Une Entrevue avec Karkwa

Ask most people in Canada about Quebec music and they’ll tell you it’s all about the Montreal scene. The Dears, The Stills, Patrick Watson, The Besnard Lakes, and Wolf Parade, not to mention Arcade Fire, who are now riding a wave of international success thanks to their recent Best Album Grammy. As such, it’s quite astonishing how much our country is immune from French-language Quebec bands.

In fairness, a language barrier is always a tough challenge to overcome. Perhaps for that very reason it’s even more astonishing that Montreal’s Karkwa are the most recent recipients of the prestigious Polaris Prize, awarded annually to the best Canadian album of the year based solely on artistic merit. Not only did Karkwa win for their 2010 release Les Chemins de verre (in English, The Glass Paths), but they are also the first French-language band to take the prize.

“It certainly wasn’t expected, and we were sure we weren’t going to win,” admits vocalist/guitarist Louis-Jean Cormier. “It means a lot to us, especially considering the amazing bands nominated who we respect a lot.” Cormier modestly went on to discuss how much of an honour it was just to be seated at the award ceremony in between Broken Social Scene and The Besnard Lakes, bands whose albums from 2010 represented two of the other nine shortlisted nominees.

Cormier is not unaware of how significant the award is for French-Canadian music. “We are in a sense representing the Francophone community, and it’s always really nice for French-language music to get this kind of exposure.”

Exposure which up until recently was almost non-existent. The recent explosion in the Montreal music scene seems to be extending to Francophone bands from English Canada’s perspective, if only slowly. Cormier attributes the recognition to the basic desire music fans have for simply wanting to find good music, in any shape or form. “There are music lovers everywhere, no matter the language spoken,” he noted. “I think the buzz with the Montreal music scene demonstrates how much the music communities of both languages are blending.” And, he explained, it means more music is becoming more accessible to more people.

“When you have a musical language, people will dance—the spoken language in the end doesn’t really matter,” he added. Such a nuanced statement says a lot more about the nature of music than perhaps Cormier even realizes. After all, what makes music so compelling to people is a song’s melody, not the lyrics. Sometimes it takes a foreign-language band to help us grasp that realization.

Karkwa's name is a phonetic play-on-words of the French word carquois, which means "quiver," as in a quiver of arrows (although, car could mean "because" depending on the context, and quoi usually means "what." How awesome would it be if the band's name could be translated as Because What?).

They have actually been around since 1998 and they’ve released four full-length albums since 2003. Cementing early on a strong presence within Quebec, it wasn’t until their third release, 2008’s Le Volume du vent (in English, The Volume of the Wind) that they started to penetrate the rest of Canada, and Europe too.

But with Les Chemins de verre, the band went for a new approach. The album has a more organic, almost improvisational sound to it than their previous works. It should then come as no surprise to learn that it was written and recorded in only three weeks. “We used to practice and prepare a lot for our previous albums, but this time we just booked a studio and created it live,” explained Cormier. “We did a song a day,” and picked the ones we liked the most, so “the album really sounds like more of a patchwork, spontaneous release.”

The approach for Les Chemins de verre was all about simplicity. Uncomplicated rhythms and melodies, minimal instrumentalizations and effects—the kind of results you get from writing songs almost in passing and on the spot.

The fleeting qualities of the songs, aside from contributing to the album’s unique sound, also explain why the band took in Paris as an unofficial sixth member: if you’re going to write an ephemeral album with little preproduction, it's naturally appropriate to surround yourself in the city's historical transience. “We were on tour. We were sleeping and living in the studio. We were isolated from our normal lives. We were in a creative mood far from home. It worked well!” Cormier exclaimed. Because what wouldn't for them?

Blinded by the Light

I interviewed Lights. Yeah. I know. Don’t worry. I got dis.

I wanted to be amiable. I wanted to be a guy to whom she could talk. I thought calling her Lights would have been too impersonal.

“Hi Valerie!”

“Hey, actually, I don’t go by that name anymore.” Light laughter.

Here I am talking to a beautiful girl, and I don’t even get her name right. Girls don’t like that.

