Handsome Furs + Scott Coffey = Sound Kapital’s insurgent, antithetical go-go dancer

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Handsome Furs: Sound Kapital [June/2011] — NOTHING GRABS OUR attention, or holds onto it, like bare skin. The desire to see other humans naked does all sorts of crazy things to our brains. Horniness, obviously. It easily overpowers other chemical reactions, especially melatonin uptake. It can also be the root of more complicated emotional states: shame, trepidation, awkwardness, megalomania, ecstasy, transcendence, addiction, love.  

This need can end up off-kilter in a culture where porn is viewed as deviant, yet it’s consumed as rampantly and unapologetically as Big Macs. Given the sheer number of times we get flashed by idealized nudity in our lives, and the enormous, enigmatic cultural carrot of sex as a marketing tool, we end up with a lot of images and ideas that don’t necessarily produce healthy perspectives about the human body. Alexei Perry, one half of the Handsome Furs (the other is her husband Dan Boeckner), is not one of those people: “I love nakedness. I wish I could see everyone naked. Nudity is appealing to me for its obvious sexiness, but even more so for its rawness and honesty. It unnerves and excites me and makes me want to know more.” 

As well as kicking ass on keyboards for the duo’s third full-length release, Perry selected the Sound Kapital cover image, and she art directed and produced all the packaging layouts. She had a handful of artists she loves giving her great material to choose from, she ruminated, she weighed her options and advice, and in the end she couldn’t resist. Provocative, yes, but her reasons are also wise and heartfelt. 

“I find especially female nudity and sexuality is often used in ways that I don’t identify with,” Perry explains via email. “Mainstream pop divas are exploited with their suggestive cupcake bras and lollipop-sucking lips and school girl uniforms and cat suits, and I find most of that type of sex very superficial and unreal and, for most of us, demeaning and unattainable. In music videos and album art there is also the exploitative use of body parts. Girls’ heads are cropped off but their tits and asses are used to be cheeky and scandalous. I have even seen artsy contemporaries of ours obscure women’s faces with balloons and tribal masks. I like things that are suggestive and scandalous, but I’m also a feminist and I’m not a dummy or a prude, so I find most of the ways nudity is usually used either very tame and boring, or superficial and unrelateable.”

So why was this naked woman, photographed under an overpass in Portland, Oregon, a good emblem for this group of songs? “For her utter humanness. Despite everything around her, she is trying to get her sexy, absurd and confusing motivations across.”

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The cover image was created by film director, producer, writer and actor Scott Coffey, a good friend of the band’s and an artist whom Perry obviously admires to pieces: “Scott is a genius. He is dark and moody, but also full of light and sex. I love his brain and I love his heart.”

It was actually one of the first stills that Coffey sent to Perry and Boeckner while developing a video concept to accompany the song “What About Us,” off of Sound Kapital. As he tells it (over the phone from L.A.), this was also the first idea that popped into his head while trying to come up with something. But not just any naked, tattooed girl; he had someone specific in mind. The woman in the photo is a friend of Coffey’s, whom he’d worked with previously on a beer company ad in which she disrobed and dove into a lake. 

“So I knew she was uninhibited, and I knew she trusted me, and she certainly isn’t an exhibitionist in any way, and not an actress, but she’s really interesting and she’s also a photographer and an artist, so I knew she’d be game,” explains Coffey. “There is something really strong about her, really grounded and rooted. She’s fiercely intelligent, and really aware and interested and curious. She’s kind of brilliant. There was something about working with her in an intellectual way that seemed really unexploitive. I definitely wanted it to be sexy, but I didn’t want it to feel like a cliché idea of what men think sexy is. That was really important to me. And I knew she would have her own interesting take on the cliched idea of a sexy, naked, go-go dancer on top of a car. I feel like that’s something we’ve seen a lot, it’s familiar. It was important that she brought herself to it, and I knew she would.” 

All this was spawned by very open minded and flexible input from the band. Having gleefully collaborated with Coffey previously on the zombie horror video for “I’m Confused” (from 2009’s Face Control), they were content to let him hatch a concept and have a say in which song would be best to work with, with the caveat that the idea needed a sexual component to it. “We weren’t really sure what that meant,” admits Coffey, but “What About Us” emerged as a great fit for articulating it. 

Handsome Furs - What About Us (uncensored) from Kyn on Vimeo.

Aside from time and money, Perry describes their collaborative challenges as intellectual ones: “We wanted to make something meaningful. Perhaps absurd and dark, but also tender.”

Coffey, Perry and Boeckner spent a few intense days driving around Portland, improvising scenes and brainstorming ways to achieve this sensibility. Coffey brought the idea to begin with a hitchhiking girl, “and it would evolve into something that seemed narrative, that felt like a story, but I also didn’t want it to be literal. So a lot of the time when we were shooting, even though I had a really solid structure and foundation in my head about what I wanted to shoot that night or that day, it was specific but it wasn’t regimented. This is the first time I’ve ever done that, where I was going to play around with some stuff and experiment and then see what happened in editing. It was a really big leap of faith on my part, because I’ve always been super planned and told more narrative stories. And I wanted to do something that was poetic and non-linear, because I didn’t want it to detract from the song.”

