"You should come see my other band," Richard Reed Parry of the Arcade Fire told me in 2003, before Bell Orchestre played one of its first public shows in Montreal that didn't involve soundtrack work for a choreographer. When pressed for a cursory description, he seemed slightly pained but nonetheless had one at the tip of the tongue: "It's like Aphex Twin meets Rachel's." Being the charismatic gentleman with impeccable taste that he is, he had me at hello; nonetheless, I was immediately smitten with Bell Orchestre's live show, and have been a huge fan ever since.
Six years later, Bell Orchestre isn't just the "other band" for he and violinist Sarah Neufeld, and nor is it easily reduced to quick comparison points. It's a vibrant, challenging and exquisite ensemble that takes its acoustic instrumentation and creates otherworldly colours; every player has equal footing in pop music (very loosely defined) and experimental sound art, and even their most abstract moments still have a strong melodic or rhythmic underpinning that ties everything together. It's also very Montreal: modern composition and textures with Old World tools.
Their 2006 debut Recording a Tape the Colour of Light was lovely, if not a tad formulaic; many songs featured whole-note brass melodies over top eighth-note strings. I had this to say at the time, in a year-end blurb for Exclaim:
Inside the club are propulsive rhythms with stately ceremonial horns, a driving string section, and a dextrous percussionist who can cut up a beat, slip into disco or tap out on a typewriter. Outside the club is an icy ambience, with submerged pianos, broken bells and lonely brass, washed upon the shore with waves of subterranean traffic. Sometimes if you leave the door open between the two worlds, they miraculously all bleed into one. If Bjork and Eno raised children in the Canadian snowbelt, this is the glorious music they’d create.
The new album, As Seen Through Windows, steps up their game on every level. Sonically, the help of engineer John McEntire finds them creating new and vivid textures, often driven by distortion. Compositionally, they embark on not so much left turns as they do a linear journey; there's very little repetition here; you can hear the band pushing themselves at each step, never settling for easy answers. They also added new members Colin Stetson on saxophones and Montreal MVP Mike Feuerstack (Snailhouse) on guitar.
They have live dates this week:
Saturday, April 18 at First Baptist Church in Ottawa
Sunday, April 19 at La Tulipe in Montreal
Thursday, April 23 at Starlight Lounge in Waterloo
Friday, April 24 at Courthouse in Toronto
Saturday, April 25 at Casbah in Hamilton
Dates in New York, London and Paris follow.
The following interview was conducted for this short piece in Exclaim. Here is a piece I wrote about their first album.
Bell Orchestre: Richard Reed Parry and Mike Feuerstack
February 6, 2009
Locale: Arts and Crafts office
Why on earth would you want a guitar player in the band?
R: (silence, grinning)
M: Who’s the guitar player? I’m a musician. I play lap steel.
The band has expanded by two. Listening to the record, though, I feel like I hear more string parts than I do guitar or horns. When you were adding people to the band, was it a question of adding the most talented and lovely people you know, or the fact that you specifically wanted lap steel and bass saxophone?
R: It wasn’t out of need.
M: It was definitely the former.
R: Mike helped write and played on one song on the first record, and then he would play on a few songs live, and eventually more than that. Then we started writing, and he was as much of a key voice as anything else. Personality-wise, we toured together, and that sealed it.
When were you no longer a contractor?
M: During the beginnings of talking about this record, which I think was two years ago. But there’s been no reason to discuss it with anyone outside the band until now. It also came up when we started recording the first sessions, whether they wanted to bother to fly me out to Chicago or not.
When were the McIntyre sessions?
R: It started two Novembers ago. I’m realizing more and more that how I work personally has a big impact on how this band does things, for better or worse. I need to take a long time to do things. Having made two of these records now, I can see that this was kind of the same process. We recorded initially in a big chunk, and it had to sit a while, and I had to listen to it and think it was crappy and then think of a long list of ways to make it better. Then we go back and record that laundry list of stuff.
