[Please note, the following transcript has been edited for brevity. For an audio recording of the whole interview, see the bottom of this post.]

From left to right, Miguel Benavides, Cary Garcia, and William Benavides, make up one half of the band.

Lewis Kelly : What does “somos” mean?

Cary Garcia: “Somos” in Spanish means “we are,” basically. So, in a way, it was very hard to find a name. Finding a name is really, really difficult. So after just going through a bunch of different options we thought that “somos” — we like to do things democratically and make our own decisions together, and we are very good friends beyond the musical part.

LK: How did the band get started?

CG: It was started because Miguel [Benavides, the Collective's drummer] and I used to work together in another band, La Candela …. We were playing together and touring together and we became very close friends. I had to leave La Candela, and when I left La Candela, because we wanted to continue to work together, we collaborated.

Miguel and William [Benevides, who plays guitar and sings for the band] are brothers, and we had actually worked together as well before, and we really liked the sound. William plays the guitar and sings. Miguel is the drummer, and I play the piano. We actually never thought that that instrumentation could work really well, because the piano and the guitar have similar functions. But, when we played together, surprisingly, it sounded really, really nice. It sounded much fuller.

LK: I associate Latin music with Latin America – which, obviously, Vancouver is not part of. So, how has being based in Canada or Vancouver changed the way you guys make this kind of tropical music?

CG : For me, especially, it’s been a very interesting experience because in Cuba I used to play mostly classical music. I loved jazz and I loved North American rock and that kind of stuff a lot. And I also loved different genres of Latin American music, like samba, bossa nova, tango, that kind of stuff.

I lived in Cuba, and Cuban popular music was always around – in the radio, in the car. And things are open there, so it’s open air, so neighbours have their windows open and you can always hear the music. So even when you don’t want to listen to the popular music that’s happening at the time, you are forced to. There’s no escape from it; you have to listen.

When I arrived [in Canada] … playing Cuban music was really important for me, because it was part of still being connected to where I came from, and it was part of, for me, making a new identity that was really not necessary when I was in Cuba.

LK: You guys sing in Spanish, mostly. But presumably, most of your audience, if not all of your audience, doesn’t speak much Spanish, if any. How does that feel, to perform for an audience that might not understand what you’re singing?

CG: We do have a bit of a Latin American audience, so I would say, from the crowds I’ve seen, it’s almost sometimes half-and-half. If we’re gonna play at thejazz festival , of course it’s going to be, mostly, um …

LK: White people.

Somos Collective play a distinct blend of Latin American styles.

CG: Yeah, but at our gigs … we have almost as many Spanish-speaking people as English. But I don’t know, it’s music for dancing, it’s music for having fun, mostly. So, I would say that if you don’t understand Spanish, but you feel the music, then you can still enjoy yourself quite a bit.

It’s not that the lyrics are not important – of course they are. But, for example, even before I knew English, I loved North American music, I loved rock. I really enjoyed it, and I had no clue what they were saying. So there is something, I think, about the music that really reaches and goes beyond the lyrics.

LK: There are a lot of options for night life in Vancouver. Why should the average person on the street go and see Somos Collective instead of going dancing or going to a show at the or something like that?

CG: The reason you should come hear us is that it’s fun and it’s actually – a lot of Latin bands who play in town, most of them play mostly Cuban music, and it’s kind of stale Cuban music, more New York kind of style. Somos Collective takes a little bit from that, but it’s not the usual kind of Latin band that you would hear in Vancouver …. So that’s one of the great things about the band, is that it incorporates a lot of things from Latin America, so we are not just playing Cuban music, which is what most people know — “oh yeah, Cuban music, oh yeah, salsa.” It’s beyond that, but it’s still fun, it’s still really fresh and energetic.

And it doesn’t matter if you know how to dance or not. That’s another thing people are always worried about. You just go, and you can dance – it’s a very relaxed atmosphere; different from what you would get in other environments.

LK: What’s in the future for the band?

CG: Keep growing. We want to play as many festivals as we can, so having gotten in to the Vancouver International Jazz Festival is huge, because it’s one of the biggest festivals in Canada besides and Toronto.