Capturing intimacy was one of Coffey’s structural anchors. “I wanted the nudity in it to feel like skin, like flesh that sweats and has a smell to it and a feel to it. And the amount of intimacy in the video, especially between Dan and Alexei, is really real and great, and I don’t think you see that a lot in sexualized art. It’s always very titillating and idealized. It was really important that we sort of did the opposite of pornography, with emotion and intimacy in it. We talked a little bit about that specifically. It was something I was really careful about doing, because I didn’t want it to just be a bunch of people fucking.” 

Instead, Coffey wanted to enhance the sexuality with a threat, or at least the atmosphere of one. “I didn’t want it to feel violent, but I wanted a slight, ominous, eerie threat to it. And I think that’s sort of sexy, and the song has it a little bit. The song has this sort of melancholy longing, but at the same time it has this kind of predator dance vibe, and I was thinking a lot about what I could do visually that would do both those things. Something kind of gentle, but also weird and scary and disturbing a little bit, an unsettledness about it. It’s not quite comfortable, but it’s still carnal.” 

He refers to the shot of a naked man with his shirt pulled over his head, and another with two nude bodies rolling around on a lawn at night. (Those bodies actually belong to Coffey and his boyfriend.) You can also see what he’s talking about in the way the hitchhiker kicks at the car windows, as though she could either be fucking or trying to escape. Or, eerier still, the long sequence inside a motel room (shot with a crew of five) where a portrait of Perry on the wall ends up flipped to show the back of her head, suggesting a dark, fragmentary, Lynchian dimension.

Handsome Furs “I’m Confused” from Grow Film Company on Vimeo.

This freewheeling, mood-chasing approach to scripting and shooting “What About Us” worked because of what Coffey describes as his “very weird kismet or synchronicity with those dudes. It’s inexplicable and I can’t really put it in words, but we have a really similar sensibility about things.”

Coffey says this first became evident when they were working on the “I’m Confused” video together. “I’d never met them, never spoken to them, and I just had the idea that it would be a zombie video, based on nothing other than listening to the song. They were so into it, and as we started hanging out and becoming friends, it turns out that they’re into all kinds of zombie and grindhouse stuff. That’s not really my thing, but we’ve always had this great energy together, where we’ve felt on the same path in terms of what we wanted to do in our work. I’ve definitely been talking to you more about what we were up to than Alexei and I ever did.” 

In turn, Coffey feeds off the Handsome Furs. He’s working on a new film project based on an original screenplay he wrote, and he’s already tapped Boeckner to score it. He also says the film is partially inspired by an idea Boeckner spoke about during a CBC Radio 3 interview around the time of the Sound Kapital release. 

Boeckner was basically saying that he wanted his song lyrics to be very direct and literal, not knotted up in metaphors. “There is no subtext, the song really is about what you’re hearing,” recounts Coffey. “My favourite art isn’t usually like that, but there is something so refreshing about hearing an artist say that and do that, and to do it in a way that was successful, and with more to it than just what’s on the literal surface. There’s a hundred different meanings to the things he says. I was tripping out on how resonant the lyrics are on that record. They always hit me a different way, even though they’re not coded. I think having those lyrics be so strong and literal, it gave me a really strong foundation to be more surreal with the video.”

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Boeckner and Perry have made it clear that the content of their new record draws heavily on recent travelling and touring experiences, during which they’ve discovered bands who really do have to defy authority and put on rogue shows to play their music. Their new songs definitely feel steeped in the same sort of hopeful, ecstatic and rebellious spirit (not to say their first two records didn’t). Appropriately, the other photographer who contributed to Sound Kapital’s packaging art landed on Perry’s radar because of a music scene that thrives on loud, clandestine noisemaking.

Perry met Matthew Niederhauser years ago when she was living in Beijing, working as a music magazine editor. The American photographer and writer spent a couple of years in the Chinese capital taking portraits of bands from an erupting upstart music scene — “a fresh, independent voice in a country renowned for creative conformity and saccharine Cantonese pop” — for a book he released in late 2009 called, curiously, Sound Kapital: Beijing’s Music Underground.

Perry says making use of the same moniker was sort of a coincidence. “We did not name the record after the Niederhauser book exactly, but it was a twinned fate that we used that terminology. On Sound Kapital, we were trying to create a global sonic capital that has no actual place in the world, but that can be found or created anywhere in the world.”

Instead, what led Perry to want to use Niederhauser’s images in her packaging art was an exhibit of his more recent work, which explores a broader realm of overbearing experience. “I feel his material really beautifully articulates what it feels like to be alive in modern China,” says Perry. 

She selected photos that Neiderhauser had taken at a huge, hyperactive water park in downtown Beijing, which gel with the record’s themes of resistance and perseverance, albeit more cryptically. “I am fascinated by mad-made oases in downtown locations. Those images are from the dead centre of Beijing, amid towering skyscrapers, but people are still trying to find a way to feel like themselves. To have a good time. That is exactly what I’m trying to do with my music.”

