Pretty
good, indeed. Watching the audience trail out of the band’s
Alladin Theatre performance in Portland, Oregon, is like watching
Night of the Living Dead Part 13. It looks as though all
of us – fans, scenesters, and curiosity-seekers alike –
have been bludgeoned into a zombie state. A blissful one, but
a zombie state nonetheless.
Efrim:
Touring is a whole different thing. It’s more when we’re
practicing and trying to write stuff that I think it’s
getting frustrating for everyone. A lot of it too is we’ve
got people in the band who know music theory and we’ve
got people who don’t, and different degrees of people in
the band who don’t. So a lot of it is finding some sort
of language…
The arrangements
that we come up with get to be pretty complex, so you have to
create words to explain that to other people. It gets difficult…
We’ve been trying to do that for five years: figure out
how to talk.
Signum:
And is your own background theory oriented?
Efrim:
No, I taught myself some theory a year and a half ago just ’cause
… I wanted to be able to use those words. And then I’ve
forgotten all that theory stuff. I stopped paying attention
to it.
I
arrive at the theatre a couple hours before the show. With its
balcony, careful rows of seats, and ornate boxes flanking a
proscenium stage, the Alladin exudes the seedy lavishness and
faded decadence of a vaudeville hall. I’m told it was a
porn theatre in one of its incarnations, but now you can drink
microbrews in the lobby and watch performances by Senegal’s
Youssou N’Dour, Berlin’s Gob Squad, and – yes
– Montreal’s finest, Godspeed!
I’ve
read about the band’s alleged refusal to grant interviews,
their allegedly contemptuous attitude toward the press, how
they won’t pose for proper photographs. And I’ve personally
experienced the snotty and passive-aggressive attitudes of other
musicians who were uncomfortable with their newly-acquired success.
Sprouting up from the cool underground into the glaring lights
of wider popularity, some can’t decide whether to feed
or bite the press shark.
But
Efrim seems sweet and gentlemanly, like a diffident host who
finds himself having unexpected guests for dinner. He ushers
me into a cosy, green-walled faux-bedroom backstage and goes
out to get me a beer. As he rolls and puffs at the first of
many cigarettes, I join in with filter tips. We’re soon
enshrouded in a cloud of smoke.
"Say something deep," I suggest, testing my tape recorder.
"Something
deep in baritone?" he replies with a little grin,
"Or…?"
As
we talk, Efrim sometimes hides behind his piles of wild hair
and gazes intently at the carpet. With softly-clipped Canadian
vowels and an upward lilt to his sentences, he speaks thoughtfully
about making music, handling personal politics, and creating
community.
Efrim:
When people started joining this band it was already established
what this band was trying to do, which was long, loud, sad songs,
without any words, that were in minor keys usually. I kinda
think the people who ended up being in the band were into it,
regardless of what their backgrounds were.
Signum:
Do particular members of the band provide specific roles in
terms of creating compositions, or is it sort of a mish-mash?
Efrim:
Yeah, it is a mish-mash, but there are roles for sure. There
are roles that are sort of exerted passively, just by the nature
of the way people play. And then there are roles that are exerted
more sort of – people always trying to bring up the same
points...
That’s
part of what we’ve been frustrated by lately. It’s
as if the practices were a script, not just musically, but also
in terms of how we’re talking between what we’re working
on. You can tell when Mauro is going to say something, or you
can tell when one of the drummers is gonna say something. You
just know, and that’s really boring. [Both laugh.]
Part of
it is [because] we’ve done so much fucking touring in the
last three years that you end up becoming like a little industry.
That’s what happens when you have all these complicated
tasks that you’ve got to fulfill day after day after day,
creating – not necessarily a heirarchy at all, but
you begin to make an assembly line. Like, so-n-so is going to
do most of the driving, so-n-so is going to deal with the merchandise…
and that’s sort of spread out as to what happens in our
practice space as well. I think that’s a problem for anyone
who is part of this ridiculous industry…
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Photo:
Mauro, Efrim, Dave, and Roger. Photo by Marshall Serna.
