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Part 1

Members: Devon Savas,  Lauren Dillen, Ray Goudy, Oliver Compton
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Musicians
Current Release: Holding Patterns
Recommendations: “Leaving” by Pomes, and “The Ceiling Could Collapse” by Rachel Bobbitt.

If you enjoyed this interview with Burs, you can find them on bandcamp, Instagram and Facebook.

When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

Lauren Dillen: I think I was singing since I could speak. My dad tells this story of my mom and him walking in on me at age 2 or 3, singing to myself a song they had never heard before. He says they freaked out because they thought I must’ve written the song. They believed I was a child prodigy until they heard it at my daycare.

I have a vivid musical memory from around the same time or a little later, of sitting in the backseat of my dad’s car and hearing David Bowie’s “Memory of a Free Festival” for the first time. That song is my earliest memory of the spiritual power of music. It’s an indescribable feeling, but I know we all know it. It’s like a drug in audible form. The end of that song especially - it’s the feeling of what death feels like, I imagine.

Some people experience intense emotion when listening to music, others see colours or shapes. What is your own listening experience like and how does it influence your approach to music?

Devon Savas: A blessing and a curse from our time in school has been falling into patterns of internalizing music theoretically and/or sonically through listening. As useful as this is to our process, our recent years have been helpful for rediscovering a less technical perspective in balance. For me, this means striving to connect with passages through emotion and utilizing technical knowledge as a tool to reach these emotions, rather than being consumed by the tools themselves.

It can be difficult to hold onto that initial spark of soaking in a body of music when it first becomes a favourite listen. Should it remain a favourite, the lasting impression after many focussed listens is what I try to reach when creating music. When I can listen to something I/we create on repeat and still feel some intensity of emotion (no matter what emotion, usually entailing some form of catharsis), even if the experience is rare, I feel content that my ambitions as a listener and creator are being fulfilled.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

LD: I’ve been writing songs and lyrics since I was a kid. As if I can’t help it, I’m looking for lyrics in everything and everyone, and as my writing matures, I’m looking for reminders, mantras, and themes that feel like a moment.

Though I think this song has a very youthful undertone, “The Year Now”, for example, is a summer’s worth of little moments, collaged together. That’s typically how I write. A big breakthrough for me was realizing that the more I attempt to write the story of my life in my songs, the less true my lyrics felt. Writing like this has grown to feel self-indulgent, and rooted in the patterns I hold of my idea of self. So instead, I look for lyrics that abandon what I think I sound like, or who I think I am, and now I search for lyrics to promote the idea that “I” who is me is ever changing. Lots of the lyrics in this record are still very rooted in the self-concept story, and entitling the album “Holding Patterns” is a promise to myself that I move on from that story.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

Ray Goudy: As a listener, I don’t know that my identity has much influence on my preferences per se. But creatively, identity is a huge theme in our music; I’d say it was the central theme on our first EP. I think it has always been a very potent source to tap as a tool for writing, just because identity is so difficult to grapple with, especially when you live half of your life on your computer and phone. As much as I want to put my devices down, being an active artist in the 2020s (and then to be taken seriously as an artist) demands that you create and maintain an online identity/presence that requires a huge chunk of your attention. It’s hard to create that virtual self-image and then to actually identify with it. The deeper you go, the more dissonant the relationship becomes with your real identity.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Oliver Compton: For me personally, in all the music and art making I do, I want to feel closer to myself in doing it. That means that I want to feel connected to what I am putting out, to agree with it and know that it reflects who I am. I want to distance myself as much as I can from ideas of what I should be or what is expected of me. A lot of my journey towards finding an artistic voice has been noticing when I feel like I’m performing a preconceived part, in the figurative sense, and then reassessing how I can carry out my creative task in a way that is more true to myself.

Learning how to be in touch with yourself so that you can channel your feelings into your art as seamlessly as possible is really hard. Lots of things get in the way, things both in and out of your control. I think it‘s a mental battle really, managing self-consciousness enough so that you are willing to go out on a limb and vouch for your individuality, even if no one else around you is doing the same thing. It’s a lifelong goal, something I know I can always improve on and something I can help those around me to do more of too.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?


DS: I read a recent Black Midi interview where Geordie talks about musicians who grew up discovering their favourite music through the Internet, and how these artists have only just started to come up in the past few years. One aftereffect of such a sporadic way of discovery seems to be more openness to different styles, as opposed to sticking with a scene or waving the flag of one genre. Based on some of our favourite bands of late, I think “music of the future” will often involve finding new ways to smash together sounds of the past. It’s certainly something that we try to do in our music. Any tradition that we continue might come from the fact that we are a folk quartet at heart, so it’s a win-win if we can create something timeless while learning to be innovative.



Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

OC: I really think listening back to one’s work is a powerful way to grow as an artist and for me, using a program like Pro Tools allows me to do that in a way that lines up with my creative inclinations. I love to use recording as a way to build a little world in my headphones; having a tool in front of me that allows me to expand and deepen and explode (in a good way) a performance, and then listen back to what I’ve done in real time, is so exciting to me. Whether it‘s EQing something so that it opens up the depth of a mix or shoving a vocal track through some distortion to get up close to your ear, I delight in curating the listening experience, for myself and for an audience.



 
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