This sentiment is also what binds all of the artists who contributed to the look and feel of Sound Kapital. “We are all strange freaks trying to figure out how to live within conditions that do not always appeal to our hearts,” says Perry. “Life is strange, but you have the power to find its humour and integrity in the art you choose to make. We all share this approach.”

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As you might expect (and as anticipated), much of this message hasn’t made it past the full frontal that adorns Sound Kapital. Perry was surprised by many of the prudish, conservative reactions, and finds it “shocking that people find nakedness such a bone of contention.” 

“All I am showing here is humanity in oppressive landscapes,” argues Perry. “So much of the music on this record was inspired by artists and writers and musicians who struggle to do their work under the constraints of difficult governments, who try to get their ideas out despite political infringement — China, Myanmar, etc. So it’s basically strange that here in North America, we are being censored by our very own ‘peers.’ The headlines have read that the artwork is ‘Not Safe For Work.’ Who the fuck gives a shit? I hope I make your cubicle job exciting for a fleeting second! And: ‘Make sure the kids aren’t around.’ Are you kidding? Kids love nudity! In fact, they know it’s totally normal! One said it was a ‘Perv’s dream.’ Frankly that just makes you a pervert if you see it that way. It’s ironic and sad that this is the society I live in. I hope it will change. And I will do the best I can to change it from within.”

Perry debated the merits of the image with her sister and three headstrong girlfriends, a mix of feminists and bisexuals and gays and straights with varying degrees of religious upbringing, “all of whom thought it was beautiful and equally fearless and uncertain and poetic, and a good summation of how it can feel to be alive.” The issues they identified are as follows, each with Perry’s response:  

1. You’ll be the one taking the flak for this because you are a woman. 

“Well at least that might finally even out the interview requests between Dan and I!” 

2. People might think it’s you. 

“I would have had no problem using it if it was me. If a photo of me had been taken that summed up that character and emotion I would have gladly allowed it. Had it been male, female, young, old or otherwise, I would have gladly used it. It is the expression and emotion and angular versus organic aesthetics of the image that appealed to me.”

3. The album features a white woman and mostly Chinese men. 

“I hadn’t thought of that. But I guess I’m comfortable with forcing people to check if they’re racist or not.”

4. Twelve year old boys are going to masturbate to this. 

“God I hope so. And twelve year old girls too! At least I would have. I hope this rawness is sexy to young people. I always worry that there’s so much internet porn now that it’s harder to titillate the kids. I remember how exciting porn magazines were, and seventies art books and Roxy Music covers and basically anything I could get my hands on to jerk off to.”

5. People will think you’re trying to be bad ass. 

“Only prudes will think that.”

Whatever people think, it’s out there now, getting juices flowing one way or another. And ultimately this is a record that intends to move your body as much as your brain. 

“Of course there are practical uses of nudity: For art to express humanity and for pornographic material to excite you,” says Perry, “and I’m a practical woman. I personally love good pornography — in fiction, film or art — because it is the one medium that works only if it works on you. If it gets you off, it is successful. It’s like the sentence: ‘I declare war.’ It’s true immediately once it is said. Just as ‘you’re getting wet’ makes you get wet. I find those returns really triumphant and poetic.”

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Cover image and music videos by Scott Coffey. Overpass images by Scott Coffey & Bradley Sellers. Beijing images by Matthew Niederhauser. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Sound Kapital from SubPop.

Nick Diamonds + Nick Thorburn = I Am An Attic’s rootless, faceless alien

Nick Diamonds: I Am An Attic [July/2011] — FOR MORE THAN a decade now, Nick Thorburn (aka Nick Diamonds) has displayed a huge talent for writing intricate, sometimes epic, always playful and often droll songs about death and the madness that precedes it. He’s also steered his listeners through a long and winding road of music styles and sound arsenals, from the frantic and fantastical garage rock of The Unicorns to the shimmery, Hawaii-meets-R&B jams of Reefer to the polymorphous pop of Islands (and beyond). 

While making all sorts of art with instruments and other musicians he loves is clearly Thorburn’s raison d’être, he’s also been a compulsive drawer since childhood. He’s self-taught—in fact: the only drawing class he ever took, while attending film school in Montréal, almost stymied his interest—and he’s always gravitated towards using simple paper, pencils and ink. 

Simplicity seems to be part of the attraction. Thorburn decribes drawing as a “very internal, private thing that I do, mostly to relieve stress and to get away from the musical part of my—quote, unquote—creative expression. I can just sit down and get into this world of drawing for hours and I won’t notice that time has gone by, and I’ll be completely relaxed.” 

In contrast, Thorburn drew the minimalist art for his recent solo effort (a digital-only release), I Am An Attic, under fairly tight circumstances (albeit in typically impulsive fashion). As he describes in the brief Q&A below, the image just kind of casually fell into place when the new record suddenly became ready to put out after a long period in limbo. 

