by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
WHO: Do Make Say Think
WHERE: Jack Rabbits
WHEN: Sunday, September 23rd
Toronto is making a bunch of hip noise in music and film these days. In addition to giving the film world one of the best film festivals, their incestuous music scene has brought us fantastic indie rock bands such as Broken Social Scene and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. One of Toronto's post-rock offerings is Do Make Say Think, a firm part of the Torontopian avant-garde scene since the mid-nineties. They are bringing their instrumental indie rock to Jack Rabbits.
Their sound is difficult to describe, to say the least, but if you could imagine early Flaming Lips getting high in a barn and jamming improvisational rock with some Saddle Creek musicians and then taking it back to Toronto to add layers of string arrangements and electronic elements, then you may be on your way to grasping this music. Their albums function as a whole, crafting elaborate musical landscapes and adventurous plotlines while rarely uttering a word. However their latest release, You, You're a History in Rust, does include some vocals. They aren't dominant by any means, but they are present on the album and they somehow manage to not take the instrumental nature of the band away.
"At first you have to be kind of brave to throw away your verse-chorus, verse-chorus structure and just make music. Then you do that for a long time and then you're like 'okay, how can we bring vocals in and keep the freedom?' So we tried to do that."
EU caught up with Do Make Say Think's Chris Spearin at his home in Toronto. Spearin started Do Make Say Think when he and Justin Small were roommates back in 1995.
"Justin was my roommate, I worked with him and then I moved in with him and instead of watching TV we would record on my 8-track."
When James Payment joined the band they were ready to hit the scene with epic improvisational rock sets. Do Make Say Think is more intentional than improvisational these days, ten years into their marriage as a band, and their albums reflect that intent. Spearin also plays guitar, bass and trumpet with Broken Social Scene.
EU: Are you guys into verbs?
CS: (Laughing) Maybe ten years ago, but we're past verbs. We're into nouns and adjectives now.
EU: What is post-rock?
CS: I think it's mostly for the journalists, you know? And for the record stores too so they have a place to put the records. It doesn't mean too much to me. There seems to be a lot of it. The more I tour the more I realize that post-rock is a genuine genre.
EU: What is the major difference between the two bands as far as writing and performing is concerned?
CS: Well, I think it's ort of an attempt at relevance. Broken Social Scene is trying to be culturally relevant and Do Make Say Think is trying to be more artistically relevant.
EU: What's the music scene like in Toronto, is it supportive of you?
CS: Well there's plenty of musicians around and plenty of venues to play and a lot of great promoters and music writers. There's all the stuff necessary for a good music community, so yeah, I'd say it's been really good.
EU: Are there any bands in Toronto that we should know about in Florida?
CS: I'm always talking about my friend Alex Lukashevsky and the band called Deep Dark United. We tried to get them to tour with us, but it doesn't really work. He sang on our record and he's been a big influence, just in the sense of freedom to music. He's a brilliant man. Great musician, great band. A little hard to stomach sometimes, because he gets a little too freaky with a wah pedal some days or whatever. It's kind of different every time. He's a great poet. Kind of jazz-ish rock music. Another band from Toronto is called Guh, but they haven't been playing for a while.
EU: This new album is very diverse. It seems to do everything from spacious, My Bloody Valentine-esque distorted guitar sounds and really big, haunting nineties indie sounds. How do your songs come out with such a wide variety of sounds.? Do they each have a different origin?
CS: We've been playing together for ten years or more. We just try to explore different avenues. There are so many ways music can go. How many different kinds of music are there out there? How much can you explore? There's so many possibilities it would be a shame to limit yourself. We have limited ourselves, you know, we have five people who have to agree on the song, so we're a collaborative band in the sense that you have to go through all five of us before it can become a Do Make Say Think song. But we still try to keep it as diverse and interesting as possible.
We're all music fans and we love all styles of music. We just try to make it reflect life a bit. Everybody's life is full of so many different feelings and emotions and there are so many different aspects to life. You wanna' try to at least give a nod to them here and there. Give them some sort of musical expression.
EU: The album has a continuity to it, like it has specific parts to its journey. You couldn't put it on shuffle and have the same experience as you would listening to it straight through. It sounds really intentionally made that way. When you perform the songs, do you have to keep that order or when you put together a performance do you re-examine how they connect?
CS: Yeah we do, we have to. You're right, I mean you could put it on shuffle, I've never tried, but the songs have more impact when you set them up properly. When you have a loud song, you put something gentle right after it or before it to set it up. You have to have some context for it to work.
If you listen to nothing but loud music it doesn't sound loud anymore, right? When we perform live, we're mixing all the songs in from other albums, so we spend a lot of time discussing the set list and looking at the different keys the songs are in, the volume and the movement of them and try to make it a bit of a journey. Basically, so that you can follow along with it. If it's the same thing over and over again then you're not going to be interested anymore; we're not going to be interested anymore.
EU: Is there a narrative to it that is unknown to the audience? When you're constructing the albums do you have a narrative in mind?
CS: It's not like we have a concept record, like Pink Floyd The Wall or something, you know? But as the album gets made, certain themes start to come up, emotional themes and things like that. You start to recognize them when you are finally putting the record together and hopefully you start to understand what the record is about.