Right off the top there’s that extremely distorted French horn to prepare you for that. There’s one sound here that I associate specifically with this band, which is what you hear at the beginning of “Water Light Shifts.” It sounds like it could be a heavily reverbed gamelan. It’s also a sound heard on Recording a Tape. What is it?
R: That is a sampled glockenspiel played back onto an old Dictaphone. It’s the exact same sound that was on Recording a Tape.
I feel like there is less clear delineation on this album, in terms of lead players and tonalities and timbres. A lot of the time I’m not sure who’s playing what at all.
M: I think there are people in the band who would say the same thing.
There are a lot of synths that sound like trumpets…
R: Actually, no synths. Not one. We should have made a note of that.
Some stuff sounds like old Arps.
R: That’s a trick of the hand. Many things are heavily effected, especially horns, but everything, really. That was another goal of this record, was to aesthetically push it all the time. We all agreed on that from the beginning. We didn’t want it to sound like anything else, to just be another record that exists.
M: To not be shy of extreme ideas.
R: That was another goal for this record, that the whole thing would constantly be surprising you, not repeating itself and not sounding like itself, in a weird way. I wanted there to be many overlapping different-sounding things that keep turning corners. It all sounded like one sound world, but many separate things inside of that. Many different places, if you will.
It’s not a lazy record.
R: No!
Could you make a lazy record?
M: I don’t think so.
R: I think we’d make a dance record first.
That could mean many things considering your history.
M: So could a lazy record.
R: Music to dance to.
M: Club dancing could be a part of it.
R: What I was thinking about the other day was the Bach cello suites, which are all dance pieces. Each movement is a dance. It doesn’t make you want to dance, but it flows in this amazing way. There’s a totally different essence to each movement, but it’s so clearly part of a larger body of work. I can imagine us trying to do something like that—though it would be a lot more spastic and all over the place.
If the goal of this record is to keep turning corners, is there a narrative or a through line here?
R: Not narrative. The idea that came up a lot was weather systems, and shifting and fading in and out of each other, and something transforming into a different version of itself; things colliding and rubbing up against each other and having friction. Something unidentifiable and elemental.
What did you learn from working with John McIntyre?
R: On a technical level, I feel like the musical lesson is to make things the way you want them to be in the moment that you’re doing them. Traditionally, there’s been this idea that, ‘I don’t like this but I’m going to do it and hopefully later it will somehow become good.’ That made me mental on this record, because I end up doing 99 per cent of the overdubs.
M: If there was something we wanted treated, John would do it immediately. He wouldn’t say, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that in the mix.’ He would run it through a reel-to-reel player in the studio. He would add things at the ready and he knew what the effect would be. It wasn’t a time-waster; he was just able to show us the options quickly.
R: That first piece with the super-distorted horn was all done live. There’s no effects added in the mix. That was really exciting, to make something really red [level] and frame it and have it done immediately.
All that runs against the prevailing attitude of the digital era, which is: “fix it in the mix.”
R: For me, on a recording, on a musical craft level, that’s the opposite of what this record is. Make what you want to make with the time you’re making it. Otherwise someone will be cursing you, trying to make something good out of what you’ve done much later, at two in the morning. And that’s about my own process as well; I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’ll probably do.’ When really there’s just right and wrong.
I’m curious about your Baltic experience.
R: Best tour ever.
Why did you go? Were you invited or did you throw a dart at a map?
R: I met this awesome radio journalist lady named Audra on an Arcade Fire tour. She wrote to the Bell Orchestre and said she was coming to see Arcade Fire and wanted to interview someone about Bell Orchestre. During the interview she asked us, ‘Why don’t you people ever come to the Baltics?’ She was born and raised there and worked there. We didn’t have an answer, other than, ‘Well, if someone invited us, we’d do it in a heartbeat.’ She’d never booked a show or anything before, but she told us she’d do it. Two months later she emailed us with a plan, with details about grants and cultural festivals in Lithuania. We played Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as official Canadian cultural ambassadors.