Oddly enough, the album drop is (unintentionally) something of a precursor to Thorburn’s first proper attempt at publishing his visual art, under the guise of yet another creative outlet that has been gestating for while. This Is Howie Doo is one of two comic books he’s developing, and he’s hoping to publish it in late 2011 (or early 2012?) with some help from a friend who runs Secret Headquarters in Los Angeles. Thorburn describes the second, unfinished comic as a “collection of little connected stories” that are “pretty light humour, but kinda dark and kinda ridiculous, just inspired by R. Crumb stuff and other random shit.” Strips from that second comic will appear in an anthology being put out by Seattle’s pioneering Fantagraphics Books this fall. 

What can you reveal about your still-in-the-works comic?  

The book I’m working on now is one long story. I’m just sort of having the story unfold as I go, so I don’t really know where it’s headed. There’s kind of a cast of characters, and all of them are recognizable cartoon characters like Olive Oil, Fred Flinstone, Bart Simpson, Little Lulu. But they’re all kind of different: they’re ripped-off, weird mutations of those iconic cartoons. And they’re just miserable because it’s a kind of end of the world, apocalyptic scenario they’re all in. 

I’ve been working on it for about a year. I’ll take months off at a time from it, and then come back to it, but I started it last October when I moved to L.A. I take it with me on tour in case I have any time to get into it. I’m hoping to find somewhere to release that, but I don’t like the idea of self-releasing because there’s a lot of work involved, and having the boxes sit in my room would be a drag. 

What other album covers have you drawn in the past? 

I did one for this release on Alien 8 that came out years ago called Books on Tape. I did the Unicorns’ album covers, and I did an Islands seven inch artwork. I’ll do a lot of T-shirt designs for bands that I’m in. But I feel like my music is getting more and more serious and less comical, so it becomes less appropriate for the kind of drawings that I do. I’m sort of stymied by my style—it’s a little too cartoony for album artwork, I feel like. I’d prefer it if it were a little more abstract and high concept, but the stuff I do is kinda low-brow, so it never really fits. 

How did this drawing end up as the cover art for I Am An Attic? 

I don’t know. The idea to even release this thing was very impulsive and spontaneous. I had finished it over a year ago, and it had just been kind of sitting on my hard drive and I didn’t really have any plans for it. Then I just decided to release it and be done with it, get rid of it. And it happened quite fast: I mixed it on a weekend with a guy who I’d worked on another record with in L.A. I put it online on a Monday, and on the Sunday I figured I should come up with some accompanying art, so I sat down and this is what I did. 

Did you have a good idea of the image you wanted before you created it? 

No, it was pretty stream of consciousness. I just sat down and it happened that way, it wasn’t a direction or anything motivating it, it was just an impulsive drawing. I think it’s in my sketchbook or maybe on a piece of paper that was lying around. I just drew it in pencil and then filled it in with an ink pen. But it seemed stark, and alien, and isolated, and that’s kind of what the theme of the whole album was. 

What do you like about the image? 

I don’t even know if I like it. I needed something, I really wanted to get the record out. It’d been sitting for a year and I’d been talking about it for two years, so when it finally got to the stage where it’d been mixed and was ready to be released, I thought, ‘Fuck, the time is now. I’ve waited this long.’ 

It just… sufficed, I guess. I know that’s a terrible thing to say. It wasn’t like a romantic decision to go with this art work, but I made it and it seemed to work. I don’t know where it came from or what about it I liked, really. 

All images by Nick Thorburn. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy (and hear) I Am An Attic at Nick Diamonds’ bandcamp page. 

Chad VanGaalen + Amsterdam’s Andenken Gallery = A Match Made in Shroom Heaven?

Life is Butter Dreamer! Aug 2 to 21/11 — IT’S ABOUT TIME someone made space for a retrospective exhibit of work from the ogre-sized, prolific psychedelic mind of celebrated musician/animator/illustrator/circuit-bending-fetishist/all-around-delightfully-mad-scientist Chad VanGaalen. Next week, the Calgary-based artist will skip the pond to play songs from his latest record, Diaper Island, to some lucky Europeans. His first performance will also kick off a three-week showing of a few hundred individual pieces of his visual art, including animation cells from one of his fantastically trippy music videos and illustrations that span the period of his four acclaimed solo records with Flemish Eye. 

VanGaalen pulled about half the material for the show from an old suitcase where he keeps drawings and retired sketchbooks. “It was definitely strange, kind of like having a conversation with your ex-girlfriend for like five days, just locked up together in a room,” he says. 

The spread on display at Andenken will feature portraits of friends, strangers, weirdos, dragons (!) and other monsters, a range of lush landscapes, delightful oddities, a bunch of half-finished comic books, and sketchbook gems from overseas album tours and road trips across Canada—including scenes from a ridiculously improvised and epic mission to Dawson City, Yukon, in a school bus, largely fueled by two mason jars full of weed. Another 100 or so pieces in the show are cells of cutout animations that VanGaalen crafted for J. Mascis’ fantastic “Not Enough” video (below), which the gallery will also screen along with some of his other morph-o-riphic moving pictures. (Speaking of which: His video for “Peace On The Rise” is like a Kubrickian sci-fi cartoon.)

Ten days before having to ship his work overseas, VanGaalen also went on a week-long drawing bender to contribute some fresh material. His subject: the droves of drunken rafters who float down the Bow River through Calgary as a summertime right of passage (or maybe just an excuse to get loaded in the sun), observed from what sounds like a totally non-incognito riverbank spot. 