Yes, that’s right, she legally changed her name about two years ago. And I thought Lights was just a stage name. I was totally blushing.

“I took the extra step to make that name my own,” she explains to me, insisting that I have nothing about which to be embarrassed (that’s what all the girls tell me). “I think it’s important to walk into everything that you do in your career with a full sense of commitment. My music comes from my soul, and it’s who I am.”

I wonder if her government IDs still have a surname on them. Do her parents call her Lights? So many questions. I didn’t prod.

The name change certainly reflects her passion, I’ll give her that much. The synth-pop indie songstress released a new song last month, “My Boots,” meant as a teaser preview of her still unfinished second full-length album that has a tentative release date of Spring 2011. With the exception of one new song that was featured on an acoustic EP released this past summer, “My Boots” is the first new material from Lights since her debut LP came out over a year ago.

“I wrote it this past winter when for the first time in a long time I saw winter looking beautiful. I was up in northern Ontario and staying in a forestry area and it was very serene. The scene inspired me to write a song that felt effortless. So many of the songs that I write are emotionally draining and end up being cathartic. Winter can be an amazing thing if you’re dressed properly, so the song is really nothing more than about putting on a pair of boots and establishing a really romantic relationship with winter.”

I told her the childlike nostalgia of the song made me feel as if it would make a good Robert Munsch story. He’s got a couple good winter ones after all, notably “Thomas’ Snowsuit” and “50 Below Zero.” She laughed: “I like that.” Good, I’m recovering nicely from the name mishap.

Despite that original setback, however, I think she appreciated my effort to be personable nonetheless. It is, after all, what she strives for herself. Although it’s becoming increasingly common and necessary for most bands and musicians to stay on top of the YouTube universe, Lights is proud to claim she always puts in extra effort. Lately she’s been posting several short videos as tour updates from her tour bus.

“I absolutely love doing it. It’s a way to stay in touch with my fans and for them to get a peek into what my touring life is like.”

When I suggested she serialize them, she laughed, lamenting that there’s just not enough time in the day.

“But I did do the Captain Lights YouTube videos after the release of my first album!” she was quick to remind me. Of course, how could I forget? "Audio Quest: A Captain Lights Adventure" was a series of short animated sci-fi videos, with Lights as an intergalactic action hero, out to defeat evil villains who are out to destroy her music. This girl’s kind of cool.

She’s going to have to revamp her MySpace approach, however. The website recently went through some renovations. Now when you click on a song on a musician's page, it tells you what other songs sound similar to it. I told Lights that according to MySpace, “My Boots” sounds similar to a song by The Devil Wears Prada, a post-hardcore metal band. Aside from the fact that about a year ago she was at one point in a relationship with that band’s drummer, and that she had toured with them I think at least once, I can’t figure out any connection.

“Neither can I,” she said while oscillating between being frustrated and laughing hysterically. “I’ll have to investigate. I certainly don’t want some of my younger fans to get confused.” I told her I was glad to be of service.

I ended things off by asking her about Twitter. “It’s funny you brought that up, because I’m just looking over my Twitter account at this very moment.”

Yeah, this girl always knows what’s on my mind.

Sweet and Salty

Salteens navigate through pop music dichotomies with the same approach they employ to interact with their everyday lives. But if music is reflective, more often than not it’s because of the realization that music comes from the everyday.

The Vancouver-based indie pop ten-piece band released their third full-length album, Grey Eyes, on Oct. 12, and the album was born out of thoughtful contemplation, not an impatient desire to write, record, release, and tour, merely for the selfish fulfillment of performing.

Grey Eyes is the band’s first LP in seven years, and to principle songwriter Scott Walker, it was all about finding the right moment (as opposed to passively waiting). “For a long time, too many things were conspiring against us, whether it be love, work, family, friendships, what have you. But eventually, everything that was going on in our lives we realized ended up really informing the album.” Life creates music, and music contextualizes life. To Salteens, navigating really means more of a balancing act.

The new album is a simple meditation on being positioned between the past and the future. Walker cathartically constructs Grey Eyes as a work that is harboured in the experiences of his past but for the purposes to help him map out days to come, and not just for him.

