New York – I sat down for burritos in the Lower East Side with Montreal atmospheric electronic outfit Seoul before their show at Elvis Guesthouse celebrating the release of their debut LP I Become A Shade. We talked about the Montreal music scene, the importance of creative presentation, and when not to listen to their album.
RH: You’ve just released the LP I Become A Shade. Where did you guys come up with that as an LP name?
Julian Lanvin: Well, it was actually in a book, a short story, called The Dead [by James Joyce], and there’s this really shitty moment in it near the end, where the guy is kind of like stumbling home drunk after a Christmas party and he doesn’t say specifically that he’s becoming a shade but some kind of thing about people, like, becoming shades. And I don’t know. I think it’s just that we were writing music that felt like a lot of it had to do with, kind of losing perspective on yourself, and your situations, and on your friends, and having that happen often in kind of a city environment too. Where it happens and you’re kind of in this populated space and creates some sort of like, fading.
RH: Your music video [for single “Stay With Us”] is quite urban landscape oriented; it was shot in Tokyo, right? How did that end up happening?
JL: I had a friend in Vancouver who was shooting an ad for Nike in Tokyo and he had an advance copy of our album and he liked it. And he was having a weird time shooting this ad. And I guess at night he went out with a cinematographer and they just sort of started shooting things in an improvised kind of way, based off our song “Stay With Us”. We didn’t even know they were doing it at all until they sent us an email one day that was like hey, what do you think of this, and we still hadn’t released any of the songs off the album and we were kind of like, oh shit.. It was a little funny because we had already called ourselves Seoul, and it was a video shot in Tokyo and like with the name Seoul we weren’t trying to be appropriating stuff with an overly Asian influence like that so it was kind of a little weird that the Tokyo got included, but it was a happy accident and it was just too right for the music to let [the Tokyo idea] go.
RH: Yeah I’ve seen the video, it really does quite fit your aesthetic.
JL: Yeah, it helped us figure out what we wanted to say in a way too, cause like the music was already written, but we hadn’t started doing photos, posters, all that sort of image stuff.
RH: Yeah, because you guys took a few years from when you started to come out and say this is our LP, we’re going on tour, etc… I read an interview where you were talking about the importance of presentation as a whole. What do you think is important when it comes to representing yourselves and your band?
JL: I think one big thing is that we wanted to produce a world for people and make the music just like, a starting point for it, and kind of like dive into more than just the songs. Just cause like most of the time we’re putting our stuff on the Internet, which is mostly visual. Like, you see an image before you click on a link or something. It just seemed like such an obvious opportunity to kind of up the ante to present more art than what your original purpose was, which was purely music.
RH: You guys bedroom-recorded your album. How do you feel you translate that towards a live performance, which is quite different?
Dexter Garcia: It’s a big project, cause like you enable these sounds to develop in a very small, controlled space and then you’re bringing the recordings to [the venue]. We really didn’t want to use a computer. And in the sense that it would really be fairly easy to recreate live recordings if we just played them off the computer. But I think the live setup is a new state to sort of re-imagine the songs in a way, and it’s nice playing real synths, real bass, real guitar, having real drums onstage; just sometimes we can’t necessarily recreate so we have samples that we work with.. But yeah it’s been a fun new project taking those songs from the recordings and giving them a new.. like the ideas are the same but a new take on it, a new shade of song, per se…….
RH: How did the three of you link up in terms of making music together
JL: So, Nigel and I have known each other since we were like four. we started playing music when we were 12 I guess probably. We saw a cover band at our junior high school who were covering Nirvana and I don’t know, I’m still trying to pinpoint why it was so epic.. I just guess I hadn’t seen someone make that kind of epic, poised sound… and then them being a year older than us we were just like, oh shit..
RH: I want to be them!
JL: Yeah. So I got some drums, Nigel got a guitar and we just played Nirvana for a long time….
RH: What made you decide to shift into the more electronic spectrum?
JL: Nigel and I eventually kind of started making kind of like soft rock/jazz/adult contemporary music, we recorded a full album back then, and then you get a lot more close to electronic sounds.
RH: What’s the electronic scene like in Montreal?
JL: Right now it’s really cool, there’s a lot of really cool weird like techno and house actually, but yeah just like cool festivals there too.
RH: Do you feel very inspired by Montreal? Or what kind of cities are your favourites or taken inspiration from?
JL: One thing is that we all grew up in much smaller places, so Montreal represents something kind of bigger to us. I feel like it was just sort of, moving away from home for the first time. And [Dexter and Nigel] lived in Boston for school.. I feel like it’s just sort of the subtle experience of that and just having that [urban landscape] be the sort of consistent backdrop to those experiences.
RH: Yeah definitely, the environment you’re in is a huge influence, how do you feel like Boston was different to Montreal in that sense?
DG: It’s different, it’s pretty centered around a more hardcore scene, which is sweet, but just at the time when we were going to school we were more making electronic music. However, it was nice to have that bit of perspective, going to like, local house shows where it was mostly noise rock, and have that kind of radically different perspective.
RH: You all write lyrics right?
DG: Sometimes we collaborate on lyrics, which is cool, and it’s really helpful to have two other people that you trust that are also critically thinking about your songwriting, and I guess we’re all pretty down for our ideas to be open for discussion..
JL: Like what rhymes with shoe? Blue! Oh my god perfect.
RH: I read somewhere else where you were talking about how different ideas stem from a sort of emotional thought or something like that. Is that what you seek to represent on your album, a deeper emotional appeal that can sort of appeal to anyone that’s really listening to it?
JL: Yeah.
RH: It’s very soundtrack-y. If you could soundtrack to anything what would it be?
DG: Like a web-cam of some random person in the world on rollerblades.
JL: A precarious rollerblader, navigating the city.. I feel like we were trying to create a more banal, in-between moment, a musical voice trying to infuse potentially meaningless things with meaning and kind of observe them that way and I feel like that’s maybe why the album would feel like it resonates on sort of a more emotional level. Like somebody who’s having a really blah day, and they feel kind of existentially approved of through the music.
RH: Where do you envision your music being played?
Nigel Ward: Mostly night vibes.
JL: Some strong night vibes, maybe early morning.. Not really too sunny, not really a noon hour. If you’re lying in the middle of the highway, sun beating, you’re naked, that’s like the worst time… never do that.
Catch Seoul on tour across both Canada and the United States this autumn (you can purchase advance tickets here), and read BestNewBand’s review of their LP Release show here. You can also order their album, out on Grand Jury via the band’s website.
Ruby Hoffman
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