What did you see and learn about local music there?
M: We weren’t lucky enough to meet any musicians or see much music. For the most part there weren’t opening acts.
I thought the gigs were at festivals.
R: They were more like conferences. Lots of talking.
M: But we did meet a lot of people, and we were lucky to see how excited they were about our music. It was a very different experience than touring North America.
This is a broad generalization, but is there something about your music that translates better to a European experience?
R: There seems to be a real eagerness to listen. People really want to listen to what you have to bring to them. They’re excited to experience things through music. That happens everywhere to an extent, but more so there. People are interested in these things to the point where Audra, who is not a show promoter, told us that she didn’t have to advertise—all she had to do was tell three people, and they’ll tell everyone else. Soon our record was being played on the jazz station, the classical station and the rock station and the college stations. We showed up in a city where we’ve never been before, with no ads, and we played a puppet theatre with an audience of all ages—from really young people to really old—and everyone is really stoked and listening hard.
Do you think that the elements of classical music or sound art translate better there? Or anything else specific?
R: Hard to say.
M: It felt like a folk music connection, more than anything else. In a more visceral, emotive way rather than a high-brow way.
R: There’s a lot of discussion of music and ideas there, and it’s talked about by everybody.
M: It’s an intellectual experience, but not a high brow thing—people are just interested in talking about it, whether they know much about it or not.
R: Non-academics having intellectual discussions.
M: Not even crazy music fans necessarily.
Anything else we should know?
R: There’s more where this record came from. And we’re really proud of it. Seriously. We all feel that it’s unique.
M: And the shows will be great.
Showing posts with label Mike Feuerstack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Feuerstack. Show all posts
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Friday, November 03, 2006
College Mucous Journey
This year just seems sad. In the rushed pursuit to become the latest indie buzz band, no doubt some playful innocence has been lost. And in my not-so-rushed pursuit to be 35, I have no doubt that some of my innocence is long gone as well. After five CMJs in the last seven years, even New York City itself seems old hat to me--the greatest city in the world rendered mundane. The thrill of biking across the Williamsburg bridge is even gone. (There’s a terrifying tale to be told there, for another day.)
Tuesday night began with a misguided attempt to catch the Halloween Parade, something I caught traces of during my first trip here in 1999 and vowed to return to. Instead, thousands of people were crushed into a few blocks around Washington Square Park, creating a truly terrifying situation for anyone with untied shoelaces or—God forbid—a small child.
Thanks to the desired venue being on the other side of the parade in the west end, my plans to see high school hero Suzanne Vega were thwarted; she was one of many artists who first implanted romantic notions of New York City in me through music. Opening for her was my favourite MOR artist of late, Keren Ann, an Israeli/Parisian immigrant to New York whose 2005 album Nolita synthesized many of my favourite moody females (Vega, Cowboy Junkies, Anna Domino, Mazzy Starr), not to mention a similar nostalgia for impressions of 1980s NYC.
No matter—I missed them both, so it was off to Tonic to see So Percussion, whom I missed when they opened for Matmos in Toronto. Unfortunately, the dance venue in Tonic’s basement too often overshadowed the (extremely) subtle intricacies of So Percussion’s minimal bowed vibraphone compositions, to say nothing of their crinkling sticks. Not that the crowd noticed: they applauded the five minutes of ambient drone that happened while the band was still doing a line check.
I had hoped to catch a bit of the JDub night at Mo Pitkin’s after that, but Golem had cancelled and I had just missed the Luminescent Orchestrii. Instead, I got the Israeli band Nanuchka, led by a radiant woman with rock star lips, ready-whipped long hair, and powerful pipes. Even though the guitarist suggested a Shadowy Men move to the Mediterranean, not much of the band’s material made much of an impression. A final bid for the evening to see Sigur Ros associates Amiina at Joe’s Pub found the gig sold out.