“I think the lie we’re all taught to believe throughout our youth is that society will take care of us, or that we can just passively live out our lives in the belief that everything will all fall into place someday so to speak,” Walker professed. “But everyone has to have responsibility for their actions, and the truth about life that too many of us learn too late is that you really have to live it actively.”

This balancing act is a critical aspect of Grey Eyes. Even though the album is didactic on the surface, it is cleansed of any politics. It is melancholic yet upbeat and hopeful. Sonically, it is both broody and cheerfully optimistic.

Drawing on failed relationships, death, and illness — indeed, a wide array of various elements that constitute the transition from young adulthood into mature adulthood — Walker’s outlet became Grey Eyes. The album feels despondent at its start, but it foreshadows the firm stance to move forward. Grey Eyes begins with destinations, but ends with arrivals. Over a soft piano, the album’s closer “Don’t Break My Heart” laments about being left alone, but the now wiser Walker says no matter, because he won’t be back.

“I’m always happily surprised how what I write always comes out as a coherent thought,” he said in regards to the album’s flow. “Because to me, the writing process is too fleeting and situational to plan out any sort of cohesiveness.” But an ephemeral outlook on his life through music is, in a way, ironically representative of his attitude to be more active in life. If what dictates life is fleeting, then reflective music is in turn naturally fleeting itself.

The sounds that emanate through Grey Eyes are pop on paper, but only in an indiscriminate way. In other words, you can’t really explain why it’s pop. The songs will either be identifiable through their radio-friendly, modern indie pop melodies or through their eclectic roots that resemble the likes of The Smiths, Bob Dylan, and even Queen (yes, “You Stayed Up With the Lights On” has a Freddie Mercury homage by way of a more modern sound, like The Format). But the classic pop inspirations are contextualized, either through grandiose orchestral-like sounds that, importantly, often come up at unexpected yet welcoming moments, or through sweeping key changes, the playful interaction between instruments, and the varied yet complementing shifts in atmosphere.

“I get really excited when I listen to music that I really like, and if it sparks something in me then it will likely stick around in the back of my mind, so that the music I write will resemble it in a way,” confessed Walker. “But then, of course, by the time I finish writing a song, I’ve made it into something that is completely my own.”

The songwriting process, too, starts off in the past, but ends looking somewhere quite different.

The Sound of Settling In

I began my afternoon adventure with Inlet Sound as the captivated spectator of a bedroom practice session. Preparing for a show at the Casbah in Hamilton for Sep. 26, the five-piece indie folk group made effective use of the cramped quarters, completely undeterred by protruding furniture and low ceilings. The intimacy was perfect, however. The energy signalled a rebirth in the band, and it emanated in each and every song.

It started off as a slow 2010 for the group. Vocalist and guitarist Michael Wexler and keyboardist Sean Hardy had been performing as a duo under Inlet Sound since early 2009, and began making a lot of headway across the province. But school and travel gradually impeded the built momentum, despite the release of a full-length self-titled album this past January.

“When the album was first released, promotion was tough to come by, and it had been a while since we were even able to play a show,” says Hardy. “But things really started opening up in the summer, and it felt like a new beginning for both the band and the album.”

Contacted by A&R reps from both Sony and Universal to play a large show show at Toronto’s Mod Club in August, the two seized the opportunity. Quickly added to the line-up was violinist and mandolinist Steven Gore, guitarist Ian Russell, and percussionist Matt Cramp to augment the band’s now more nuanced sound.

“It was definitely a turning point for us,” says Hardy of the show invitation. “It presented us the opportunity to really recreate our band, and now we can make great sounds that Mike and I wouldn’t have been able to do before.”

After the practice session, the group made a trip down to Cootes Paradise, instruments in hand, to play some songs and shoot some promotional videos and photos. In between the photo snapping and video recording, they played some songs for the pleasantly surprised passersby on the various bridges and paths of the nature preserve. The interactions between the guys certainly indicated a newfound energy within the band.

“Having Steven, Ian, and Matt in the band now really makes a lot of sense for us,” says Wexler. “It really falls in line with the philosophy that Sean and I had from the outset. We chose the band name for a reason: an inlet is a narrow place where rivers or creeks will meet. The idea of convergence has always been at the centre of our music.”

