we wanted to write music as a collective and not just have one person write the songs. And moving to a new city (Montreal) was extremely difficult with not knowing anyone so we really grew as individuals. I think a lot of the songs translate that growth and that struggle. We went back to Calgary during a summer to track the drums in Taylor's parents garage and we thought we'd be done tracking everything that summer but we ended up just doing the drums. We came back to Montreal and while we were attending classes at university and at night we would go to our jam space and start recording all the other parts.
SIR: What did you record the album on?
K: In Logic (Apple music recording software)
SIR: The process of writing has evolved so much for bands and artists above and beyond coming up with song ideas using traditional guitar and piano and I listen to Native Speaker and i'm really struck by how you guys use loops and textures. Are the songs born out of a more traditional methodology or does it evolve from something as simple as a loop or sound or texture. Or both?
K: Usually someone comes up with an idea whether that's lyrical or a riff or an environmental soundscape on a loop and then we jam from that and someone will add something to it and something big will usually come out of that and then we'll strip it down. I guess that's where the songwriting happens when we start editing it down. Rarely do we come in with a full song in our heads.
SIR: So what's in store for Braids next. I'm guessing you guys are going on tour.
K: Next couple of months we are touring North America with Baths and Starslinger for the first couple of weeks and then touring with Toro Y Moi, back in Montreal for a couple of weeks. Then hopefully we'll playing Europe and the festival route in the spring. We're also trying to write while touring so hopefully we can have another album done by end of the year.
SIR: Katie thanks so much for taking out time to sit and talk with us.
K: Yeah thank you so much
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For more information on Braids check out the following online destinations:
It's a rare treat when you can sit down to chat (albeit on google talk) with an artist you not only admire but who's musical output has influenced your own creative endeavors in the past. That said, it's an even greater treat when that artist introduces you to one of the finest explorations of minimal experimental glitch electronics I have heard in ages. In between yet another busy schedule with Efterklang, I was lucky enough to catch up with lead singer and instrumentalist Casper Clausen in Berlin and discuss one of his most inspiring records, Max De Wardener's 2004 album Where I Am Today.
Listen to the full audio interview here or an edited transcription below.
(Outro music: Max De Wardener- Hundreds and Thousands from Where I Am Today)
Sound It Resounds: Casper thank you for taking time out of your Saturday night in Berlin and I understand the album you're going to talk about is an album by Max De Wardener called Where I Am Today so tell us a little bit about this record
Casper : Well thank you first of all for having me on the show. You were asking me for a favorite album of all time, a tough challenge for sure, but this is for sure one album that means a lot to me and one I'm always looking back on and it never really grows old. You can pick it up and put it on and it's this imaginary world of sounds. And it meant a lot because it came out at the same time we were creating Tripper our debut album, in the process of doing that we were consuming a lot of music. This album really filled our heads with a lot of different kind of inspiration. Sadly he hasn't really released anything else but luckily for us we made contact with him and he did a remix of one of our songs.
S.I.R: Which song did he remix?
C: He remixed one of our songs called “Caravan” off the album Parades
C: There's nothing really quite like this album. I'm not really sure the story behind how he did it but from what I picked up, he recorded it in a small church so you have a lot of pipe organ and then he used this very special instrument called cloud chamber bowls, it's kind of like a wine glass and you can make them ring. But instead he kind of knocks them like a bell sound and makes them ring. But Max De Wardener is more like an electronic musician and he uses beats and bass sounds that are synthetic so it's this mix between the acoustic world and this sort of synthetic world that I was blown away by.
S.I.R: I definitely hear a lot of those kind of twinkly electronic elements that are on the Tripper album and you raised an interesting point that I wanted to ask you about. One of the things that has always struck me about Efterklang was how you maintain a real balance between electronics and real instrumentation. Can you talk a bit about that blend of real instrumentation and electronics and why that's important to the band?