Wednesday began at the Canal Room, where I hoped to catch both Beans and Mike Ladd on a bill with no discernible set times. I arrived while Beans had three songs left, ably backed by friends in Holy Fuck—a band whose career was kickstarted after only a few gigs when Beans discovered them and brought them to Coachella for their debut as his backing band.
What followed was sure to win this year’s Diamond Nights award (explanation to follow) for the most baffling set of the week. In this case, Vic Thrill consisted of two men entirely too old to act this ridiculous: one playing guitar, the other punching up the beats on his obviously recently acquired laptop while attempting to rock out on his guitar and whip around the clunky silver monstrosity wrapped around his neck. It was your worst nightmare of They Might Be Giants’ rockier older brothers—with none of the musicianship, mastery of melody, or absurdist wit. Oh, Vic Thrill are absurd all right, but they themselves don’t even know the half of it. Nonetheless, some misguided miscreants felt obliged to dance at the front, and some even more questionable types with pencils and pads jotted notes at the back. Nobody booed—instead, someone let off a post-Halloween stink bomb that spoke volumes. Later research turned up the odd fact that sexiest smart girl Tina Fey is working on a movie about this band--wtf??!!
A beautiful bike ride up through west Greenwich Village took me to the Absolutely Kosher showcase at R&R in the meatpacking district. The Affair is the label’s latest signing, boasting a compelling frontwoman who channels Debbie Harry’s drawl with considerably more passion, while the keyboards and guitar wrestle each other for the forefront of the band’s sound. They have one great song in them—but the rest of the set showed they’re a bit too quick to succumb to that formula. Hopefully their debut album in January shows a bit more diversity, but they're off to a great start. Get Him Eat Him followed that, and despite their great name—which practically invites heckling—this was simply college rock by numbers.
Over in Brooklyn at Northsix, the Late B.P. Helium sounded less like their Elephant 6 neighbours in Athens, GA then they did like terrible post-Happy Mondays British atrocities like The Music. Dreadfully dull, and the sparse crowd couldn’t be bothered to get worked up about it. Downstairs, MC Trachiotomy was a no-show, much to the mystification of organizers and other bands on the bill. It was an all-too-fitting ending to a disappointing evening.
Thursday night started out much better with the Thrill Jockey night at Tonic. Angela Desveaux and her band drove down from Montreal for a few hours, just to play the show and turn right back around, but they certainly weren’t punching the clock during their set. Playing borrowed instruments and going without a sound check, they didn’t have to do anything but plug in before they captured much of the magic heard on her Thrill Jockey debut, Wandering Eyes. Well-seasoned (and tasty!) guitarist Mike Feuerstack is a fine foil for Desveaux’s comfortable yet understated stage presence; his dry wit, note-perfect low harmonies and guitar leads coloured songs that can just as easily stand on their own. Desveaux’s voice is the perfect embodiment of heartache, and she sounds entirely natural: these notes just come to her, with no affectation or seeming sign of effort. Calls for duets and harmonies are sure to be pouring in the more people hear her record. The set was bolstered by several surprises: a cover of Gene McLellan (the “Nova Scotia legend” who wrote “Snowbird”) and Paul McCartney (“Roll With It”) as well as a hard-driving new song and a version of a Snailhouse song where Feuerstack sang lead. Comic highlight: bassist Eric admitting he belched in Angela’s face while she was tuning; Feuerstack responded by assuring the crowd, “In Canada, that means ‘I love you.’”
Other trivia: finally met the lovely and ageless Bettina Richards, aka Ms Thrill Jockey, who I embarassingly mistook for a random merch girl while buying a copy of Looking For a Thrill. Ouch! Apparently Feuerstack slipped her some Snailhouse and/or Wooden Stars recordings; let's keep our fingers crossed. He also introduced me to Desveaux, whom I interviewed over the phone for a piece in Exclaim that I was truly embarassed by (what's up with that first quote?)--so much so that I didn't bother making that connection for her when we met.
