Montreal’s The Besnard Lakes don’t make music for passive listeners. In the last two years, the band — led by the creative partnership of Jace Lacek and Olga Goreas — has released sprawling cinematic records created in Lacek’s famed Quebec studio, Breakglass.
Rich with heavenly psychedelic textures and guided by a sprawling narrative that tracks the circular stages of life, their newest double-album, The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings, is a stunning breakthrough.
To celebrate its release, the band will be playing three shows on Noonchorus, kicking things off Friday at 7 p.m. with a full performance of The Besnard Lakes Are The Last of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings. The next performance will be on March 6, with the final airing April 3.
We caught up with Goreas to talk about the new album, not feeling tied down to a record label’s expectations, doing yoga to Talk Talk and the wonders of the “space rock” genre.
This album is sequenced like one fluid score. Is that generally your intention to have your records be big flowing cinematic statements? In the past, and with this new record, you even cast yourself in the title like the heroes to the story — The Besnard Lakes are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings.
I don’t know if we strive for that, but I guess it comes out like that. It’s also in our experience too. We’ve done film soundtracks and live documentaries. Maybe that translates into the way we write music? I don’t know, but it’s the way that we’ve always envisioned it. “Cinematic” is the right word because it’s very evocative and brings a picture to mind or something. I think we’ve probably gotten better at it over the years.
Making music is a heavy thing for us. It’s our life’s work. We’re putting this out there like the children that we decided to not have (laughs). These are like our babies that we’re putting out to the world. We’re finally coming to terms with the fact that once it’s out there, it’s out there. It’s ours but it’s everyone else’s now. It’s just a heavy thing for us. We love to do it and it’s our form of therapy.
The album is split up into four different sections for each of its sides: “Near Death,” “Death,” “Afterlife” and “Life.” I know that much of the material was drawn from the recent passing of Jace’s father. Was that experience a narrative throughline you wanted to use for the entire record?
Well, it didn’t really become that until it showed itself to us. We weren’t thinking that it was going to be a concept record around the circle of life and death. Once we started writing it and all of these things started happening — Jace’s dad got sick and us being there when he was on his deathbed and witnessing what that was like. Then we had some of our musical heroes dying during that time. The concept basically revealed itself to us.
We haven’t purposely set out in the beginning of [writing and recording an album] saying, “Okay, this album is going to be about this.” It always seems to be like that. It just kind of presents itself to us. I think that’s how, even with the convention of naming the album, with “The Besnard Lakes Are The…”, we had done that before as well but that kind of a “concept” revealed itself when we were making the album. It’s been more of a helpful way to make something and have it meaning to us personally to tie everything together with what’s happening in the world.
By naming the [specific] four sides of it, it had that circle of life to it. It’s a pretty heavy thing. You don’t know until you know I guess.
Right now seems like the perfect time to have an album like this to lose yourself in. Have you found yourself listening to similar records that are massive in scope to get lost in?
Yeah, definitely. Talk Talk has alway been a huge band for both Jace and I. I really got into it again. I always have. I do my exercises and yoga listening to Talk Talk. It’s always been there, they’re that kind of band for me (laughs). Sometimes you fall off for a little bit, but then there’s a resurgence.
I was listening to them and realized the agelessness of albums like Spirit of Eden, Laughing Stock and the Mark Hollis solo material as well. It solidified something for me. I thought, we’ve got to make something as beautiful as this. We’ve got to at least try. We might fail, but who cares? We’ve at least got to set the bar because these bands that have influenced us have set the bar high. We want to be a part of that and have that goal to make something beautiful.
It’s never been about appealing to everyone. It’s never been about selling as many records as we can. Music has been a constant for the both of us. I’ve been playing since I was 19 years old. Listening to the first Pixies albums and learning how to play bass sitting in my living room. It’s a highly personal and a highly inspirational thing for us to play music. We don’t want to just put something out that we didn’t put any thought into or have a lackadaisical attitude about. It’s a heavy thing for us.
You had briefly thought about your last record, A Coliseum Complex Museum, as being your last record after parting ways with a label that we will not mention here [Jagjaguwar]. What made you want to release this album under “The Besnard Lakes” moniker? Did it ever cross your mind to start a completely new project?
Well, that’s the thing … We thought about it like, “maybe we should start another project?” but then we just realized it’s stupid because it’s still going to be Besnard Lakes. It’s always been that from the start, it’s me and Jace.