What each new member now brings to the table is distinct, yet the band is progressing as an organic whole. “It’s a funny thing,” Hardy remarks as we make a steep climb up a forestry hill in Cootes. “We each bring something different to the music now, but at the same time, we all like the unified direction we’re heading in.”

The members’ mix of styles and backgrounds really feeds off of the equally diverse album, and to Hardy, the correlation is both welcoming and fulfilling. “For us, there is as much of an importance and emphasis on the creative process itself as there is on the music or the message that we can impart.

“In regards to the album, I’ve honestly tried on many occasions to pin down some sort of concrete theme to it, but I don’t think there is one. To label it with a theme just wouldn’t feel right.”

The intimate experience with people that day at Cootes was an extension of the band’s overarching goal to make their music an interactive and personal endeavour, particularly in the environment out of which the band was born.

“It can certainly be a stressful balancing act sometimes. We’re all students who come from different places and have different backgrounds and varying priorities and obligations,” says Wexler on the conflicting interrelation between the band’s increasing popularity and their commitments as students. “But, simply put, if you love something enough, then you have to do it—there’s no compromise.”

Sweet Dreams

Inception
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, and Cillian Murphy
4/5 stars

The first rule you learn in Creative Writing 101 is to never end a story with “It was all a dream!” The development of Inception’s narrative leading up to its conclusion is too complicated for it to fall victim to this writing cliché. But then you start to wonder, with previous films such as Memento and Insomnia, how long will it take before writer/director Christopher Nolan finally exhausts all other alternatives? Maybe there will be a lot of upset people in a couple of years with Nolan’s upcoming follow-up to The Dark Knight, when they find out that Batman never really existed.

With Inception, Nolan is doing what he does best: taking a somewhat trite plot device or tired story concept and adding his own nuanced twist. He extrapolates from the dream cliché, creating a story that in itself blurs and fiercely questions the distinction between reality and dreams. Heck, the fact that he situated this concept into an action-heist narrative is a bonus at this point.

Just as he did with Memento (although with a vastly different approach), Inception is a textbook example of the difference between plot and story. Nolan achieves this distinction in Memento through chronology. With Inception he does it through degrees of complexity. The story is incredibly complex, but the general plot is entertainingly simple.

Leonardo DiCaprio is Dominic Cobb, an “extractor” who infiltrates the minds of others to steal ideas from their subconscious. Cobb and his partner Arthur, played by an increasingly likeable Joseph Gordon-Levitt, are hired by a businessman (Ken Watanabe) to do the unthinkable: enter the mind of rival businessman Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), not to steal an idea, but to implant a new one. It’s not extraction; it’s inception.

With the benefits outweighing the risks, Cobb accepts the assignment, and he and Arthur begin to recruit a ragtag team for the job, including someone to construct the dream world within Fischer’s mind. Cobb discovers a bright graduate student named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to be his architect, a job he is unable to do himself because of the traumatic memories which haunt his own dreams.

The film’s ingenuity arises from its seemingly clear transitions between realities and unrealities – transitions which garner increasing doubts as the film progresses, and which function under the guise of the heist-genre style of the plot.

Indeed, the film’s apparent lack of surrealism is what I originally found slightly frustrating about the narrative, considering so much of it takes place in dreamscape. The first half of the picture is devoted to the methodological planning of the inception, contextualized within a world where dream extraction not only goes unexplained, but also unquestioned. The visually stunning dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream inception operates within a relatively straightforward, action-movie formula. It features everything from a car chase in a rainy downtown metropolis, to a very intricate fight sequence in a hotel building, to a semi-militarized break-in at a snowy mountain fortress.

As much as I was impressed with the story’s concept and entertained by the plot’s structure and the film’s visual aspects, I couldn’t help but have a lot of questions. Why is Ariadne not the least bit suspicious when Cobb first explains the concept of being able to create and enter dream worlds inside others’ minds? Even Neo from The Matrix needed a lot of convincing upon his “I don’t believe it” response after learning the world he knew wasn’t really reality. It felt as though Page’s character was written as a mere superfluous device to move the plot along.