***

You can see Somos Collective live at the Backstage Lounge on Granville Island on Friday, March 26th, or later this summer at the . Head to the band’s website or to hear some of their music.

To download an MP3 of the whole interview, click here (17MB, roughly 18 minutes).

]]> http://thethunderbird.ca/2010/03/21/somos-collective-qa/feed/ 0 http://thethunderbird.ca/2010/03/17/fan-death-review/ http://thethunderbird.ca/2010/03/17/fan-death-review/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:36:43 +0000 Lewis Kelly http://thethunderbird.ca/?p=8391 Vancouver’s Fan Death, composed of Dandilion Wind Opain and Marta Jacuibek-McKeever, is named after the bizarre South Korean fear of sleeping in a room with a fan running and dying of suffocation. The band’s recently-released EP, A Coin For The Well, is suffused with just that sort of macabre, irrational tone. As the music video for “Cannibal” illustrates, the album is alternately bizarre, depressing, or both.

Unfortunately, like the disco the group so stridently adopts, the record also peaks early and falls off precipitously. The opening track, “Reunited,” offers just enough to pique your interest – strings in sync with synthesizers, cryptic lyrics, and a pace just a few notches below “danceable.” Then comes “Cannibal,” with its magnificent, soaring violin riffs, and driving drums.

It’s easily the strongest song on the album, especially since the final three songs don’t offer much. This trio of tracks is burdened by boring string riffs and nonchalant vocal delivery. The two combine to lull the listener into a stupor, reversible only with aide from known, reliable stimulants.

Mannequin, lead singer, or both? Dandilion Wind Opain lets you decide.

With their supremely confident, cooler-than-thou attitude and recent signing to Last Gang Records, Fan Death are generating a lot of buzz. In fact, some people are calling them the next MGMT or Crystal Castles . I’m not convinced – if they pump more “Cannibal” and less “Son Will Rise” into their full-length début, which comes out in May, they might well grow beyond the indie scene. If not, they might end up as the next Ark of Infinity .

“Who?”

Precisely.

***

Listen to  “Cannibal” and “Reunited” on Fan Death’s MySpace page and then leave a comment to tell me how wrong I am.

Don’t tell anyone, but right now you’re using a great tool for getting free music.

Though it’s no secret that you can use your computer to illegally download music through programs like LimeWire, I’ve always thought using those services was like eating a tuna sandwich you found in a public bathroom – yeah, you do get a free sandwich, but you also run the risk of picking up any number of interesting and educational viruses.

Delicious, but deadly? Photo courtesy Dave Lifson.

There’s a way to avoid all those trips to the doctor’s office, though: podcasts. A ton of free music is legally available to download through iTunes or directly from the web. Best of all, you can load them onto your hard drive or MP3 player directly, so your listening isn’t tethered to your internet connection or your computer, as it is when streaming from Last.fm or a band’s MySpace page.

“But wait!” you cry. “All these podcasts are cumbersome, unwieldy files, full of songs I don’t want and annoying radio personalities exhorting me to kick it Old School. I find that offensive!”

“Ah,” I reply, “with the aide of some free audio-editing software and about thirty seconds of training, you can snip those unwanted bits from your audio file and be on your merry way with precisely the music you want in an MP3 file, completely free of adware, viruses, or anything resembling Jeff O’Neill.”

You also won’t have paid a cent, which is kind of problematic from a business perspective.

But you might not want to start placing big money with your bookie on a Napster-style crackdown on music podcasts in the recent future. A little while ago, I asked Mark MacArthur of CBC Radio 3 – a man who, as a producer and music programmer, makes podcasts professionally – if CBC cared about making so much music available for free.

“Not really,” he said. MacArthur argued that even the hassle of opening up an audio file, making one or two cursory edits, and exporting as an MP3 is enough to deter most people from pirating music like this.

I’m not convinced he’s right. Learning to use audio editing software in this fashion isn’t much more complicated than using BitTorrent to download District 9 or Avatar.

