Esmerine

Q&A: Esmerine

Esmerine: La LechuzaEsmerine: La Lechuza (Constellation, 6/7/11)

Esmerine: “A Dog River”

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Cello/percussion twosome Becky Foon and Bruce Cawdron, of Montreal’s Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra, began recording minimalist chamber music under the moniker Esmerine about a decade ago. Two instrumental albums and numerous (sometimes collaborative) performances later, the duo has doubled to include percussionist Andrew Barr and harpist Sarah Page and completed its third full-length album. Both developments can be attributed to the late Lhasa de Sela, a Montreal vocalist and common thread between all four band members.

Lhasa passed away due to breast cancer at the age of 37 on January 1, 2010, and in her remembrance, Esmerine created La Lechuza, a beautiful, moving album. With several guest artists (including Colin Steton, Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire, and Patrick Watson) and the addition of steel drums, violin, harp, and saxophone, La Lechuza is a testimony to Esmerine’s musical progression.

ALARM caught up with Foon, Esmerine’s cellist, to discuss the band’s expansion, its new record, and its inspiration.

What was the initial motivation to create your own musical project as Esmerine?

We (Becky and Bruce) met recording the first Set Fire To Flames record, Sings Reign Rebuilder, in 2001 and became really interested in exploring the world of cello and melodic percussion. Bruce and I started to improvise together quite a bit, which then naturally evolved into writing songs. About a year later, we decided to record our first record at the Hotel 2 Tango in Montreal.

During the six-year time span between Aurora in 2005 and La Lechuza, was Esmerine on a hiatus, or were you just waiting for an appropriate time to start another album?

Bruce and I had been playing the occasional Esmerine show in Montreal since our last round of touring in 2005-06, inviting various guests to join us for some of them, but we hadn’t been thinking much about future recording. Lhasa asked us to open up for her in Montreal in 2009, which we did as a duo, and that’s where we met Sarah and Andrew, who were in her band at that point. We really hit it off, and soon after we invited Sarah and Andrew to join in an Esmerine show (where Lhasa also sang on a song), and everything evolved very naturally from there.

Love is All

Love is All: Telling Stories with Raucous, Lo-Fi Pop

Gothenberg, Sweden-based band Love is All hails from a historic city with a burgeoning indie-music scene. Unlike its contemporaries, the band’s noisy, guitar-driven pop songs are bolstered by an undercurrent of recklessness.

Morrow vs. Hajduch

Morrow vs. Hajduch: Tom Vek’s Leisure Seizure

Scott Morrow is ALARM’s music editor. Patrick Hajduch is a very important lawyer. Each week they debate the merits of a different album.

Tom Vek: Leisure SeizureTom Vek: Leisure Seizure (Downtown / Island, digital = 6/7/11, physical = 9/13/11)

Tom Vek: “A Chore”

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Hajduch: Alt-pop singer/multi-instrumentalist Tom Vek released his under-the-radar debut, We Have Sound, in 2005.  Since then, he’s remained very quiet.  It turns out that he was holed up in a studio, preparing more of his rhythmically propulsive, sort-of-electronic, meticulously produced post-punk pop jams.  Leisure Seizure recently arrived digitally (a physical release is forthcoming), and it’s very solid, if largely unsurprising.  Banging drums and sing-along choruses have always been Vek’s MO, and they serve him well here.

French Miami

French Miami: Self-Reliant Post-Punk from the Bay

Bay Area post-punk trio French Miami is focused on the integrity of its art. Its DIY reputation and self-described “dynamics and bombast” have landed it more than a few fans — including one rock legend in a bar in Ohio.

Junior Boys

Guest Playlist: Junior Boys’ musical motivation

Junior Boys: It's All TrueJunior Boys: It’s All True (Domino, 6/14/11)

Junior Boys: “ep”

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With a new full-length, It’s All True, out today on Domino, Canadian electronic duo Junior Boys takes another trip down the sultry, synth-studded path that it deftly paved on previous albums. What better way to get a sense of how the band arrived at its signature sound than to examine the music that inspired it? We asked Jeremy Greenspan to put together a 10-track playlist of his favorite songs. He did us one better, coming through with 11 songs ranging from soulful to skittering and timeless to Top 40.

1. Blawan: “Bohla”

It’s super exciting to be buying so many R&S records again.

Carla Kihlstedt

Guest Spot: Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters

Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: Still You Lay Dreaming: Tales for the Stage, IICarla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: Still You Lay Dreaming: Tales for the Stage, II (12 Cups, 2/1/11)

Carla Kihlstedt & Matthias Bossi: “Subsequently”

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Oakland-based multi-instrumentalist Carla Kihlstedt has had a hand in upwards of 50 albums in less than 15 years. As a member of groups such as Tin Hat, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and The Book of Knots, Kihlstedt sings and plays violin, organ, percussion, and just about everything else.

Currently, she’s set to premiere Necessary Monsters, a song cycle based on Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings, in San Francisco on July 29 and 30 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Read more about the project and the corresponding Kickstarter campaign on the Imaginary Beings Project website. We gave Kihlstedt the opportunity to write about her personal relationship with these monsters and how they unlocked a world of objectivity and imagination.

How Monsters Changed My Life
by Carla Kihlstedt

At first, they’re all so cute. Even the one with only one arm, one leg, one wing, and half a tongue; the one who goes around with hatred in his heart stealing speech from animals; the one who weeps in the forest, and if she’s caught dissolves herself into a heap of bubbles and salt; the little one made of string, dust, and a broken spool of who-knows-what; the one with one eye and a maniacally monotonous, monocled perspective.

But then you let them in for long enough, and as the spectacle wears off, they start just looking like friends with foibles. OK…large foibles, exaggerated features, caricatures for sure…nonetheless familiar, and almost friendly. And that’s when you’re in trouble, but believe me, it’s a necessary kind of trouble, a trouble that teaches you more about yourself than perhaps you were prepared for.

I’m referring, of course, to imaginary beings. My encounter with them begins with an innocuous moment when I was in college, home for vacation, looking at my parents’ bookshelf for something to read. The Book of Imaginary Beings jumped out at me, both because of its title (scholarly yet full of fantasy) and because I had heard this fellow, Jorge Luis Borges, referred to with an equally compelling combination of reverence, amusement, and excitement.

There were those who had read Borges and those who had not. I had not. Having read Borges was a kind of a badge of intellectual hipness. He would laugh to hear such a thing, he who said, “I think that what I have read is far more important than what I have written. For one reads what one likes. And one writes not what one would like to write, but what one is able to write.”

Now, I normally whinny, rear up, and gallop in the other direction when faced with a peer-pressure-inspired badge of anything! But in this case, my curiosity led the way, and since then, I have grown to love him as if he were my own grandfather. (Listen to his set of three lectures from Harvard’s “Norton Lecture Series” here, here and here, and perhaps he’ll become your surrogate grandpa too!)