zion

A Silver Mt. Zion - March 2k4 - Lyon (F)

The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tralala Band With Choir

-Where does the name Silver Mount Zion come from ? Any biblical influence (Mount Zion, place of Last Supper, highest point in Jerusalem, etc…)

-(Ian) I guess so, although neither of us came up with the name. I am sure the reference must be to Mount Zion on some level. I am not sure why Silver though, maybe you know?

-(Thierry) No, I don't actually…

-The name has evolved over the four releases. Why the change in name: A Silver Mount Zion, then The Silver Mount Zion etc.

-(Ian) Well, the first name change was more than just the article, there was a longer extension. I think that just reflected the larger membership in the band. With the second record, the band expanded from three to six so there was a very direct reference to an orchestra, tralala band, a little bit more singing. On the third record there's a choir involved, at least on the recording. So it's all pretty literal although it does seem like there is a conscious effort. I mean right now, I feel that every record will have some variation on the band name. I think that's also, on some level although a reduced one, just making it clear that the project is reinventing itself on some level with every record. I think it's also on a smaller level a "fuck you" to journalists who are trying to pin a band down. There is definitely something very mildly petulent, intentionally petulent, about long song titles, long album titles and so on. That will be a much smaller issue, but certainly one that I think is kind of playful. It's amazing how many people don't see that as being playful and just see it as being willfully pretentious.

-The last album is entitled The Silver Mountain Reveries, same idea?

-(Ian) Same thing. It was a different process surrounding the making of that record. Really only three of the six members play on it. It was much more of a studio effort. I think also that the songs came to be in a pretty different way process-wise. They are much more almost mystical and very vocal-driven. I think the production value on that EP as well gesture towards something a bit more dreamlike than the other records. I think the "reveries" just refer to how provisional a process it was. There were studio sketches where it was unclear whether Efrim and Thierry and Jessica at any point along the way were sure that they were going to remain sketches and become templates to a further record or if in fact by the time that they got worked over everyone was happy with how they sounded. Does that sound fair?

-(Thierry) Yeah.

-You are all members of several other projects. How do you manage your time/inspirations amongst these ?

-(Thierry) Projects start up and stop like people band-rehearse for a record or tour and make the record or go on the tour. There is inevitably a break between projects, whether between GYBE or other projects that people are straggling. There is an effort for this band to make it a more permanent band. There are bands that just put together a set for a tour and stop, and there are bands that practice constantly regardless of whether or not there is an agenda. I think that was discussed a while ago, our desires expressed. I think people find time, compromise.

-(Ian) Yeah, I think it is always a process of negotiation, depending on what people have on the go and it's not just band commitments necessarily either. There are people in this band that have work commitments or whatever else. While we are mostly in the fortunate position to be able to book off large amounts of time to pursue this as our vocation, some more than others, there are all kinds of things that need to get negotiatied. But it is true that through the history of this band, up until this past fall, it was very much seen as something that got fit in between, in particular Godspeed's schedule, which takes up the time of three of the six members. So in the last year, as that band has been on hiatus, it was pretty obvious that there was the willingness to have this band move forward in terms of the time commitment and the amount of work we were going to put in to rearrange songs for the tour. We started rehearsing in the beginning of September, knowing that we wouldn't be on the road until February and hoping that we would write a little bit of new stuff along the way. We knew that we all wanted to sing and that we needed to revisit some of these songs in a pretty radical way to reinvent them or reinterpret them for the stage. It seems like it's in six-month doses that people can project ahead and figure out. I wanted Thierry to answer this question first 'cause he plays in like twenty different things, although a lot of them are Montreal based. Like free-jazz, you just show up and play, they don't necessarily require a whole lot of prerehearsal. But we don't know where it'll go after this summer in terms of this band versus others.

-What about your other project re : ? Do you plan to release anything else ?

-(Ian) I hope so. That project is incredibly easy to manage timewise because there is a five-hour drive between the two cities where the two of us live. We will get together three weekends out of a year. We don't do file exchange, it doesn't happen in a virtual space at all. We don't like working that way. So we hold ourselves up for maybe two or three days here and there. That's why it takes so much tiime in between records. But we do have a something that's pretty close to being finished and I think we are happy with it so we'll see. It's a project that's way more motivated by friendship and the desire to explore what the technology range can do. The fact of something sounding actually finished enough to release is always a question that gets put off. I hope, I think, in the next year.

-You're quite a busy man with Constellation as well.

