What happens when what you create is changed in order to be shown to others? What kind of link to you have with your songs, your writings or your belongings when they’ve been moulded by other minds, touched by strange hands?
This coming Thursday, band Kill the Lights will be launching an EP of old songs which a big label got its greasy paws on, a few years ago. Frontman Alex Hackett had a little something to say about it.
We went to the Saint-Michel flea market.
Somewhere between the amateur taxidermy, the ancient radios and the surreal relics of eras past, there was a concept that supported our forthcoming Pink Dog EP.
We walked through the stalls and picked up old rifles, leafed through crates of ‘50’s vinyl, popped World War II helmets on to our heads. There were clusters of old chandeliers dangling like glowing foliage, there were whacked-out old board games and some of the strangest posters we’d ever seen.
Modern detritus. The cast off. The underdog object, still going, still in circulation. The abandoned thing nudged into the present.
A flea market is a time warp. You get a sense of the intimacy of the past. Not the dusty theoretical past, but real things that real people used, touched, altered and eventually cast off. You get a sense of the identity of former owners, of past tastes and trends and ideas.
A collision of eras, a mash-up of chronology. Just like music.
The French thinker Jacques Attali claims that the only thing all music has in common is that it’s an attempt to give structure to noise. Musicians take noise in its raw form and mold it into something different, something manageable.
Operas, ragas, hymns, fugues, arias, passages, soundscapes, pop songs – all a form of noise molded according to prevailing cultural tendencies and with God-knows-what impetus. Throw Time into the mix of course, as a fundamental component of the structure.
My band Kill The Lights is a noisy band. We always have been and likely will continue to be. Not being virtuoso musicians, we started out playing a frantic brand of post-punk. It’s a typical rookie mistake – to make up with volume levels what you lack in skill and dynamic.
But that was already a few years back. A funny thing happens when you play a lot. You get better. You start to think about structure. You start to think about tempo and dynamic.
We were all pretty obsessed with these themes when, having survived our first album Buffalo of Love and the tours that came with it, we hunkered down to craft our second album.
I don’t know exactly what the prevailing feelings were anymore. But it was something like an attempt to slow our songs down, to play with less energy, to pack more of an emotional punch. We called the album Fog Area and we were pleased with how it turned out.
In between the two albums, we had continued to record. What we initially got down never made it onto Fog Area. We were in no rush to get that album out, we really took our time digesting and thinking about the material we wanted to craft. The whole aim of the project changed, as projects tend to do.
So we were left with a bunch of orphans and bastard children. Songs and outtakes that existed in a strange interstice. At first we didn’t know what to make of them. They were weird, they didn’t fit, we didn’t recognize ourselves in them. Different producers had worked on the songs and there was no unifying aesthetic.
But finally we couldn’t deny the pride we took in our paternity.
A music career – especially in this day and age, especially in Montréal where everyone and their grandmother is in a band, where cross-pollination is not a passing fancy but a fact that speaks to an over-arching idea of community – is not something one should take too seriously, or attempt to control too strictly.
Pink Dog is a pawn-shop, a peaceful offering, a document of time and structure. We love the fact that a song like Terrible Death, a kind of intergalactic electro death-march, now rubs shoulders with Paint Your Eyes, Susan – a frail, reverby slice of shoegaze.
Pink Dog is our flea market – structure through chaos, glimmers of value from cluttered and dusty corners.
Pink Dog available June 8th on Bonsound Records, launch Thursday June 10th at Il Motore with The Dryheaves. Kill the Lights will also be playing Fringe Pop June 18th at Parc des Amériques.
by Alexander Hackett / photos Jose Enrique Montes Hernandez