“I kinda set up this, like, camo zone where I could be sitting. I hollowed out the inside of a bush on the edge of the river, and pulled the leaves out of the middle section so I had a nice shaded spot. The challenging thing about it was that I only had a window of about 10 seconds to draw people as they went by. And I was totally not camouflaged. People were like, ‘Dude, who is that dude in the bush totally perving out on people?’ It looked pretty suspicious.”

Accidental creepiness aside (in the eyes of apparent dick-wagglers, mind you), VanGaalen was pretty stoked about the results. “Being forced to draw them fast made them cartoony, kinda like Gary Larson-style almost… just one-liners. And there’s weird shit going on with rafter culture in this city, I feel like. I kinda got to know the rafts. There’s a Ralph Lauren inflatable raft that everyone has now. I don’t know where the fuck they’re getting them. It’s like a giant donut. Everyone has an inflated recliner armchair with a cup holder built in, and it seats 11 or 12 people all facing themselves in a giant ring. And just drawing an object that weird as quickly as I can is crazy enough. But then the people are shirtless biker dudes with handlebar moustaches, next to bikini babes, next to a bald headbanger or something.” 

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself in Amsterdam in August 2011, Life is Butter Dreamer! is a rare and special opportunity to soak up a literal tickle trunk of crazy, uncanny, joyful and no-doubt hilarious visuals by one of Canada’s most incredible young artists. Especially in a city where you can—for the moment, at least—buy psychedelics and smokeables with your coffee.

Images by Chad VanGaalen. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Diaper Island—it rules!

Pat Jordache + Sarah Pupo = Future Songs’ transcendental congregation

Pat Jordache: Future Songs [Apr/2011] — DIVING IN HEADLONG and figuring out your moves in mid-air seems like a key ingredient in Pat Gregoire’s creative repertoire. So it’s fitting that the cover art for the re-release of his full-length debut as Pat Jordache (yes, after the jeans) pays accidental homage to the improvisational zeal and collaborative tenacity that went into making it.

After losing the original Future Songs sessions when his laptop was stolen (on the same day he failed a driving test), Gregorie managed to rescue his homemade record (thanks, Mediafire!) and eventually turn it into a cassette tape release, which in turn convinced Constellation to remaster and reissue it. Likewise, the capturing and recurring re-creation of a photograph of Sarah Pupo’s art for the LP/CD cover image became an unintentionally epic undertaking. 

Pupo’s assembled flock of abstract blobs also fits nicely with the freewheeling, kaleidoscopic, semi-slo-mo uproar that sounds like Pat Jordache. Pupo describes the image as having “these sort of humanoid figures that keep creeping into my work” via a process that allows her to operate very intuitively. “That’s when it turns out best, and it’s always kind of a combination of chance and control,” she says. “I like putting ink down on paper and having it sort of be like a lab, just adding and taking away and blotting stuff and seeing how everything reacts, and then kind of going in there and nudging it in a different direction once I see things happening.” 

Gregoire craves a similar approach: “Maybe it’s just something that all artists do, but I like the idea of a creative act being a thought process unto itself, of it always being an experiment. Maybe we’re just messy people who don’t premeditate a whole lot and just do as we go.” 

It’s definitely appropriate that Gregroire and Pupo’s creative sensibilities overlapped into an emblem for Future Songs. The two artists became roommates by chance when they skipped Toronto for Montréal around the same time in 2003, and they’ve lived together most of the time since, developing their respective talents—Gregoire most recently with Islands and Sister Suvi. They also crack jokes about recently bumping their marriage pact from age 50 to 60, given that they’re both now pushing 30.

They’d collaborated in the past on some poster projects, “and the occasional house cleaning,” quips Gregoire. Pupo also did the cover for the Future Songs cassette (above), which “had a very homemade operation and feel to it, with Sarah’s drawing photocopied on butcher paper—it cost about five cents a sheet and looked really sweet.” When Constellation asked for new art for the re-release, Gregoire quickly honed in on the strange humanoids that Pupo was making at the time. 

“Sarah obliged and drew a bunch of them,” he says. “They started out and finished as these cutouts, with each one separate and thus arrangeable into different configurations. This seemed like a lot of creative potential at first, but it also led to infinite possibility…” 

Pupo: “…and massive indecision.” 

Gregoire: “Yeah, a whole lot of not shitting and not getting off the pot.” 

“What happened was that it’s such a testy process to make these figures that some of them don’t turn out,” says Pupo. “I was never happy with a full sheet of them, with one drawing, so I would just cut out my favourites and I would have this whole assortment. We decided that it would be a good idea to shoot them in different amalgamations and have them as sort of moving figures.” 

“So Sarah did a bunch of configurations at her studio and brought them home,” explains Gregoire. After much deliberation about the best compositions, their seemingly finished idea began to unravel a little when they were told that the resolution of their photographs wasn’t good enough. “And so began this odyssey of trying to recreate the correct placement, lighting, warmth of the shot, all that.” 