-(Ian) It' s a day job! Yeah, it's busy.

-Thierry, you record and mix Fly Pan Am. Do you do it because you're friends?

-(Thierry) Yeah, we're buddies. I enjoy recording them. They generally know what they want to do and they generally know how they want stuff to sound, which is sometimes frustrating, 'cause generally I have an entirely different idea of how the product should end up sounding. It's a fun, interesting little exercise. Their sounds are great, beautiful, strangely minimal and complicated at the same time.

-(Ian) …and Thierry does an awesome job recording that band..

-(Thierry) Thank you…

-(Ian) We can just compliment each other for the rest of the interview (laughter).

-One of the reasons for forming ASMZ was to play with a smaller group than Godspeed. ASMZ is now a six-member group whereas GYBE has nine members. Why this evolution? How do the dynamics of ASMZ differ from Godspeed's?

-(Thierry) I think this is another Efrim question, but I think it was more than just wanting to play with less people than Godspeed.

-(Ian) Yeah, we've had that question a few times and I have to apologise for the website. The introduction to the band on the Constellation site was written in 1999, when the first record was made which it was clearly a far more intimate process. That was really our interpretation, it wasn't a sentence out of Efrim's or anyone else's mouth at the time. It seems that it was at least one of the efforts. I think it was mostly to try, and this is from an outside observer, on that first record, I mean there is something more stripped down about it, the juxtaposition of notes and the intimacy of the compositions and we're talking about a record that doesn't have a lot of vocals. The first record is largely an instrumental record but is much more willfully about exploring one or two recurring musical themes. It's a thematic record in a way, that Godspeed when they assemble that sequence, and I can only say this as a listener, as an objective set of ears, there was no clear idea with the first record what order the songs would appear in, but there was clearly an effort to bring back certain themes and have it flow in a particular way. I think that now, more and more, it's not so much about the number of players but rather much more about rounding around a whole different way of writing songs and increasingly those that involve vocals. It's also playing acoustic instruments more, even though they are amplified.

-You use a choir/vocals on this record more than any other. On the first record the vocals can almost resemble field recordings or samples at times, now it is more singing along with lyrics. Do you consider it simply as another instrument?

-(Ian) I thinks vocals motivate the songwriting more and more. On This Is Our Punk-Rock, the last full length, by and large, it was still the music than came first, although, in the case of the choir, it was something obviously deliberatley composed for voice, for amateur voices, for a large group of friends to sing. A lot of the songs still started in the rehearsal space with riffs, movements etc. It was clear that there were going to be vocals in different places but I would say that the vocal melodies, the placement of the vocals and whether it was going to be solo voice or double voice or whatever, are things that evolved kind of like an instrumental: introducing another "voice" in the broad sense on the term. With the new EP it is unclear how this would necessarily work with a larger band as opposed to something that just gets built up in the studio as test recordings. To my ears, and I don't play on this new EP so it's easy for me to have some distance, it seems to be sketches that are motivated or laid down by vocals first and foremost. The arrangement of stuff around it has a lot to do with where the voice, or vocal melody or vocal phrasing is already. We don't play any instrumental songs anymore. We've got nine or ten different songs. We'll play six or seven of these on any given night. There isn't a single song that is strictly instrumental. We do have one which is a version of a choir piece on the last record that we just haven't been really happy with. There is definitely a feeling in the band that it'll be nice to have just one chunk where we could give our voices a rest because none of us are trained singers. I think this is really the first time for most of us that we've been on mike a lot, Thierry and Efrim in particular. That's most likely the future of whatever incarnation or name of the future Silver Mount Zion projects. And again, that comes from Efrim who, I think, is pretty determined to continue writing lyrics and singing. I think he is evolving into a pretty strong lyricist and that he's gaining a lot of confidence. I would imagine that he'll want to continue pursuing that.

-Your live debut was March 1999 during the Musiques Fragiles Fest. The album was recorded November 1999 and released only in March 2000. Was the intent to keep the band alive present at the time?

-(Thierry) There was definitely a desire to form a band and record. I don't think it was in any way, I'm positive for everyone, a fleeting little sidebar. It was really a band.

-(Ian) The piece you played at the Musiques Fragiles was basically the anchor for the record. If I remember correctly, the big descending scale stuff on piano, the bass and violin, that was basically one seamless thirty-minute performance with one of the tape loops with the low hum, that was in there already at the time the first record was recorded. There was a piano at the loft where we lived at the time so Efrim played piano at that show and Thierry played acoustic bass, there was a reel-to-reel tape player going. I don't even remember there being a long gap between that performance and when you started recording stuff.