If we start another project, what the fuck are we going to call it? Would it be Besnard Lakes after Besnard Lakes? It just seemed like a ridiculous notion. That was the first time where we had that “aha” moment. We’re just going to continue doing this anyway. We love playing music together. We love each other. This is what we set up our lives for, it literally is. It’s the reason why we moved to Montreal in 2000 was to make music together.
Other things happened of course along the way. Jace became pretty successful with the studio he owns, Breakglass. He’s producing other people’s work, and that’s great. But the initial impetus was for us to record our own albums (laughs). It just seemed almost ridiculous when we realized we were asking ourselves that question. So we said, “Let’s just make the album, we have all the time in the world.” We were not under the gun in any way. Who knows if anyone would want to take us on again. We’re not the hot young band anymore.
It lit a little bit of a fire for us and it’s touched people in ways that we never would have known. Just hearing the response from people … it’s pretty crazy and it’s very humbling to think back now that we were almost on the brink of calling it quits.
Yeah, why let a record label dictate the lifespan of your band?
Exactly!
Your records always sound massive. I’ve always been curious, how much of your writing is done in the studio? What is your demoing process like?
In the past, when we’ve been writing songs in the studio it’s usually Jace and I demoing stuff and then we pass it along to the band and they add their own parts and their own personal flair to it. With this one, most of the demoing was done at home in our little shed in the backyard. We had drums set up in there and a big Ampeg bass amp. It was awesome.
Initially, the demos came out of there and then we took them into the studio and at that point, it was basically getting people to add their parts. That’s how we’ve usually done it. We’re not the kinds of people who write when we’re touring. We don’t really jam things out with the whole band, that’s not really our aesthetic. There was a bit of an exception to that with Coliseum Complex Museum. We jammed the songs more as we were demoing them.
It’s usually been just Jace and I doing it on our own, in the studio or at home. Coming up with some ideas when we go to Besnard Lake in Saskatchewan, which is our actual getaway in the summertime. It’s a pretty loose form method of coming up with songs (laughs).
It always has that feeling to it. We always take out time with it. At the point when we’re ready to record it, we know and that’s when we record it for good. Because Breakglass is where we do all of this — and it’s a proper studio — so we have to book the time. It used to be a little more of a luxury in the early days because it was still a pretty small thing. But now it’s become where a lot of bands go in and record there. So now when we record there it’s like, “That’s it. We’re on the clock.”
The term space rock gets thrown around with your band and others like Hawkwind and Spiritualized. But when I think about it, I immediately think of the Alien tagline: “in space, no one can hear you scream.” There is no music in space. If there was an update on that term what do you think it should be?
(laughs) It’s a vacuum. I personally don’t mind that terminology at all. But I think “psychedelic music” is a little more accurate? I think that is what is kind of meant by “space rock.” You’re off on a journey, which, to us, is what it means to be on a psychedelic journey.
It’s crazy. We don’t even mind being called “prog rock.” We don’t mind being called “psych rock.” We don’t mind being called “shoegaze.” We listen to all of that stuff. Why would we mind it? It just doesn’t matter. Back in the ‘90s there was this new kind of music called “alternative music.” When I was listening to music in the ‘80s, they called it “underground music” and I’ve always liked that terminology.
It warps and it changes and these labels ultimately come out, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t think that it’s really an issue other than getting people into what you’re doing. Because they’re going to decide that on their own anyway. So it’s not a dealbreaker for me to call us “space rock”(laughs).
The other thing is, I love Star Trek and I love those worlds that are created in science fiction movies like that. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about this and saying that at one point I was watching Star Trek, I was pretty depressed at the time. Besides it being totally escapist, it’s this incredible world that they were creating when they first started that show. For me, as I started watching it more and more it actually gave me this incredible hope for the future. It’s not all happy, fuzzy stuff. It gets pretty dark sometimes. So make of that what you will, but I guess I don’t mind if people tend to call us “space rock” (laughs).
Do you have any special plans for these upcoming live streams?
The first live stream is this Friday [Feb. 5] and we are going to be playing the entirety of the new album. The second live stream is going to be more of our classic old “hits.” In April, it’s going to be a mix of old and new. They’re going to be different sets entirely. Maybe with the exception that we’ll mix in some new songs in the third live stream. It’s going to be all different songs from all of the different eras and we’re trying to do it in a way so that you get the experience of what we’d do at an actual show with fog and strobe lights. Basically, it’s going to be like seeing The Besnard Lakes live.