C: If we isolate Tripper as a work and the time we made that album, it is us trying to define ourselves and a sound that we could call our own. We're all from a kind of classic background of rock music, like playing in rock n'roll bands so I think moving into that field was very exciting for us. We were listening a lot to, well...the album we're talking about, but also German electronic music like Mouse on Mars and Markus Popp and Oval and that kind of “glitchy” world, but also drawing inspiration from a band called Einsturzende Neubaten. And the great thing for us was to try and pick the best things from both worlds and somehow try and match them and create our own world. It's still a big part of what we try to do and I think if you look at Parades, that's to me, what we wanted to do on Tripper but more full-on. We kind of got better at blending those two worlds.
After Parades we were touring a lot and what we learned about that was the excitement of being a band which we kind of forgot about for awhile. By playing these songs live we learned there was a special energy that we really wanted to capture. So we tried to compose the songs (for latest album Magic Chairs) the way we use to in the computer but the idea was to quickly get them out of the computer before they started growing in there (laughs). But I would like to go back to the mindset of Tripper at some point because there's some amazing things we did at that time which I also hear when I hear this Max De Wardener record. The way we recorded (Tripper & Parades) was very ambitious and the foundation of those ambitions was really based around going to churches and inviting boys choir's (to sing) and having a quartet of strings and going to a field to record to get that real ambient sound, all these kind of things that give the sound texture and makes it sound specific.
S.I.R: I wanted to ask you about the Efterkids project. How did that all come about and maybe you can talk about its goal and how it came together
C: Well the goal of it is to raise awareness of music education in public schools. It came about from one of the label guys at 4AD in New York and he had a friend who was working at this amazing public school in New York and they were thinking of doing something new in music education. They asked us if we could come up with some ideas of contributing and that quickly led to the Efterkids project of us collaborating with the school kids and that's what you can see at the website (www.efterkids.com). There's two songs where we played our part, video recorded in Copenhagen, and it's two songs that include strings but we've left out the string parts and we've put up sheet music so students and teachers can download the sheet music and video and they can project the video of us playing and they can play along. We actually managed to play it twice live on stage with the kids which was an amazing experience for us.
S.I.R: I want to finish off with the latest thing on Efterklang's plate which is a great film collaboration with French filmmaker Vincent Moon called An Island. Tell us a bit about how that came about and what the project is all about.
C: It's basically a documentary about Efterklang and Vincent Moon going to an island for four days and performing and creating musical experiments around the island with the local people in its different locations. It's kind of this mixture between a music film and documentary so it leaves a good space for the experimental film aspects and the experimental music aspects of the film. The way we've chosen to air the film is through something we call private public screenings which basically allows people to screen the film at their home, so they can basically hold their own screening. At the moment there are about 230 screenings set around the world.
S.I.R: It's a very unique way of distributing and disseminating the word of the film in a very viral and social way.
C: Yeah and that will take place in February and March and we'll be able to bring the film with us on tour and screen it before the concerts.
S.I.R: Caspar thank you so much for taking out a part of your Saturday in Berlin and sitting and having a chat. It's been really great and lots of fun.
Check out these important Efterklang online destinations:
What seems like a lifetime ago, and before ascending to the level of don of all things digital marketing, social media, and web 2.0, Mitch Joel was a music journalist of note writing forHour Magazine, a Montreal based arts and culture weekly magazine. Given his consistent keen insights in the digital landscape, it's not surprising that Mitch also brought the same vim and vigor to his reviews and music journalism. In a recent phone interview, Mitch sat down with me to discuss the band Anthrax and their finest moment Among the Living and how it stood out from the pack of 80s metal excess and big hair and consequently bridged the chasm between hair metal and skate punk.
Also, on an editorial note, the format of the Sound, It Resoundsis slowly evolving to a more interview driven audio podcast format. Hopefully this will accomplish two things: Create a lively and engaging discussion with some really interesting people and secondly publish more consistent and regular features.