Three photographers and five makeshift studio sessions later, they finally revived the version they were after—appropriately, a bigger, cleaner cut of the first low-fi attempt. The final shoot, pulled off by Pat Jordache band mate and impromptu tour documentarian Phillip Chanel, was also a bit of a gong show: “We ended up building a crazy contraption with furniture piled up into this ridiculous looking structure, and then a tripod was rigged to shoot down from directly above the cutouts,” says Gregoire. Their seven-foot-tall makeshift rig used a desk, a table retrieved from the garbage, and emptied-out record boxes, with ample weight up top to steady the off-kilter tripod. 

Admittedly, Gregoire likes to wing it in good company. “I tend to have this really community-based approach, for better or for worse, of not even trying to but always ending up working with friends because of some sort of inherent cheapness or lack of professionalism, just keeping it in the family. Which is great, and it’s awesome to work with your friends, but it means that you’re always figuring it out as you go, at least a little bit. You’ve got a lot of heart, but maybe it takes you a few tries to get that right picture res.”  

That said, both artists prefer to produce by the seat of their pants. “There’s usually not a plan,” says Pupo, “and often that bites me in the ass, but the work wouldn’t be the same otherwise.” 

“I think there’s just a look to what you make when you’re working with your friends and it’s a community effort, versus needing to take a picture and paying someone you don’t know to do it,” says Gregoire. “It’s weird, when you farm things out and get the pro approach, rarely do you love the results, but because you paid for them, you’re committed to them. It’s never the same, and I feel like that’s sort of been a theme of the entire record: Doing it not necessarily the quickest, or the most efficient way, but the familiar one.” 

In their case, Gregoire and Pupo worked with Ian Ilavsky at Constellation to evolve their 10 or so configuration ideas into coherent record art packaging. They had images of the humanoids cropped variously, some obscured into colour patterns, sometimes stacked on top of each other, “ones that acknowledged more that they were figurative, others that were more abstracted,” explains Pupo. And as for what elevated their cover choice: “I think there’s something about the gathered shapes that evokes some kind of mystery taking place. That huddle… What are they doing together? There’s something a little bit creepy and magical about it.” 

“There’s probably a little bit of after-the-fact projection happening in my saying so,” says Gregoire,” but I like that it does evoke that community mentality a little.” 

Pupo deadpans another joke: “Yeah, I’m the green one.”

But seriously: Pupo explains her art at the time (2010, that is) as moving away from the figurative and verging on abstraction. “Although for me it always maintains this sort of figurative or narrative bottom line, but it’s not always recognizable to other people. I was thinking a lot in my work about memory, and ghosts, and residues of actions and events, the things that are left in place after everyone’s gone. The traces of life. Like if something bad has happened in a place, how do you walk in and feel that? How would you depict such a thing? That’s kind of what my practice was circling around. So that required me to experiment with these shapes, with bodies that were more like presences.” 

Pupo says she wasn’t really thinking of a specific event or situation while crafting ideas for the Future Songs cover, but she did amp up her normally sparing use of colour for Gregoire’s benefit. “I think it goes well with the music, or at least with kind of what I can hear in his music: A sort of apocalyptic psychedelia,” she says.   

Her technique is pretty simple. “I work on paper a lot, not on canvas, and I use a lot of deep black or dark ink and contrast that with more vivid colours and more washiness. I lay down water on the paper, and because it has a membrane it stays in the basic shape that you lay it down in. With good watercolour paper it just sits on the surface, and it just catches all the ink, so I drop in different colours and amounts into the water and they react to each other. Or you can break open the membrane with a paintbrush and it’ll spill out and do weird things.”

The results, however, are ripe with possibility, and so Pupo has continued working a lot with this particular material technique, albeit in tandem with other experiments. “I’ve been trying to make a couple of small drawings as a ritual daily practice, still dealing with the same kind of themes, but with a sort of more journalistic or diaristic approach,” she says. “Just processing the events of my day, but not overthinking them. I like the idea of thinking through a drawing—not thinking too much about it beforehand, but having the actual making of the work be the thought process.” 

Cassette cover illustration and all paintings by Sarah Pupo [#2: “Procession”; #3: “Gathering”; #4: “Untitled”; #5: “Passengers”]. Cover image by Phillip Chanel. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Future Songs from Constellation Records. 

Jennifer Castle + Mira Dancy = Castlemusic’s otherworldly witness

Jennifer Castle: Castlemusic [Apr/2011] — OFTEN IT’S BEST not to overanalyse things. So goes the prevailing wisdom of bewitching singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle, whose third solo record owes much of its creation to this approach. 

Patiently put together between early summer and late fall of 2010, Castle says that while she definitely crafted Castlemusic with specific intentions, “we didn’t ask too many things of the songs, we just let them exist.” Recording sporadically with partner David Clarke and producer Jeff McMurrich in Toronto, Castle admits that the trio did a lot of experimentation that eventually led them back to their bed tracks. “I never exactly know what it is that I’m trying to do, so there’s a blindfoldedness about the whole thing. For me, that’s when I’m creative is when I’m exercising some sense of discovery or improvisation.”