On the other hand, I’m not sure what podcast producers like Radio 3 ought do about it. Sure, they could go all Ubisoft and create a draconian, cumbersome anti-pirate program that inconveniences five legitimate users for every thief it deters, but … well, it would be draconian and cumbersome.

Excepting Lars Ulrich , who wants that?

So in a roundabout way, I support MacArthur’s position. Podcast piracy could become a problem for the music industry in the future, but the list of potential solutions is a short one, and for now there are bigger pirate-fish to fry.

Maybe the best we can hope for is that it’ll remain an an obscure, unspoken secret, like the real story behind Van Halen‘s famous “no brown M&Ms in the dressing room” contract clause, or the real identity of Elvis.

Dead, or living in a rest home as his own impersonator? Photo courtesy of Ariela Beal.

I won’t tell if you don’t.

Brasstronaut is currently touring North America in promotion of their recently released debut LP, Mount Chimaera. I called lead singer and keyboardist Edo Van Breemen

while the band was driving to a gig at the Red Dog in Peterborough, Ontario to get the inside scoop.

[Please note, the following transcript has been edited for brevity. For an audio recording of the whole interview, see the bottom of this post.]

Brasstronaut plays the Astoria Hotel in Vancouver. Photo courtesy Steve Louie Photography.

Lewis Kelly: Brasstronaut has a really unusual, remarkable sound. Where does it come from?

Edo Van Breemen: I think it’s just like how any other band would write, but we might not use the traditional instruments for an indie rock band. But at our heart, the band is a pop band or an experimental pop band …. We’re drawing from a lot of different places, and that’s why you get something special when you have six people putting that together.

LK: I’ve read that you guys decided to re-record a lot of the material that’s on Mount Chimaera after you had originally cut it at the Banff Centre. What was it like to throw away all that hard work?

EVB: It was a tough decision, I think, because we all wanted the album to come out in the summer, and then we pushed it back to the fall, that didn’t happen. We wanted to feel really confident about what we were putting out …. It was just admitting to ourselves that this was something we had to work on a lot more.

LK: Do you think the album is better because you did it?

EVB: Completely. We would never dare to put out what we came away with immediately from the Banff Centre.

LK: How do you feel the new album compares with your début EP?

EVB: I think it’s a lot deeper, it’s more complex, it’s actually representative of a band playing together, versus, you know, me and Bryan [Davies, who plays trumpet and flugelhorn] together, writing songs and then having extra musicians come along. We’ve grown to a full band now, something much bigger than we could have ever imagined. It’s got a lot more depth, I think.

LK: For the stuff on Mount Chimaera, did you guys start [the writing] from music, or did you start from words?

EVB: All music, yeah. Always music, that’s the way that I write, and then lyrics are placed in.

LK: Most artists – or at least singer-songwriters – start from words and then go to music. How do you think that changes the nature of your sound?

EVB: I see the song as a template for a mood or a feeling, or some sort of experience in my life, and then I just plug in the lyrics accordingly. When I think of instrumental compositions, I have very visual connotations, and usually I can attach that to some kind of experience or theme that I can write lyrics for.

LK: For a band named Brasstronaut, you guys have Bryan, who plays trumpet and flugelhorn – that’s still just one guy, though. Fewer brass elements than someone might expect. What’s the story behind the name of the band?

Horn player Bryan Davies pulls double-duty as a back-up singer at a Brasstronaut show at Great Northern Way Campus in February.

EVB: My ex-girlfriend Sally, who did the artwork on the new album, named it. She was going to Emily Carr [University] at the time, and she’s a big fan of Japandroids. She said “why don’t you have a compound-word name, like Japandroids?” I was going out of my mind trying to come up with a name for this band, and she just suggested Brasstronaut. I think another one we were going to use was Brass Antlers, but I think Brasstronaut was a bit more fluid.

***

Head to Brasstronaut‘s website to hear three tracks from Mount Chimaera. For more of their music, you can also go to the band’s MySpace page or their CBC Radio 3 artist profile.

Click here to hear the full-length interview (14 minutes).