Aside from his recent collaborative history with Nolan, why is Michael Caine thrown into this movie for a mere five minutes of screen time to play a clearly expendable character?

Why is Nolan’s conceptualization of dreams as (un)reality so literal? What is significant about dream extraction and inception? How did it come about and why is it important? I can summarize all of these questions by asking, simply put, how did we get here?

But then, I realized in retrospect, Cobb rhetorically asks that same question on separate occasions to both Ariadne and Fischer in order to expose the dream worlds they’re in as unreality. Suddenly Cobb’s own back-story can be understood in a new light: all of the realities that are taken for granted throughout the film should come under question.

It is difficult to be critical of any transitory, fleeting, exuberant or inexplicable aspect of this film, therefore, if only because that’s what dreams are.

Students Hope to Paint the Town Purple

It’s two days before opening night, and Grant Winestock is five minutes late for my interview with him. I’m sitting on an outdoor bench at McMaster University, with my notebook and a coffee, nervously looking from left to right to see if anyone is approaching.

I don’t know what he looks like, but I gave him a pretty good description of myself: “I’ll be the guy sitting on the bench…with a notebook and a coffee.” I’m starting to wonder if I should’ve added more.

Suddenly an unshaven man in a dirty white T-shirt comes into view, frantically jogging from the nearby parking lot in my direction. I didn’t need to ask.

“I’ve never been this stressed before in my life. Writing exams at school is a walk in the park compared to what I’m going through this week,” he jokes in a voice that is anxious, excited and, well, dead, all at once.

The McMaster University student, along with Max Rose Begg Goodis, have written and will be directing the play Purple, which is set to be performed at this year’s Hamilton Fringe Festival from July 16-25.

The two first started writing the play over two years ago and finally got their opportunity to produce it at this year’s Fringe, Hamilton’s largest annual theatre festival. It’s a dark comedy that deals with issues of life, death, morality, and romance, all set in a fictional world that faces crises of mutant pigs, contaminated milk, and a destructive snow storm.

“It’s a dark, dark, dark comedy,” Winestock elaborates. “It’s funny at times, but it changes on a dime.” He was too noticeably tense and burdened for the rhyme to have been deliberate. His trembling hand might as well have been holding a fast-burning cigarette. “The play mostly deals with love and death, because really, those are the only two things that matter. I definitely didn’t want to fall victim to the student pitfall of writing a play about the life of a student. I live that shit; I don’t want to see it on stage.”

Purple features a cast and crew of mostly current or former McMaster students, so campus has become a hub of sorts for the group during this extremely stressful and busy week. It's also the reason I agreed to meet him on campus, for his own sanity. “We’ve been doing desperate last-minute rehearsals in lecture halls. We’ve got less than two days left and we’re still doing rewrites, building sets, everything. And because everyone has their own schedules, if we didn’t have campus as a central spot, we’d be done for.”

Indeed, Winestock looks up and says, “Oh, here’s Jimmy, our sound guy.” Jimmy walks by, not even knowing that Grant would be there giving an interview. Well-trimmed, thick dark beard; heavy glasses; gelled hair; stocky but not overweight stature; slightly below average height; unpretentious dark wardrobe. He looked like my my non-existent older brother if I were a character in a '90s teen movie. “I’ve only been working on this project for a little while now,” says Jimmy Skembaris. “I think they had issues with their last sound guy, so there’s still lots of stuff I’m trying to figure out. But to be honest, I think despite the problems, sound is the least of Grant and Max’s concerns,” he jokes.

Grant didn’t have a response, as he was busy giving instructions to his girlfriend and brother, both cast members, who had also just walked by: “Quickly, go down to the copy shop before it closes and get these promos done.” He then started apologizing to me for Goodis’s absence, saying she really wanted to be there for the interview but that she got caught up at home making a prop of a paper-mâché three-headed purple pig.

I started to feel as if I was intruding, taking precious time away from Winestock as he had only a day and a half to finish doing about a month’s work of preparation.

But he was confident that in the end, it would all work out. “I’ve been in this situation before, as an actor and not a director mind you, in which there is absolute chaos literally right up until the 11th hour. But as soon as the curtain goes up, everything somehow always magically works out.