-(Thierrry) Neither do I actually.

-(Ian) I don't know what dates are listed on the site. I guess when you guys went on tour and came back with that board and tape deck. That's what made it happen. That was really the first thing that really got recorded at the hotel. The Hotel2Tango which was still doing live shows at the time. It has since evolved into a really nice, simple, great sounding studio, 24-Track board and tape deck, lots of really good mikes. Not a lot of fancy bells and whistles beyond that. At the time, there was just an 8-track tape deck and that's what the first album was recorded on. It was really the first thing that got done there, I think.

-(Thierry) The Molasses first record got done there before that, on 4-track… and stereo speakers.

-(Ian) I guess technically the Exhaust cassette was recorded up there, directly to mikes, but as part of the real studio environment that was kind of the first thing.

-(Thierry) Once there was a compressor…(laughter)

-One of your pieces is entitled " Movies Never Made ". You do not use images/projections during your performances, why? Do you want to have a more active audience, forming their own visual interpretation of your music?

-(Ian) I don't know. Actually, there was a brief period last fall when we were talking about having some visual element although I don't think it was ever going to be films. It was more having slides for each song, one image per song. I guess there clearly wasn't a strong feeling that it was a necessity, particularly as the vocal element evolved. So yeah, I think there's a certain kind of intimacy and a certain kind of connection with the audience that, coming from the context of Godspeed or any other band that is used to making purely instrumental music, is a change for everybody. We don't run any compressors, we don't run any EQ on the board and the mikes are all very active and can pretty much stay up and stay on. The effort is to make it as unfettered or unmediated a sound as possible. I hope that all of that sonically contributes to a sense that there is always detail to listen for and that there is something that is obviously less explicitely grandiose about the sound that we are making. I think that thematically on a lot of levels, we are actually striving on a whole other level fairly high, with respect to narrative. Whereas Godspeed has always felt like a sonic exsperience enhanced by some degree of narrative coming from the visuals or from the films. I think that this band doesn't necessarily need that. In fact, if anything, it might be a distraction. If we would talk about it now, three weeks in to our tour having played a dozen and a half shows, we'd all probably feel that had we brought the slide projetor with us, had that idea gone through, we would probably have abandoned it after the first couple of shows. We might have realised it was superfluous. That's speculation, but thus far we feel that we have fairly nice, intimate interactions with the crowd. We're not chatting with them constantly throughout the performance, but I think people realise that this is not an instrumental band anymore and that there is a lot of singing happening, that there is a human element to it. Perhaps, and this is only a theory of mine about Godspeed, one of the efforts with the films is to humanise on some level, or contextualise the songs that are purely instrumental. Even if a lot of those images aren't of people, some of the images are and those that aren't certainly speak of urban space, of humanised or de-humanised space. I think imagery will continue to be very important for the records, although you can see for both the last EP and the last record, there is almost a de-emphasis on excessive visual content, at least with the cover. There is actually an effort to make the cover just a lot more flat and then allow more of that imagery to inside. I'm realising now that with Punk-Rock there is actually a 12-page booklets so there's plenty of images in there. I mean the cover images in particular on the last two records seem to be almost intentionally de-emphisising any particularly forceful image to associate with the music.

-How involved are you in the creation of the artwork for the Constellation CDs?

-(Ian) I'm involved in how they look, the bands exclusively provide the imagery. We are never actually really designing, beyond the technical issues of: we don't want to do jewel cases, we're not interested in four colour insert cards necessarily. We talk with the new bands that we work with. Most are usually familiar with how we work, not just ethically and economically, but also with respect to packaging and artwork. Those who are not can quickly take a look at our back catalogue. One of the first things we'll put on the table is: think about how you might want to render something because for us, the texture and the process of actually realising a cover is just as important. If they have a bunch of images in front of them they start to pick out the ones they realise could look really good as a foil print, those that could look really good as a silk screen, those that could look really good as a sepia tone or whatever. It's really more just helping people fit into the frame as well as trying to research new possibilities if people come up with things that they'll like to try and do. As far as the actual content goes, if anything, while there is obviously a template and there are certain technics we've used recurrently so there is some identity to the packaging. The last thing we would ever want to do is to make it look like it's formatted visually or from a design element. We do want everything to look like it's part of a catalogue on some level, but we also want the bands to determine ultimately pretty much all the visual content. Our function at that point is just pretty technical.

