Part 1

Name: Westelaken
Members: Alex Baigent (bass, backing vocals), Lucas Temor (piano, rhodes, lap steel, banjo), Jordan Seccareccia (electric and acoustic guitars, vocals), Rob McLay (drums, percussion, backing vocals)
Interviewee: Lucas Temor
Nationality: Canadian
Current release: Westelaken's I am Steaming Mushrooms is out now.
Recommendation: Barking Dog on CKUW - Listen to their archives; Mississippi Records - Bulawayo Blue Yodel

If you enjoyed this Westelaken  interview and would like to stay up to date with the band and their music, visit them on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

I am often fighting against my own attention to actively listen to music. Except in rare moments of a beautiful melody or lyric my body is passive in its engagement, overwhelmed and overstimulated with everything else in the world.

I find it hard to assign time to dedicated listening. Most of my active engagement with music recently has come from devoting time to learning songs - transcribing melodies, memorising lyrics, listening closely to harmony and arrangements.

Music used to be more of a transcendental experience for me as you suggest in the question - this confusing overwhelming wash of texture and rhythm pulsing into my brain as I sat on the bus to school. It is hard to connect with that once it mixes too much with the regular pain of living

What were your very first steps in music like - and how do you rate gains made through experience versus the naiveté of those first steps?

Hymns in the Armenian Apostolic Church, my mother singing “the Riddle Song”, Catholic School, Suzuki Piano Method Book 1, video game music.

I’m not sure I would use the word gains to describe how this changes with time. I see it more as a reframing of the same experience. I think these sorts of foundational experiences plant some intuition in us for the movement of music. Practical experience and the ability to adhere to some musical form gives the means of instantiating this experience.

I am grateful that I was forced unwillingly through piano lessons for a few years. Some basic technique stayed in my hands even after I didn’t play for a while.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music meant to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

Music was a way for me to feel cool, to feel different from others. I went to the mall to buy a London Calling t-shirt to stand out. A teacher in the seventh grade saw this and told me about some other artists - Elvis Costello, Jonathan Richman. I hoarded CDs from the library and LimeWire.



You can grow up in the suburbs and be the only person with a Sex Pistols™ t-shirt and feel differentiated but totally miss the fact that you bought this reproduced t-shirt in some chain store (Hot Topic) in some mall of which there are 10000 of across the country. It creates a false sense of identity for you rooted in consumption and materialism. That is the ultimate grift of corporate “alternative” music.

Though I loved the music and I did connect with it deeply, it was (and still is) hard to unlearn this lie of the enlightened artist and to understand that the spirit of music does not live on in this. The songs are still good though - I still wear the London Calling tshirt.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools and how have they shaped your perspective on music?

Aside from piano, playing around with synthesisers and experimental / noise music helped me to grasp what it means to colour in the complete audio spectrum.

Until pretty recently (including lots of spots on our new record) my playing in Westelaken has been mushed in with the other instruments - it definitely creates an interesting chunky texture, but I didn’t really understand what it meant to balance out an arrangement, to support the other instruments and singing, etc.

A lot of the music I listened to and played growing up didn’t really require you to think of this, and no one really told me. I learned classical piano from a young age and this is almost entirely focused on the individual delivering a fluid performance that very much sticks to the script.

Really the most important thing that has shaped my perspective on music is not a tool, it is connection with others. Observing how people play in groups, learning to listen attentively (which is still difficult), open improvisation with others. Those have been the most important developments for me. I am still learning so much

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

I want to achieve a fluidity between what is abstractly in my head and what my fingers can express. This is far away still.

I want to achieve some meaningful form of self-expression. I want to engage in this in a group dynamic with our band. I want us to feed off of eachother, to create an open atmosphere. I want to create with other people, people who have never played music before and people who are strangers to me.

Other people motivate me to create. I often struggle to do it alone. Nothing ever feels final when you’re doing it alone.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I think our sound is that of 4 people who are constantly (re)learning how to play music together. There’s a clear evolution of this throughout our recordings that has been carried on in the newest record. I think we all have different conceptions of what this band is and what the music is and that keeps things interesting.

To the Paul Simon quote: I really think this is how all non-musicians experience music. The difference is that musicians have some interest in putting names to facets of that experience. On the outside, no one is going to notice or care that you made an interesting chord substitution.

I don’t know anything about film - when I watch a movie I’ll say “that was good”. When I watch movies with friends who are very into film I’m amazed at what they can perceive. They have trained themselves to identify and name minute details, and they create meaning in that way. We’re experiencing the same material in similar ways, but applying different vocabulary to it.

Musicians are often analytical about those kinds of things - chords and lyrics and what not - but just the same it is easy to become disconnected from the actual experience of a song. Though Paul Simon says he can listen to the overall sound I don’t actually think it is possible for him to do that. He is a practised musician and songwriter and has absorbed the tools, techniques, and vocabulary into his perceptual system. It isn’t possible for him to decouple the two of them because they are part of him.

To your previous questions -  it's the same reason why we can’t connect with music like we did when we were 16. Too many other things are going on. Too many ways of describing our experience.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

When I am feeling good all of these sounds are beautiful, moving, etc. I particularly love to hear birds - this is probably not out of the ordinary for most people. Hearing birds chirping brings me to a very warm and reassuring place - that nature is going on with or without me. When I am depressed and I hear the same sounds I remember this - nature is going on with or without me. Are the sounds musical? It's romantic to find music in nature, to think there is some order and purpose to it all. But I don’t think it has to be called music to be beautiful. It is beautiful in itself.

When I was studying mathematics I always wanted to find something meaningful in the relationship between mathematics and music. But everything you read is particularly boring and uninspiring. For some reason there is this sort of drive among analytical types to want music to be explainable and decomposable for it to make sense. We want to unlock some scientific proof that music is part of the very fabric of our being but miss the point in doing so.

I think it's the same thing here. Nature doesn’t have to be music for it to be beautiful. If I paint a landscape, is the landscape a work of art before my brush hits the canvas? It's more about representation than it is about being. I think music really emerges as a relationship between people, and maybe a bird chirping could be interpreted in this way. But cosmically, it doesn’t matter.