From: owner-trajectory-digest@smoe.org (trajectory-digest) To: trajectory-digest@smoe.org Subject: trajectory-digest V3 #120 Reply-To: trajectory@smoe.org Sender: owner-trajectory-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-trajectory-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk trajectory-digest Sunday, December 12 1999 Volume 03 : Number 120 Today's Subjects: ----------------- m o re exc it m en t ["Nick Eeepooh!" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 13:46:27 PST From: "Nick Eeepooh!" Subject: m o re exc it m en t Well, Meredith seemed really appreciative that I posted those album reviews the other day so I decided that I shouldn’t hold out on you guys any longer ‘cause I have a nice (but loooong) interview with Veda that was in the November issue of offbeat magazine. I was too lazy before to transcribe it but here it is… Oh yah! Tonight I’m going to see “Brutal Telling” (y’know the Emily Carr dance piece thing) (evergreen cultural centre, coquitlam, b.c., 8 pm….) I missed it when she premiered it last year so I’m pretty excited but anyway on to the interview. “Veda’s Own Self: an interview with Veda hille” by Andrea smith . (Offbeat magazine is a paper put out by the University of Victoria radio station 102 CFUV.) AS: Could you give just a brief outline of your history as a musician? VH: That’s very brutal of you! Okay, I started playing piano when I was small and graduated from classical to jazz and pop music when I was a teenager. Started writing music when I was 21 right after a couple years at art school – it changed me forever, and I’ve been putting out records and touring my butt off and trying to keep things interesting ever since. I’m 31 now so that’s 10 years of independent music history in Canada. AS: I didn’t wanna ask this ‘cause it’s kinda tired, but I think it’s still a good question. What are your influences in your songwriting? VH: Well they’re vast and varied. Currently I’m quite influenced by Wil Oldham and Neutral Milk Hotel (she has such exquisite taste.) the writer Hakuri Murakami and the writer Annie Dillard, plus my friend Stephanie Aitken who actually studied painting at UVIC. She’s a sort of companion artist of mine and our work is always related. I think it is important to have influences that are close to home as well. AS: I really enjoy all the unusual (for pop music) instruments you use. How do you decide about instrumentation? VH: Well it all depends. The saw got incorporated into spine because I’d actually just watched a movie about the theremin and I didn’t know any theremin players, but saw is a similar sound so I pulled that in. You hear things in your head, but I also trust my band. I have a wicked band (she does!!!) Ford Pier, Barry Mirochnik and Martin Walton. I know that if I bring them a song, and a rough sketch of how it’s supposed to feel, they’ll bring me back something really great for it. So they have huge input on the arrangements. AS: My much more musically sophisticated girlfriend noticed that in your music you play a lot with time signatures. VH: I really love playing around with time – it keeps things fresh for me. But what I like is doing it so it’s not so obvious. So that if you’re not listening to the count you don’t notice that things are shifting around. For instance on the song “26 Years” off Spine there’s 5 different time signatures, but it flows together…I hope. And that’s what I try for. The time changing will influence the way people hear it but hopefully they don’t notice why they’re being influenced. It brings up different emotional values. In “the boy in the woods” it starts in three, but then the chorus’s kick into four, which just makes things sound like they’ve suddenly evened out in a way that you didn’t understand. AS: You used sampling on this album. I don’t know if I’ve noticed that on the other albums. Is that new for you? VH: There was a little with the song “instructions” (off Spine) and some sounds that David Travers-Smith and I put together. But with this album I got Christof Migone involved from the beginning. He’s an incredible electro-acoustic artist; a Canadian living in New York. His own records are amazing – they’re not really music, they’re more about sound. He takes these beautiful organic sounds and then twists them up, so you can still tell they were once organic, but now they’ve been run through some electronic paces. I think his work has a real emotional quality, which is rare in some of that twisty stuff. We started he and I working on these loops and I took that back to the band and they laid their tracks on. And then I took those back to him and he twisted them up a little bit more, so it was a very nice back and forth across the country process. Christof and I are actually going to work on a record in the summer that will be a little more experimental. It won’t be about songs, it’ll be about us making sounds together. I’m really excited about that. I find those kinds of sounds really emotive – they’re very effective, so I certainly plan to keep using stuff like that as well as acoustic instruments. AS: You Do Not Live In This World Alone – what does the title mean to you? VH: Well it’s more important what it means to you, but there’s a few things when it first came up. It’s a line from a Hakuri Murakami novel, who is a writer I’m very into right now and my first take on it was almost an accusation and a reminder to people who are not being responsible to the people around them to not forget. I think we have a very strongly individualistic society, but I think we have to take care of each other, too. The other meaning which was very important for me was that you do not live in THIS world alone – there are other worlds we inhabit whether we know it or not. And the artwork reflects that…which of course we can’t see on the radio. Jeffery Farmer is the artist who did the cover and he got a really great sense of a mythical world that I really like. AS: Where do you see this album fitting in for you because in some ways it hearkens back to some of your earlier stuff, but maybe just because I hear a little more light in this one. VH: That’s interesting. I’m happier than I’ve been in a while, so I’m glad that’s coming through. Someone said that it was my most isolated record, which I don’t think is actually true. But anyway it’s obviously a little wide open. I see it as a kind of mix between Spine and Here is a Picture. I saw the Emily Carr record as a side step, while I was getting ready for the next pop record. But it really changed the way I write and record songs. And it was a very lighthearted project. It also got me writing about people other than myself, which is a good thing. For me, this album makes sense. It makes sense in terms of the stuff that’s come before. But I also feel like it’s a very close record to what I hear in my head. It feels the most personal in a way, sonically almost, more than musically. More professional. It’s most myself. I really love it. I’m already thinking about the next one, but it does feel like a very good record to me. AS: How much should background information about yourself and your songwriting enter into people’s listening to music? VH: I always try to oblique about songs and stuff. I obviously am oblique within the songs themselves and I think it’s important for people to hear what they have in themselves. But there are also stories attached to the songs. Like “3xThin” is a story about a boy whose father takes him away for summer vacation and never brings him back. He goes and lived with his father over the ocean and he doesn’t see his mom again until he’s 21. And that’s the mother singing in that song. That’s part of the live show, in a way. I talk a bit more in the live show. But also we’ll be putting out a companion book to this record that will have all the lyrics and stories attached to the songs and illustrations by the same artist. So that should be out in January. AS: What’s your favourite kind of crowd and venue? Do you like playing live? VH: I like playing live. My favourite place to play is probably the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. Very reliable place. It’s a perfect room for music. You can get crazy, but you can make sure people are listening. It’s very fun to play bars, too. The Victoria show is the last show on the tour, so I think we should have a nice rock and roll time. Sometimes a bar show is really great. Mostly I just like people who really wanna be there. If people want to be there, it’s usually pretty good. AS: Since the Scrappy Bitches do come up, are you still a scrappy bitch? What’s the status of the tour? VH: We just did a week in Ontario, but we’re going to Germany in the spring. My agent over there is bringing us over to a festival. That’ll be fun – the Scrappy Bitches take Europa. It’s one of those things, we thought it was only gonna be one year, but it continues on and continues on and as long as we keep having fun we’ll keep doing it. AS: Here is a Picture – are people gonna get the chance to see you performing that live with the dance troupe and everything ever again? VH: Yes, this is exciting! The Rheostatics and I are doing the art rock tour next spring. We’re doing the Group of Seven/Emily Carr, in Europe and in Canada as well. And I definitely have to do a Victoria show. It’s funny, when the album came out, we didn’t have enough coordination and it never really got played, the whole thing, very often. It’s a really lovely piece to play, end to end. So I’m sure we’ll have a Victoria date – that’ll be probably sometime in May next year. It’ll be a huge Canadian art rock extravaganza, literally. AS: Why are you doing this – what keeps you working so hard? VH: Well I love it. I really do love it. There have been some hard times, and money is never easy with this kind of thing. Maybe I shouldn’t think like that, maybe one day it will be easy. But I feel like I do it well and that it’s important work and that I wouldn’t be awake and alive without it. Well that was mildly time consuming but I do think it’s a really great interview and it was worth taking the time to spread it around to the Internet masses. Hope you enjoyed it, .nick. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com ------------------------------ End of trajectory-digest V3 #120 ********************************