-How is the tour going so far? Response from the audience etc.

-(Thierry) It's been extremely positive, it's been wonderful, even on nights where we feel like we're sucking, which happens every now and then, on any given tour. People have been very receptive to it all. Even when you are uncertain on stage, when you're selling merchandise you get showered with just compliments, compliments. I think things on that level are going pretty well.

-(Ian) I think we probably expected that the music we are making now to devide audiences a lot more than maybe it has. It's never really clear at the end of the show, when we are standing on stage with lights shining into our eyes, whether one out of ten people or one out of five has left. What is happening very consistently at shows is that people are extremely silent. However small or large the number of people who are enjoying it or who want to keep paying attention is, they seem to be ruling the atmosphere of the room. You can't ask for more than that. If half the people are disappointed by, I don't know, the lack of ragga moment or more amateur singing than they expected or whetever else, at the very least, we're not finding that they are all clicking their glasses and talking at the back of the room, which makes a huge difference. It does seem like that pretty much, without fail, and we've been playing generally more intimate rooms than those Thierry would have been used to in the last couple of tours with Godspeed. You naturally attract the people who want to be there, whether the show has sold out in advance or not. In Paris, the show sold out quite far in advance and there were people who were saying that we should have played a room twice as big. I'm glad we didn't. I think two things end up happening in that case: one, especially the first time out with this incarnation of the band, the people who are really fans to begin with are the first ones to get tickets and you don't get a lot of "tourists", ie those who come to the show because it is the concert to be at that night and just start talking if they don't like it. That's something you get a lot of in North America. Fifty hipsters on the guest list who never really listen, so I'm glad that those people are getting routed out. It also meant that we were playing a smaller room, 300-400 room capacity as opposed to 700-800 which I think makes a huge difference to the intimacy of our playing as well. There was great energy in a lot of rooms that we've played in so far.

-You've played quite often with Frankie Sparo, why didn't he come along for this tour?

-(Ian) We decided pretty early on that we were going to come over on our own and basically the van is full already and we can't afford to rent two vans for this tour. So it was the choice between bringing a solo guy or a sound guy. It's pretty important to have the sound guy that we have. It wasn't really an option, although we had a really good time touring with him, I'm glad that happened. A number of the Mount Zion players adding pretty nice arrangements to a lot of his songs.

-What do you think of the opening acts you've had so far ?

-(Thierry) We haven't had many.

-Tonight Alexandre Pax is opening up for you, how do you feel about having something completely different from you opening up?

-(Ian) Better that than having someone who got the opening slot because they sound like... I'd rather that it was different. I don't know, what do you think Thierry ?

-(Thierry) I generally like it when it's different. I think Ian is right.

-(Ian) A lot of the local promoters as well musicians that may have been in attendance in the different cities saw the show. I think if we were to go out on tour again in a year's time, after this tour, there might be a totally different understanding of what would make sense as an opening band. I'm not sure that a lot of promoters or local club owners booking this tour were expecting what we're doing on stage, especially with the vocal element and kind of a weird, american folk, almost history on some level that we're trying to address in places. It's a way more "modernist" approach to composition. I think that if people saw us three years ago when we were doing almost exclusively instrumental stuff, it would have been a lot easier for them to say that we were like Godspeed junior, so they would have just kept looking for other instrumental bands or people that are really excited to open for a Godspeed-related band etc. to open for us. On this tour, the band has established itself as a much more distinct entity. I think that maybe it'll change if we were to go out again soon. I didn't mind at all the band that opened for us in Paris, Rosika. I've always been a fan of Mathrock. I'm not sure it was all that well suited to what we were doing in terms of setting the atmosphere, but once we took the stage there was no problem to clear and start fresh.In London, we had the same band for both nights. What was nice is that it wasn't a band from London, but a band that came down from Liverpool, which was cool. It was exciting for them too, they just travelled to do it. They were a bit more, you know, everything-in-its-place, middle-of-the-road, country-influenced pop. They were all nice guys, big band, eight or nine people. Where it's possible for the promoter to put a local band on the bill and get them some exposure, I think we're all behind that, as long as it doesn't mean that we have to go on at midnight. There's obviously something nice about playing your own show. It's been a pretty decent balance on this tour I'd say, about half and half. We never know who's going to open up for us.