They were followed by Pit er Pat, who sounded like what I always wanted Blonde Redhead to be. The singer is dry, her keyboard lines sparse and the songs are slight, but it’s the drummer here who glues everything together with a melodic jazz approach to his electro-acoustic percussion. Even better: said drummer's name is Butchy Fuego. How cool is that? Of, if it's true, how cool was his mom? What could have become too mannered too quickly instead was a joy to hear live; how that translates to an album I have yet to experience.
Arboretum followed, but didn’t seem that different from any other rock band who recently decided to try their hand at being psychedelic. That was going down at the Knitting Factory, where (I believe it was) Moon and Moon featured an acid burnout (not, as rumoured, Devendra Banhart) fronting three percussionists, three keyboardists and a bassist making shockingly listenable hippie jams. I only caught one song before catching the PATH train to New Jersey; today was an early drive because the 5th annual Canadian-Brooklyn Brunch starts in a mere few hours!
More to come…
Tuesday night began with a misguided attempt to catch the Halloween Parade, something I caught traces of during my first trip here in 1999 and vowed to return to. Instead, thousands of people were crushed into a few blocks around Washington Square Park, creating a truly terrifying situation for anyone with untied shoelaces or—God forbid—a small child.
Thanks to the desired venue being on the other side of the parade in the west end, my plans to see high school hero Suzanne Vega were thwarted; she was one of many artists who first implanted romantic notions of New York City in me through music. Opening for her was my favourite MOR artist of late, Keren Ann, an Israeli/Parisian immigrant to New York whose 2005 album Nolita synthesized many of my favourite moody females (Vega, Cowboy Junkies, Anna Domino, Mazzy Starr), not to mention a similar nostalgia for impressions of 1980s NYC.
No matter—I missed them both, so it was off to Tonic to see So Percussion, whom I missed when they opened for Matmos in Toronto. Unfortunately, the dance venue in Tonic’s basement too often overshadowed the (extremely) subtle intricacies of So Percussion’s minimal bowed vibraphone compositions, to say nothing of their crinkling sticks. Not that the crowd noticed: they applauded the five minutes of ambient drone that happened while the band was still doing a line check.
I had hoped to catch a bit of the JDub night at Mo Pitkin’s after that, but Golem had cancelled and I had just missed the Luminescent Orchestrii. Instead, I got the Israeli band Nanuchka, led by a radiant woman with rock star lips, ready-whipped long hair, and powerful pipes. Even though the guitarist suggested a Shadowy Men move to the Mediterranean, not much of the band’s material made much of an impression. A final bid for the evening to see Sigur Ros associates Amiina at Joe’s Pub found the gig sold out.
Wednesday began at the Canal Room, where I hoped to catch both Beans and Mike Ladd on a bill with no discernible set times. I arrived while Beans had three songs left, ably backed by friends in Holy Fuck—a band whose career was kickstarted after only a few gigs when Beans discovered them and brought them to Coachella for their debut as his backing band.
What followed was sure to win this year’s Diamond Nights award (explanation to follow) for the most baffling set of the week. In this case, Vic Thrill consisted of two men entirely too old to act this ridiculous: one playing guitar, the other punching up the beats on his obviously recently acquired laptop while attempting to rock out on his guitar and whip around the clunky silver monstrosity wrapped around his neck. It was your worst nightmare of They Might Be Giants’ rockier older brothers—with none of the musicianship, mastery of melody, or absurdist wit. Oh, Vic Thrill are absurd all right, but they themselves don’t even know the half of it. Nonetheless, some misguided miscreants felt obliged to dance at the front, and some even more questionable types with pencils and pads jotted notes at the back. Nobody booed—instead, someone let off a post-Halloween stink bomb that spoke volumes. Later research turned up the odd fact that sexiest smart girl Tina Fey is working on a movie about this band--wtf??!!