To choose an album cover for her new discoveries, Castle gave in to serendipity. The previous summer, she’d played a gig in Brooklyn at an event called Whitney’s Biennial, which was put together by her artist friend Davida Nemeroff, who’d photographed the cover of her last album, You Can’t Take Anyone. Castle performed from an improvised stage, above which hung a diamond-shaped, multicoloured abstract painting that was chained to the ceiling, “probably as large as a person with their arms stretched out.” She recalls the setup feeling slightly dangerous, and that it was “a bit of a fish out of water for a painting to be floating in the air like that.” Nonetheless, Castle immediately liked the piece’s psychedelic qualities, and felt it fit nicely with her music. She also hit it off with the painter, Brooklyn-based Mira Dancy. 

A year or so later, Dancy’s work was suddenly, strangely hovering just above Castle’s radar again. While in hot pursuit of a cover image for Castlemusic, both Clarke and another artist friend called her attention to Dancy’s website. “I went online and saw the painting Drawback, and I thought it was perfect,” says Castle. “It didn’t have to have a sense of meaning that I could articulate, it just had to fit. I like letting it exist as this beautiful thing that I feel complements the overall design of the record and the record itself. It’s mysterious.”

One thing’s for sure: Castlemusic and Dancy’s Drawback both explore a sense of colourful mystery. But Castle is also talking about the album’s backside art, a photo that Clarke took which had already been decided upon (pictured, below). The photocopied quality and “really crass black and white” are quite intentional; Castle liked the eeriness, and that her eyes were the image’s most reflective element. This feature also explains what made Drawback such a natural spontaneous choice.   

“In Mira’s painting, you dance all around it, your eye keeps going throughout the whole canvas, but the eyes are so striking,” says Castle. “It was just this perfect complement to this photo really rooted in reality, and then you flip it and the cover is this completely surreal, expressionist, beautiful other world. I liked the complement because I think where they are in relationship is their eyes.”

Incidentally, there’s an emerging thread in Dancy’s creative process that also mirrors Castle’s go-with-the-flow reflex. After Whiney’s Biennial, Dancy started “thinking about how I can incorporate more performative elements into my actual practice in the studio.” Using different paint was one way to experiment: “The ink in Drawback is really watery acrylic, so it’s sort of this spontaneous event that happens, and it either works or it doesn’t.” 

She’s also began playing around with canvas materials and shapes. For example, her pillow pieces evolved out of practical utility (“It’s expensive to ship work around”), but also because “they have an interactive or performative element themselves.”

Dancy also says her work was very abstract for a while, but that she’s returned to creating bodies and voices while still working very impulsively. “I don’t have an idea before I do it. With Drawback I was thinking of a body and shape, and creating it as it occurred to me, responding to that particular shape. My paintings can be pretty mysterious or surprising when they arrive.”

When they do, Dancy can see confrontation and drama (or melodrama) as recurring themes, as though her characters have witnessed something and captured it. At the same time, she strives to keep a rawness that steers her work clear of perfection or conventional beauty. This also informs her penchant for producing unusual ideas, such as the piece that was chained to the ceiling when she first met Castle (not pictured; the piece below is called Queen of Sheeba). 

“It can be such a let down to put up your work up in a clean white space which feels like it’s sort of sucking the energy out,” says Dancy, adding that she’s more fulfilled when there’s something else going on in an exhibit space. “As my paintings have become more spontaneous in terms of the ink and staining with acrylics, while I’m making them I’m dancing or moving around a lot, and so it’s more satisfying to think of them going out into the world in a way that’s similar to how they’re being made. It’s more interesting to think of paintings as something that can be activated, or that can activate their surroundings.”

Ultimately, Dancy wants her work to have a physical effect on its audience, to inspire the feeling of something or someone else that strikes you in your reality. “Jennifer’s songs have that too. Parts of them, and her voice in particular, it just hits you. You don’t know what it is immediately, because it sort of seeps in.” 

Sounds like a dead ringer for the way Castlemusic’s cover art was picked. Oddly enough, the root of their kinship likely has more to do with depth than instinct, as Dancy also recognizes: “I was really drawn to Jennifer’s music and songs because they are like poems. It takes a long time to unravel her narratives. I think I definitely have a similar relationship to that kind of language, and I see it alongside these figures and bodies in my work.”

Paintings by Mira Dancy. Photo by David Clarke. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Castlemusic from Flemish Eye.

Colin Stetson + Tracy Maurice = Judges’ celestial horse stampede

Colin Stetson: New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges (Feb/2011) — TRYING TO DESCRIBE the music on Colin Stetson’s new record with words is like trying to decorate a cake with dirt. It can be done, but this is definitely an album that should introduce itself. 

You also need to actually see the American-born, Montréal-based saxophonist perform before your mind will completely blow (or at least watch this), but here’s the detonator: the songs on New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges are essentially just Stetson, his alto, tenor or bass sax, a small army of mics, a shamanic talent for breath cycling and a fierce imagination. The recordings are single takes, no overdubs, just deluges of hypnotic percussion and melody and raw emotion culled from all over his body and instrument, rippling into form as he rocks back and forth between feet, bullfrogging his cheeks.

