We received an invitation to an apartment building, somewhere in the Mile End, but they omitted to tell us which door to ring. Happily, a small group of people came out and asked us: “Are you here for the interview?” Yes. Are you the band? “Nah, we’re just friends. Ring number 10.”
They welcomed us into their small but elegantly decorated apartment with cups of green tea. This is Blue Hawaii’s house, but it’s also a little bit where everyone in the neighborhood seems to end up, including Pop Winds, who are dropping by a little later.
They seem to be pretty close, all these Arbutus label bands. Blue Hawaii’s Alex tells us: “The label rose out of this lost space that my brother and I had, called Lab Synthèse. It was operating for two years up until last fall. Out of that, a lot of bands became our friends. It went down hill because of a lot of problems with the city and the police. We decided to form this record label to keep things together.”
In the meantime, people come in and out of the apartment, friends and neighbors. Everyone seems to live around here, and there’s an atmosphere of slippers and small community. It feels good.
Blue Hawaii’s music is primarily electronic, but they work hard to make their songs stand alone, avoiding to be overly dependent on technology. And here we have an acoustic, spare version of a usually far more densely arranged song. “At the beginning, this song was an upbeat computer song, with midi sounds. [...] It was originally super dancy, and we took it apart, and it became really ambient and slow. [...] We went to Guatemala for two months together, and we got samples of kids playing soccer and fireworks, and we put tons of reverb and delay on those, and compressed the whole song. Yesterday, we got excited that “Felix wants us to do this acoustic thing!” so we came up with this arrangement.”
I’m telling myself that despite the marked contrast between this performance and Blue Hawaii’s usual sound, open-minded neophytes won’t feel cheated, far from it. Their album launch will certainly please all kinds of people. “Everybody is crossing a lot of boundaries in terms of genre, claims Hawaii singer Raphaelle. You still have the die-hard folk fans who just want to see guitar, but I think it’s loosening up quite a bit.”
Pop Winds, who’ve been comfortably sitting with us for a while now, are also launching an album next Friday. The biographical notes they have on the Arbutus site mentions that their creative process involves “life threatening musical experiences…
“Yes, like playing music for a long time, say like under the influence of certain substances and being lost in the room, or in the music. There are certain crises; states of terror, irrational dispositions.”
It’s true that hallucinogenics can be somewhat of a risky experience. Sometimes you build your little world, and you can try to make it fit with someone else’s, but either it works, or it doesn’t. And you try not to be too dramatic about it.
“And the music has its own life, and it can be scary, or not… Taking drugs and making music were a big part of my life last year, but this year, not at all.”
What should we talk about now? “The future”, suggest Blue Hawaii, but Pop Winds answer first: “We want to record sooner than we did last time, because the stuff off this album dates back to August 2009, and we didn’t record for a long time until we had a bunch of songs ready. Hopefully in the next month or so, we’ll be recording again, and it’ll sound very different.” Both comforting and a bit of a curve-ball, coming from a band that people are just beginning to talk about… Blue Hawaii also have some small revolutions in mind: “We want to experiment more with performance as an artistic form. Rather than just being vulnerable and up there, I want to create an atmosphere for the art to be delivered: a lot of blue stuff… Blue smoke. We started wearing blue eye shadow. And we got this blue guitar in Guatemala. It’s funny, it’s made in China.”
Pop Winds and Blue Hawaii are launching their albums simultaneously on Friday, May 14th, at 3655 St-Laurent, Loft 200, 9pm, with invited guests Silly Kissers (also on the Arbutus Records roster).
by Félix Dyotte / translation from French by Toby Cayouette
video by Anthony / Pop Winds pic by Emily Kai Bock / Blue Hawaii Pic by Alex Cowan