A beautiful bike ride up through west Greenwich Village took me to the Absolutely Kosher showcase at R&R in the meatpacking district. The Affair is the label’s latest signing, boasting a compelling frontwoman who channels Debbie Harry’s drawl with considerably more passion, while the keyboards and guitar wrestle each other for the forefront of the band’s sound. They have one great song in them—but the rest of the set showed they’re a bit too quick to succumb to that formula. Hopefully their debut album in January shows a bit more diversity, but they're off to a great start. Get Him Eat Him followed that, and despite their great name—which practically invites heckling—this was simply college rock by numbers.
Over in Brooklyn at Northsix, the Late B.P. Helium sounded less like their Elephant 6 neighbours in Athens, GA then they did like terrible post-Happy Mondays British atrocities like The Music. Dreadfully dull, and the sparse crowd couldn’t be bothered to get worked up about it. Downstairs, MC Trachiotomy was a no-show, much to the mystification of organizers and other bands on the bill. It was an all-too-fitting ending to a disappointing evening.
Thursday night started out much better with the Thrill Jockey night at Tonic. Angela Desveaux and her band drove down from Montreal for a few hours, just to play the show and turn right back around, but they certainly weren’t punching the clock during their set. Playing borrowed instruments and going without a sound check, they didn’t have to do anything but plug in before they captured much of the magic heard on her Thrill Jockey debut, Wandering Eyes. Well-seasoned (and tasty!) guitarist Mike Feuerstack is a fine foil for Desveaux’s comfortable yet understated stage presence; his dry wit, note-perfect low harmonies and guitar leads coloured songs that can just as easily stand on their own. Desveaux’s voice is the perfect embodiment of heartache, and she sounds entirely natural: these notes just come to her, with no affectation or seeming sign of effort. Calls for duets and harmonies are sure to be pouring in the more people hear her record. The set was bolstered by several surprises: a cover of Gene McLellan (the “Nova Scotia legend” who wrote “Snowbird”) and Paul McCartney (“Roll With It”) as well as a hard-driving new song and a version of a Snailhouse song where Feuerstack sang lead. Comic highlight: bassist Eric admitting he belched in Angela’s face while she was tuning; Feuerstack responded by assuring the crowd, “In Canada, that means ‘I love you.’”
Other trivia: finally met the lovely and ageless Bettina Richards, aka Ms Thrill Jockey, who I embarassingly mistook for a random merch girl while buying a copy of Looking For a Thrill. Ouch! Apparently Feuerstack slipped her some Snailhouse and/or Wooden Stars recordings; let's keep our fingers crossed. He also introduced me to Desveaux, whom I interviewed over the phone for a piece in Exclaim that I was truly embarassed by (what's up with that first quote?)--so much so that I didn't bother making that connection for her when we met.
They were followed by Pit er Pat, who sounded like what I always wanted Blonde Redhead to be. The singer is dry, her keyboard lines sparse and the songs are slight, but it’s the drummer here who glues everything together with a melodic jazz approach to his electro-acoustic percussion. Even better: said drummer's name is Butchy Fuego. How cool is that? Of, if it's true, how cool was his mom? What could have become too mannered too quickly instead was a joy to hear live; how that translates to an album I have yet to experience.
Arboretum followed, but didn’t seem that different from any other rock band who recently decided to try their hand at being psychedelic. That was going down at the Knitting Factory, where (I believe it was) Moon and Moon featured an acid burnout (not, as rumoured, Devendra Banhart) fronting three percussionists, three keyboardists and a bassist making shockingly listenable hippie jams. I only caught one song before catching the PATH train to New Jersey; today was an early drive because the 5th annual Canadian-Brooklyn Brunch starts in a mere few hours!
More to come…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)