The vision that appeared between Stetson’s ears as he began exploring this new musical terrain also inspired the album’s cover image. You may have already caught wind of him describing a melee of blind, warmongering wild horses on a forgotten beach. (For the record, Stetson says he’s “kinda kicking myself in the dick a little bit about saying the words graphic novel out loud, because now that’s out there and people know that I’ve been thinking about that and writing it, and now I actually have to produce.” In other words: sit tight and just enjoy his songs for now.) 

The imaginary scene he describes — a herd of isolated, eyeless horses strapped with cannons that fire whenever they run, igniting panic as they all try to escape their own terrifying noises and eventually fall into the sea — is the seed that spawned Judges (first the song, then the record). Stetson calls it an “underlying narrative,” “like a guide,” “just a tool,” and “a companion piece.” He insists the scene (and others like it) are “metaphors for the more general arc and themes that the record deals with,” and shouldn’t be construed as meanings of songs, which is “really antithetical to the initial point of making music, and making a record like this in particular.” 

Instead, think of the crazy ass horse vision as an emotional temperature gauge. “The scenes started to become something that would accompany a song, and then I could bounce thematic ideas off of that narrative towards seeing how the scene would feel, if it would have a definite resolution, or if it would be something that would kind of drift,” explains Stetson. “A lot of the stuff I do, I tend to think it out in my head really visually, and that informs me on how to take it musically — if questions need to be answered, or if this is just a space to inhabit for a while.”

The depth of what Stetson actually envisions is fascinating. His fantasy is intricate: a gaunt, metallic-hued, mechanical-looking breed of Mongolian horse; their eyelessness borrowed from a Chinese folk tale about a boy whose paper horse is brought to life; their cannons modelled after the Bira, a Nepalese relative of the Gatling gun. The broader “arc and themes” Stetson mentions are fear and transcendence and isolation, and tackling them is what he calls “kinda my attempt at dealing with the greater human condition. I feel like if there’s anything that’s universal it’s our ultimate isolation from everyone and everything, in that we are just us, ourselves. I was also trying to get into disparate concepts of isolation in the evolution of ideas, in how they could create completely different and opposing results given time in that isolation. Fundamentally what I’m doing is channelling everything that I know through this one very specific medium, and in doing that trying to create as big and as broad a brushstroke as I can.” 

Aware that the breadth of detail in his mind might be a bit daunting, Stetson only spilled some of it when he began speaking with Tracy Maurice about creating the cover and packaging art. He played her some songs, told her a bit about how they were making the record — sound data collected on 20 microphones, including contact mics on his saxes — and says he was “somewhat vague” about the horses. Originally he’d been thinking of something very literal, perhaps photorealistic, “almost like a movie poster.” 

Maurice, whose work you’ve seen on the cover of Arcade Fire’s first two albums (and the first record by Bell Orchestre, one of Stetson’s many collaborators), had never heard anything like Judges. At first she simply wanted to find a way of complimenting his experimental approach, and the iconic imagery that she says his music conjured: “Horses of the apocalypse, the drumming of hooves, dust and metal, weightlessness and floating, light and shadow.” 

She felt their visions meshed pretty effortlessly, although the process of settling on an approach took a few months. Whereas previous covers Maurice worked on had often been illustrated, “the complexity of Colin’s record inspired me to want to make something that had more visual depth, that felt more 3D. The record is really dynamic — refined yet jarring, bright yet brooding. I wanted to use something that could capture these contradictory elements.”

Initially she’d tried to create a charging scene with a bunch of Civil War-era miniature horses. “I painted them all black and wanted to build a set around them, but then a friend of mine sent me a link to a horse sculpture on Jordan Askill’s website and it was basically the same idea but in black.” 

So she started thinking more abstractly about what Stetson had created, and soon became bent on the idea of using glass to capture light. As a material and methodology choice (as opposed to drawing or physically building an image) it certainly evoked the recording process, where sounds were gathered and later reassembled in the mix. The concept came together when Maurice found and “ordered figures of horses from a company in China that had really strange designs that were 3D laser etched into glass blocks. I then photographed each one with a different coloured LED light underneath and then composited them all in Photoshop.” 

Maurice liked the approach because it allowed her “to play with the darker feeling imagery in a way that was still vibrant and beautiful.” Likewise, the background of the layout she created is made of black sand that she lit and photographed, “so the beach element is there too, though it’s not a literal interpretation either.” 

Stetson was impressed that his ideas had been translated into something that was non-literal, and he says the cover image “takes this kind of celestial turn that I’m really pleased with.” He was also really stoked about Maurice’s addition of the skulls and skeletons that appear in the packaging. “They so perfectly balanced this whole notion of fear and transcendence, because ultimately what we’re dealing with is death. Whenever we’re talking about the human condition, and about isolation, we’re coming back to that. And the next record, which I’m working on right now, is focussed on that as well.” (!!!)

Given his process — itself a strange exploration of isolation and transcendence, and perhaps sometimes fear as well — I couldn’t possibly imagine what Stetson must be thinking of next. And that’s just as it should be.

Album art by Tracy Maurice. Stetson image by Keith Klenowski. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges from Constellation Records.