Hey Everyone-
Hope your summer is going swell.
Some brief news:
The North American street date for "Tertia" has been put back to September 15. Our label expects all pre-orders to ship sometime within the next week and a half though so if you put in an order for a CD or the 2XLP, you'll still be getting it before it hits stores. Thanks for your patience!
Our European tour is just about totally confirmed. Dates for Portugal, Spain and some in France should be finalized by the end of the week. On tour we will have some nice things at the merch table including: Tour Edition Vinyl Pressings and CD versions of all 3 Caspian albums, 4 different T-shirt designs (2 designed by Three Bears Design and 2 from Chris of This Will Destroy You) and a limited edition, gigantic hand screened tour poster. We'll have tons of stickers and pins too.
Below is part of an interview conducted with Phil by sunonthesand.net. Hit up their site to read the complete interview and read a review of "Tertia".
Follow us on Twitter!: http://www.twitter.com/caspian_
All for now...
~xoxo~
CASPIAN
Since post-rock/instrumental rock is such a dense genre filled with so many acts that sound exactly the same, do you find yourselves approaching songwriting intending to stand apart?
Yes and no. That is a loaded question. The bottom line is that we write music that we genuinely enjoy. Plain and simple. I know people say that all the time but we are dead serious about it. We like the music we write and it makes us smile when we play it. That is our “approach” to songwriting. We figure the point of this band is to accomplish that, first and foremost, and then find other people along the way that enjoy it as well. It’s not rocket science. Do we want to stand apart? Sure. Who doesn’t? We want to develop a distinct sound and sonic approach to music. That is not because we feel some sense of obligation or duty to “post-rock” or any other bands who play it, though. We don’t really care at all about how much this genre of music develops since, to be blunt, we hardly ever listen to it. We’re more concerned about how our band develops. We have a duty to Caspian and that’s where it stops. If people think that sounds insular or self-absorbed, then so be it. People who are consciously trying to “stand apart” in their genre of music need to get back in touch with the reasons they picked up an instrument in the first place. Wanting to evolve and push boundaries should be informed by internal motivations to grow as an artist, not as a “member” of a genre that needs to move forward or whatever. To be frank, I don’t feel like we have earned the right yet to totally turn our sound upside down and reinvent ourselves from top to bottom yet anyways. One of the reasons we all are proud of Tertia is because we didn’t have to compromise the foundational, central elements of our sound in order to create something that we felt pushed the band forward into some new territory here. That was a genuinely satisfying experience for all of us as musicians, and has nothing to do with “standing apart” from other bands.
Do you find yourselves consciously trying to “top” You Are The Conductor and The Four Trees or do you try to steer clear of any comparisons?
Every album represents a specific moment in time, and when you try to top an old record, you’re challenging an era that is already dead and gone. Trying to do that would be uncomfortable and awkward. We will never make the same record twice and don’t much desire to. On The Four Trees, we dug very deep into songwriting bag of tricks. That’s one of the reasons why Tertia was as challenging as it was for us. We could include a four-second silent pause like we did with ‘Crawlspace’, for example, into every song and knock people out, but that would be kind of boring and predictable. We could approach songwriting, mood, tones, album flow, melodic interaction, riffs - everything - like we did on past records, but then there is no sense of exploration or growth. We assume that the people who listened to our old records have grown in different ways in two years, just like we have, and that hopefully they want something that sounds a little different and exercises different parts of themselves - ideally, maybe even parts of themselves they didn’t know were there to begin with. That is our goal. If we’re trying to “top” our old records on any level, I guess it would just be trying to match the passion and intensity in which we went about creating those older albums. For Tertia, I think we definitely topped them if you look at it that way.
How has the reaction to Tertia been? Have you been following it closely?
We will come across the random message board from time to time in a Google search or something, I guess. I created an account on one of them since it seemed like a good way to interact with people. I’m going to try not to read reviews when they eventually come out, but I’m sure that’ll last for a day or two. Joe usually keeps everyone well-informed anyways. We are not afraid of hearing criticism, and we are not lusting after praise, but being exposed too much to either of those when they come from someone else’s own subjective opinion can create a deep, deep sense of corruption, artistically, that is hard to shake.
On Tertia, the sound is much more immediate than last records. Was this a conscious decision? Was it brought on by influential bands you were listening to before and during the recording process, or did it just kind of happen?
That probably has a little to do with what I discussed above regarding our duty to grow as a band and try new things. And yes, a lot of it just felt natural for us when writing. It felt pure. We did discuss wanting to go more into that realm before we started work on Tertia a little bit, but that was a long, long time ago, and no matter how hard we try to govern how our writing process develops or what we want to go for with a record, what we do impulsively and sounds good to us always wins out. The immediacy thing is a rare moment when what felt right and what we wanted to get into intersected at the right time.
