Apr. 29, 2009 - Issue #706: Nevermore
The Famines: On the cutting edge
Cassette and 268 pages of context mark the second release from the Famines
VUE WEEKLY: This is a goldmine for liner-note junkies. Are you one of those guys who sits there with a record and reads everything that's there?
RAYMOND BIESINGER: With '60s bands, yes, because I've always been enamored with the Kinks' greatest hits album, and on the back there is a little series of paragraphs by each of the members and they're answering questions or providing anecdotes. And, honestly, this might be where the two things come together—there's a typeface that I use a great deal and all of my typeface work is basically cutting and pasting from sources, and I've been copying and pasting text from the cover of that for about seven years now. So I really like that—there's a band called the Creation and they just have the most horrible, vapid question and answer on the back. It's like, "What do you want to do with yourself," and the guy's like, "One million pounds," and "What's your favourite car?" and stuff like that.
So there's an appeal in that, but I think that this thing came from a different place where it's simply the urge to document this day, because the recording that was done was very rough and it was real. In my opinion it was a good recording in a few ways, energetic wise ... I think it was better as a document of a certain time or evidence of a certain time—and then the book thing, it just seemed natural to want to complement that and be like, OK, this is a slice of life, it's basically one take. Let's build upon that and see how descriptive we can make this thing be of a certain time and place.
VW: Context can be huge when it comes to interpreting an album.
RB: It was made three days before our actual debut and it's a very different band than it is currently and if anyone came into this expecting it to be what the Famines are right now, they would be very mistaken. But certainly the liner notes do a fantastic job of explaining what and why this thing is.
VW: This would be a great thing to have on just about every band, to see a band live now and then be able to go back and have this thing where you can say, "Wow, this is where this came from."
RB: I can understand all of it, absolutely, and this is where my history degree does a lot of talking. I mean that is my first love and documentation is a hobby of mine. We're going to go down to Calgary on the 30th and we're doing a live CJSW performance there and I thought how hilarious it would be if we came up with a new album titled April 30, 2009.
VW: That would be great. You guys should do that every now and then. Document the evolution of the band.
RB: With all the context. I would, however, the amount of labour that went into this was absolutely stunning. At one point it was three days straight where I had three people here helping me for seven hours a day, and then [artist] Josh Holinaty was here two days before that working exclusively on this and it came out to like 68 hours of hired help, and that doesn't account for any of my time.
VW: It says in the notes that you first talked about releasing this that night after we left.
RB: Garrett said that and, much like there are contradictions through other parts of the book, I don't remember it like that. I remember it coming up after we had listened to it online, and it's very rare that I listen to our band's recordings after they're made, but what was remarkable was when I heard this I actually felt really good about it. And I think that's probably when the discussion of, "Hmm, maybe we can make something out of this," started coming about. And certainly the concept for it didn't come until much later. As much as I'd like to say, "Oh, we had this fantastic idea to do this recording and document it extensively," that idea came a few months after the fact, I think.
VW: Were you keeping all of these details, keeping track of everything from day one?
RB: No. Beyond my regular, obsessive document keeping, no, we were not. It's amazing how much you can remember of a specific date, however, when you go back through it and you start dealing with the objects that participated in that day and your memory does start working. I was pretty stunned with how specific some people's recollections were. Garrett's is hilarious how he's riding his exercise bike and listening to Black Sabbath's "Snowblind." And some people might think that's fiction, but knowing him that's completely what he does.
VW: I love that you included all the little contradictions, because that's what is real. People have different perspectives on it.
RB: It's a microcosm of world history, essentially.
VW: What does this release capture of the band that's different from the first recording, the debut recording?
RB: When the band started we had eight songs and we chose the best four to put on the double seven-inch record and we did nothing but play those songs for four months, and then the moment the recording was done there were a few trips—I went to New York and Garrett did some travelling as well—and we suddenly realized that we had to turn everything into a coalescent set, so this is basically the first public performance of us doing any kind of set beyond a few songs strung together.
I think that it catches us not at our most proficient. The way that I play those songs on guitar is very different now. I've learned very quickly since then and I'm in one of those zones in my life on guitar that I've gotten to rarely in the past. There's a certain élan to it, or enthusiasm and a certain ferocity that is kind of surprising, and my voice is pretty broken, too.
One thing that we've found—because both Garrett and I in our past bands we were very much enthusiastic stage performers—we found that when we were in seclusion and writing a bunch of songs and trying to get the band in shape, we would eventually get down on ourselves because we would be playing for each other and there just wasn't a spark that was there sometimes. But we found that the moment even one or two people were in the studio visiting, a switch was turned and the songs got tighter and meaner and at the same time a little bit looser in some regards as well. But simply having one or two or three strangers around or an audience of any kind caused us to turn on in a way, and that's there and I don't know if the same thing would happen in our jam space now if someone came to visit us. But basically the four people in the room who weren't us were the equivalent of a hundred people.
VW: We all walked out of there blown away by the fact that you guys played as though you were onstage in front of a packed audience. The energy was incredible in that room.
RB: You guys were the largest audience we'd played for up to that point, so you may as well been Rexall Place packed.
VW: Why did you do this as a cassette?
RB: I've been thinking about this and if you have a hammer suddenly you see a lot of nails that need to be nailed in. Once we put out the double seven-inch we realized that we could put out cassettes as well. It's the same with the book-publishing house: the moment that you have a book-publishing house you realize that there are a hell of a lot of books to make. If we wanted to put these songs on a CD or a piece of vinyl, it would be incredibly expensive, but on a cassette you can afford to put out things a lot cheaper. And then the structure of the cassette is novel in a sense, and the moment I realized I could make a book that's exactly the same shape as a cassette, we knew that it was something that we wanted to do and we just needed to find the concept behind it. Being a purposeful band it seemed important that the liner notes were not just surrealist bunk and were in fact relevant to the recording. V
Thu, May 7 (8 pm)
The Famines
With The Wicked Awesomes, Michael Rault
Pawn Shop
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