The Besnard Lakes light up the night in Australia

Dreamy Montreal band The Besnard Lakes are making their first trip to Australia on the back of their stunning album The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night.

The Besnard Lakes are centred around song writing duo Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas. Their second album was nominated for the 2007 Polaris Music Prize and their third has seen them find wider acclaim and attention and also sees them in Australia for Golden Plains and some select sideshows.  We speak to Olga Goreas of Montreal quintet The Besnard Lakes ahead of their first ever Australian tour.

yourGigs (yG): Have any of the band ever been to Australia before even as tourists? What are you most looking forward to about coming here?

Olga Goreas (OG): None of us have been to Australia before, we are extremely excited about it, and we are counting the days. I would like to be able to – Canuck mentality – Jace in the band asked – is there a day we can go to the outback? – The people at the promotion company said do you even know where the outback is? You will be nowhere near it and it is vast. Do you want us to parachute in there? But we do want to do a bit of a tour, and our time is somewhat limited so we’ll be in the cities, but if we can get out to t the Barrier Reef I’d love to do that and spend a day on the rocks there.

yG: Has the extra attention the band has found with your latest album and touring wider to places such as Australia changed the band much?

OG: There were actually plans to possibly come down there for our previous album – but it didn’t turn out then. It is nice to have the opportunity again. It has been – I wouldn’t say exponential growth- but the places we get to tour are certainly further and further from our homeland and we are stoked to be coming over.

yG: Does the touring and travelling lifestyle give the inspiration and opportunity to write songs on the road?

OG: Not really, we are not that kind of band, we haven’t really written music when we are travelling. But there is always a certain influence we get from places that we see. We are very influenced visually and experience wise by things in my life so I can always see there being something that profoundly effects me and I may try come up with a lyric to try and describe it or some kind of a sound that might mimic it. But I’ll leave it up to the Australian landscape and see if that happens.

yG: How are you and your music influenced by your environment and your surrounds?

OG: It is definitely a strong influence. There is an actual place called Besnard Lake, it is very special for Jace and I, we go there every summer. It is more just a time of reflection, we don’t expect there to be a musical output from it, it is more us gaining our perspective and taking than back with us when we go to the studio and record our records.

yG: Do you head to the studio with set ideas and themes you want to achieve or does most of your music evolve in there?

OG:  There is always the feeling of we want to try bring in different things when we record, it is hard to say if it will be a particular type of instrument or we will just decide to go with the subject matter that we haven’t been into before. But we are still very much creatures of habit so there is always this ongoing story or plot that we have of spies and previous wars and basically the cosmos in general. When it comes down to it we have a psychedelic or space rock kind of ethic and the feeling I get from music sometimes is that it grounds me and is the only thing that really keeps me alive in a spiritual sense. I always find a moment that is profound and I want to bring that out in something that we are recording. I am thinking that we will always have parameters that we work within when we record but at the same time who knows what we will experience, there may be something that just completely blows our mind tomorrow and it might give us a completely new musical direction or it could make us think the way we are going about it is the right way to do it.

yG: Was that part of your thinking when you did build your own studio so you could create what you wanted when you needed to?

OG: Yeah, what we try to do is the first three or four days when we go into the studio are the most crucial days – it is the amassing of the ideas and then seeing if we can expand on them. I don’t know if it is really a method per se, it is just how we have always gone about it. When we went in to record The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night we didn’t have any structure or set way to do it. It just seemed to happen actually quite fast for us. We had this time blocked out and we have our own studio and we had these luxuries a lot of other bands don’t have. We have at our disposal a studio that Jace runs and records other bands in so it’s a little bit easier for us in that respect to get down an start working and putting our ideas down. But the music comes first by the time we are getting to the songs being fully fleshed out its is then that the lyrics are added at that point.

yG: Are you very particular about the equipment and instruments that you use?

OG: When you are using something that has such a history like that [the control board they used was used to record Physical Graffiti] you are just imagining all the ghosts in the machine. You are wondering if someone is going to put down a guitar part if it is going to come out sounding like Jimmy Page. But if has definitely got a vintage quality to it and a warmth and a humanity we like to have, it is using the studio as an instrument.

yG: Film director Mark Ruffio said he could see whole films in your songs? How did the band get into film soundtrack writing and was it something the band always wanted to do?

OG: It was something that just came up and it was very flattering of Mark to give us a call and want us to soundtrack his film. I can see that there is a certain cinematic feel to what we do musically. It’s all great for me; I loved working on the film and love doing film score work and it feels very natural. For us the music always comes first and in the third kind of respect where visuals provide the narrative you are off the hook – you don’t have to come up with anything lyrically, which is neither here nor there, but for me, the upmost importance is just the music and the feeling behind it and being able to carry the emotion of a scene that’s coming across the screen fits perfectly in the way I work creatively.

yG: Did it open you up to treating music differently to its traditional forms and just singles and albums?

OG: At this point it has to be. Music has changed so much, in one respect it is great that it has become so easy for someone to make a record, but it’s become exponentially more difficult to make a living at it. There is that aspect of it where if you can find other work and still have this creative outlet that’s’ great, so I am very thankful that we’ve had this work come across and really enjoy doing it. We have recently done a score for a National Canada board website – Welcome to Pineville, which is just awesome, when you see the whole thing and how it’s come together it is just awesome, and makes me so happy it all comes together. Definitely if there comes a day when I am too old to do this, I hope we can still doing film scores, I’m definitely into it.

yG: Do you remember your first time on stage?

OG: It was actually my first recorded moment I remember seeing this band that I played in – I do remember it and it’s kind of goofy.

yG: Best moment on stage?

OG: We played a show two or three years ago with Swerverdiver’s Adam Franklin and he actually came at the end of our set and we did a couple of Swervedriver songs with him, it wasn’t record for posterity or anything, but it was amazing and I just remember being totally on cloud nine that night, my jaw just dropped I got to play with one of my musical heroes and I though that’s it I can die happy now.