There is a lot of exploration in the creation of the record, but there is also a lot of trust. You don't know where you are going, I have to let it go and hope that the dots connect. And whether we're projecting onto it, I'm sure there is a lot of projecting onto it, it's pretty much notes and chords and sound, but that's what music does, it allows you to project your emotions and if it works that way, then we have our own narrative.
EU: It's kind of an abstraction of a narrative.
CS: Yeah it is an abstract narrative; it means different things to different people in the band. For me, the last record is about forgetfulness. It's about looking at the things in life that have disappeared. The rusty memories. Every day is so filled with different frustrations and joys and they just get forgotten. I don't remember what I was doing on Wednesday. So much of life, the huge majority of life is forgotten and you just have these little moments in life that you use to tie it all together, but for the most part, life is a big void of forgetfulness that follows you around.
We talk about things and they have one memory which leads to another memory. When you have a conversation you'll suddenly remember all of these things that happened to you in school or whatever, but for the most part they're not that accessible. So the album is an anthem to the things that are forgotten. The painful moments and good moments have disappeared, that's what the album means to me, in a way.
EU: I read that you guys go out to rural areas and farmhouses to record. How is the experience of going out there and isolating yourself to create these songs different from when you bring them out to play live, those dynamics are so different, how does that effect the evolution of the song?
CS: When we go out to a barn or a cottage to record there is a sense of freshness that we are looking for. When we get out there, it's a new place and there are none of the distractions of regular life, so our senses are open to what's around us a bit more; to what's new. You sort of hope that that absorbs into the music a little bit, along with the smell of the manure in the next yard over (laughing) you kind of want the dirt of the experience to make it into the music somehow.
When it comes time to tour, hopefully, we've been through the process enough that we have an understanding of why we are playing the music and what the emotion is that we're trying to convey. And then touring is the presentation of it. You're not trying to find that place every night, but you're trying to present these feelings. It's the difference of digging for treasure and then presenting it. Hopefully people appreciate it and hopefully it is worth listening to.
EU: Many bands leave in the accidental, off-mic voice or the mis-stroke on the guitar, but it usually comes across as contrived or an afterthought. You're music is very intentionally structured, why leave some imperfections in there? What is it about the imperfection that fits or creates a nuance?
CS: For one thing, when we listen to these so-called imperfections, accidents is probably more appropriate of a word, they have a human-ness to them when you listen to it that touches you, sometimes. We left a little laugh in on one of the songs, we left that in because it sort of gets you in the chest. It's not part of the composition, but it's definitely part of the composition now. All these little things, which are happy accidents, like the drummer putting down the sticks at the end of a song, they take it from just music to people playing music.
You want to include the people; you want to keep it human. Sure you want to go off into outer space and get into other realms with music, but to come back and remember that it's people playing music, you don't want to forget that. I think it makes it better if you can keep that involved.
EU: Have you done vocals on previous albums?
CS: We've done vocals but never lyrics. We've done some on & Yet & Yet and on Winter Hymn we did some ooh-ing and ahh-ing, but this is the first one that had lyrics, yeah.
EU: Why did you bring them in?
CS: I think part of it was a test of our courage. We've been an instrumental band for ten years. It's like "okay, let's do something different because we don't do that."…There are a lot of bands that have really shitty lyrics and we didn't want to be a good instrumental band and then suddenly be talking shit on top of it. So we chose and really put a lot of work into it and we're really proud of it, but we didn't want to over-saturate it, we didn't want to have a "vocal album." It isn't a new direction. The next album might be instrumental again. We just wanted to experiment with it and do our best.
EU: When you start writing, does it still start with improvisation?
CS: Yeah, it always starts with improvisation. I mean all music starts with one person improvising, in our case it is a group of people. Sometimes we'll just be jamming and we'll like what we are doing so we'll stop and say, "okay, remember what you are doing." As a band we started as an improv band, so we kind of keep it in the same roots, I guess.
EU: Do the songs start organically and then you layer on the electronic elements or add some violin, or does the vision of the song exist from the very beginning?
CS: No it definitely happens over time. In fact, we had kind of a motto, not for this record so much, but for Winter Hymn, we had to fearlessly add, skillfully remove. With new technology you can pretty much record as many tracks as you want, so we would put it all on there and then listen and start scraping stuff off until the song revealed itself.
Sometimes there is a vision at the beginning, but that usually just gets in the way because you stop listening and just try to create what you heard in your head, and that's just frustrating. So you start with a vision that is flexible. That is how we approach songwriting. Have a strong vision but make sure you are willing to scrap it if something better comes along.
EU: Do you ever improv live?
CS: Not much. We sometimes do, but no, right now we just have a bunch of compositions that we're pretty proud of and we want to present them the way they are, so we don't do a lot of improvising anymore.
EU: If I get them to do an encore for you here in Jacksonville, will you do an improvisational number for me?
CS: (Laughing) I will, but I don't know if I can get the rest of the guys to do it. I'm looking forward to coming back to Florida, we came there for the first time last fall and it was really great, so I'm looking forward to it.
And I'm looking forward to seeing what Wikipedia calls Chris Spearin's "trademark moustache" on stage at Jack Rabbits in San Marco on Sunday, September 23rd. Go to jaxlive.com for more details.
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