‘Epochs In Dmaj’ seems to be an interlude-y kind of song. What made you want to release it first for fans to hear?
That is one of my favorite tracks on Tertia, personally. With our albums, and Tertiaespecially, a sense of narrative and storytelling is absolutely critical to the flow and pace of the album. Every story has its main characters and its supporting ones. A song like ‘Epochs In Dmaj’ obviously isn’t the knockout punch kind of track of the record, but it serves an essential function of adding color and shape to the story we are trying to convey. Musically, it involves some of the more keyboard-and-sampling-based elements that were getting us excited this time around, and it seemed like a good opportunity to put some of them on display. I love that track.
‘Vienna’ and ‘Sycamore’ seem to follow the more typical post-rock formula, which some have now started to refer to, tongue-in-cheek, as “crescendocore.” Why did these two songs make the record, as some might say they don’t seem to fit well with the other songs?
One of the most central inspirations behind what we do is our desire to try and mirror life experience. Not every moment of every day is some huge, epic, glorious walk in the park. There are slower, more quiet kind of days and ‘Vienna’ represents that. It’s an opportunity to reflect on all that has happened prior on the record. A chance to slow down. I imagine at the age of eighty or something, hopefully everyone gets a chance to sit on a back porch, calm down, and remember every detail from their lives quietly and in peace. ‘Vienna’ is, amongst some other personal things, very much that kind of song to me. ‘Sycamore’ has been our trademark set closer for the last two years at live shows, and it was time to record it and get onto a record. Like I said, Tertia is another attempt at storytelling, and having those two songs at the very end of the story seemed like it gave the ending a surprise you maybe wouldn’t have seen coming, since they are both very different than the rest of the album. Considering this is a darker record for us, that aspect of it mirrored the emotion we wish to convey most as a band: hope.
Some say that Tertia is the closest the band has come to doing justice to your live show. Was this an intentional in the recording process?
Having three guitarists on this record ended up giving it a more live, raw, and vibrant kind of atmosphere. In the past ,Cal and I would multi-track all of our guitar ideas for a song, whereas this time we got to explore them much more in the developmental stages of writing and performing, since there was another guitar in the mix. We still view the live show and an album as two totally different beasts, and approach them both one hundred percent differently, but this time, due to the nature of the way it was written and recorded, it did have more of a “live feel”, I guess.
How do you approach the songwriting process as a band? Is there one principal composer, do you all just jam for a while, or is it an amalgam of things?
The songwriting process is so difficult to explain. For Tertia, I did a lot of demoing by myself on my own time, and then would bring it to the band to flesh out. We didn’t do as much jamming this time around; the process was a bit more methodical. At first for this record, we had some communication problems, but we broke through after a couple discussions and then started pumping out ideas fast. Everyone brings their own flair to the table, always tempered by other band members’ honest reactions to them.
In general, what are your biggest influences to your songwriting?
I think it would be different for everyone in the band. Personally speaking, mood and atmosphere are central to everything. Everything. My favorite musicians are people that create a genuine atmosphere. That’s one of the reasons why artists like Mark Kozelek, Burial, or Fennesz - who sound nothing like Caspian at all - grip me more than anything else out there. Caspian is also a very reactionary kind of thing. Life experience is very influential in what we create.
You’ll be embarking on a European tour soon. How are you feeling about it? Is this the biggest tour you’ve had to date?
Yes, this is the biggest so far. We did a seven-week US tour in Autumn 2007, but this will be even bigger than that. Very excited.
Are there any plans for a large US tour when you get home?
We will be doing a full US tour sometime early 2010, probably starting in late February at the latest.
Do you have any plans for any sort of Atlas Ladder release, either hard copy or otherwise?
I would like to put together an Atlas Ladder record sometime in 2010. No guarantees but its something I want to work on.
2009 is more than half way over. What’s caught your attention this year?
I love the new albums by The Field, Mew, Tim Hecker, Jack Rose…I’ve played Mark Kozelek’s Lost Verses Live probably like a hundred times now at this point. It’s excellent, and maybe my favorite release from him to date.
Are there any upcoming 2009 releases that you’re especially looking forward to?
I can’t think of one…I’m really out of the loop these days.
Finally, is there anything else you would to share?
When we get a chance, we always want to say thank you to people for supporting the band in whatever capacity. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate it, and we hope people are enjoying the new record and can make it out to a show if we play in your area over the next year or so. Much love from up here in Beverly, to you, from us.