“Having been involved so much with theatre over the years, doing it is at the end of the day just a lot of fun.”

I didn’t even bother asking him if the play’s mutant pig was also going to have wings. I was afraid of the answer.

For further information, including show times, visit www.hamiltonfringe.ca.

This Trench is Deeper Than it Looks

There’s a plethora of surprises at the bottom of Marianas Trench once you dive underneath the surface (no, not the ocean floor). In regards to genre categorization, this Vancouver quartet might as well be the pop-punk equivalent of yesteryear’s emo kid: once you get to know the real him, turns out he’s just a misunderstood, complex guy.

“Sure, sometimes you get classified as pop-punk, rock, whatever, but I think the nice thing about the record is that, yeah, it appeals to the masses through the radio and stuff,” guitarist Matt Webb explained to me, “but if you take a closer listen to it there’s a lot to hear, and if you read in between the lines, there’s a lot more to it than just a pop band.”

Indeed, last year’s Masterpiece Theatre features the pop-punk anthems “Cross My Heart” and “All to Myself” that we’re all so familiar with thanks to constant media exposure over the past several months, but the band also wanted to up the ante and challenge themselves conceptually and sonically. The album’s backbone is structured by three separate title tracks—the opener, the interlude, and the closer—that mesh together The Black Parade, The Crickets, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and Pet Sounds.

You can even hear some of these experimental flairs creep into some of the album’s more traditional pop-punk songs. I told Matt that the opening vocal melody to the band’s latest single, “Celebrity Status,” immediately reminded me of The Beach Boys. “Beach Boys are a huge influence to the band,” he responded. “You know, in the bridge of that song, the ‘look around round’ part, it’s very unusual, like you never hear any other rock/pop band do that kind of stuff. And the fans appreciate that because it’s something a little bit different and we’re working hard at it.”

Making meaningful connections with their fans is certainly no alien concept to Marianas Trench. Widely known for personally creating and orchestrating many grassroots-styled contests and promotional events, such as Marianas Trench Day and fan t-shirt designs, the band recently invited fans to post video performances of the song “Good to You” onto YouTube, and the winner will perform a duet of the song with the band on stage for their Toronto show at Massey Hall tonight.

“We put that contest out there and we have crazy awesome fans that’ll go to great lengths to do anything for us, which is amazing,” Matt commented. “It’s important to interact with the fans. They have done amazing things for us and we like to make them as involved as possible. People know that we’re just normal dudes, and we’re always looking for advice and feedback from the fans.”

The band’s concert in Toronto tonight is part of Canadian Music Week, which will feature over 700 shows during the weekend in 45 venues throughout the city. There will also be several award ceremonies, and Marianas Trench has been nominated for three Indie Awards, as well as the Canadian Radio Music Fans’ Choice Award, up against Hedley and Nickelback, among others.

I’m personally hoping for a heated battle to the death between Marianas Trench and Hedley, so I inquired about maybe starting a rivalry with Hedley. “Oh, that’s existed for years, my man,” Matt joked. “I actually used to live across the street from Dave Rosin, their guitar player, so we’re all really good buddies. I’m sure there’s a little bit of a rivalry there, of course; but those guys are good guys, and we always have a lot of fun hanging out with them.” Ah yes, the old friendly rivalry. Those aren’t nearly as exciting as hate-filled rivalries, but, I’ll take what I can get.

Right now, Marianas Trench is focused on touring as much as they can in support of Masterpiece Theatre, and they hope to be back in the studio sometime next year. Although, following up a pocket symphony album is never an easy task. “I think the record is pretty impressive, and it’s going to be tough to follow it up for sure,” Matt admitted. “But I think every band should evolve to a certain extent. You know, your fans grow up and you grow up; we’re not going to be writing the same songs a year from now as we were from before.”

I recommended to him they pull an In Utero and write an album with all double-time songs. “Yeah that’s not a bad idea,” he responded, completely straight-faced. “We considered doing like a trombone record, where it’s just all going to be trombones.” A small part of me doesn’t think he’s joking.