Ceti Alpha
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Ceti Alpha

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The best kept secret in music

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"Ceti Alpha-The Street"

"These are the songs you hear in your head outside sticky-floored bars, when you brace against the chill and look for a taxi home"

-Johnny Shaw-local Dartmouth drinker - Word Of A Drinker's Mouth


"Alpha's Flight"

Nick and Rhys Bevan-John form the core of Ceti Alpha, a band with one foot on either side of the Harbour. Sean Flinn investigates.
by Sean Flinn

And at Christmas, one brother, the older, shall give the younger a Fender Squire bass guitar and unto him he will speak: "Here you go, we have a gig in three weeks."

That's how 26-year-old Rhys Bevan-John, bassist in Ceti Alpha, recalls being invited to join the band of his 30-year-old brother—and singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist—Nick. Though he'd played around with a guitar a little, Rhys admits with a laugh, "The concept of holding an instrument with strings in that fashion wasn't completely alien to me."

Lessons began right away, downstairs at their mother's place. "On Christmas Day night, Nick took me to the basement—and he was actually pretty drunk at that time—and he was like, alright, these two strings here…"

That Christmas present last year was the gelling factor in Ceti Alpha's formation, recalls Nick. "We played the show and then just started recording for the album." Mike Conrad (synth), Dave Chisolm (additional synths) Kris McCann (guitar) and Andrew Wright (drums) joined the Bevan-John brothers in the studio.

Ceti Alpha's first album, The Street, is full of songs that sound like they're drifting across the harbour over dark water at night. They're quiet but intense, fading but present.

"I wanted it to sound like a basement sort of thing, a home recording," Nick says. A home recording in a basement in Dartmouth, as opposed to a bigger city, including the one on the other end of the bridges: "I always had this notion of big cities when I was younger, having this glossy…living, where everything's going to be like Oz or something. Then you realize for yourself, anyways, you realize that it isn't."

His songs, such as the opener "Bridges," "Open Days" or "First I was Happy," draw a direct line to "Thoughts that you go through your head when you're walking down the street, which is the title of the album," he says. "Here, it's so quiet. I can walk home from the bar or something like that and the streets are empty and all you hear are trains, the harbour. It's a different soundscape over here that fills you up and then comes back out of you again.

"I took some trips to some bigger cities this year, like Boston, and really just couldn't wait to come back. The sound of trains there are different. They're faster, more violent, [with] a sense of urgency or something."

The tension between stillness and restlessness in a small, confining place have produced pop mastery from the likes of everyone from the Smiths to New Order and Belle & Sebastian—both named influences—to early REM to Dog Day. Nick's also a big fan of I'm Your Man, Leonard Cohen's 1988 album, so the stirring synth work makes sense.

Nick Bevan-John also pays attention to the people around him. He distills them into songs. A week before this interview, he found out a fascinating back story of one man.

"I've been drinking with this Russian guy for years now down at this bar. He's a cab driver and I found out the other day that he was a Cold War pilot," he enthuses. "I knew he was from Russia and he always sent money back to his family but there's this whole history behind him that I didn't know

—he was flying these crazy jet fighters during the Cold War."

Find the brooding jam of "Cold War Pilot," penned just last week, on the band's MySpace page.

Rhys relates to the impact of the colourful characters from a Dartmouth youth.

"You'd be at Tim Horton's on Ochterloney and there'd be Bernie, and the story is he was in the NHL when he was young but he got his head slammed into the boards too many times," he says. "Who knows if that was true? But he'd shuffle up to your table and he'd be in his slippers and a robe, saying 'I own Coca-Cola. I make a $100,000 a day. Give me a cigarette, I'll clean off your table off for you.'

"Seeing people in that state, it's a very raw, human state."

Thanks to the band, the brothers Bevan-John, who live on opposite sides of the harbour (Nick in Dartmouth, Rhys in Halifax), see each other more often. Rhys "joked with me one day that he's been waiting years to be invited down into the basement," says Nick. "Finally he gets to play with his big brother." - The Coast


Discography

The Lion's Club- Ep 2006
The Street- LP December 2006

Photos

Feeling a bit camera shy

Bio

CETI ALPHA

Ceti Alpha stand with backs pressed against the wall, where dull thuds of bass from the empty dancehall anticipate the first notes of a heartbreaking melody drifting out onto "The Street".

"The Street" (2006) is their first album, self- recorded in the basement of singer's Nick Bevan-John's childhood house, and his loft Dartmouth Apartment, an old Captain's house that overlooks the green, sometimes blue, Halifax Harbour, and the buildings across the way that fool you into believing there might be a city here. "You do not feel the peace drinking in big cities, or making music. I like empty streets where you can be left alone with the stars in your eyes, and then try and remember, and drink, and play music with your companions, say things that you are not allowed to say in the play of the dlike ay and night, at least not with a blue collar on your throat anyway, or any collar for that matter...well maybe a priest's"

While reticent about musical influences, their sound betrays the influence of British garage bands of the 1960s, electro pop from the following decade, and New York post-punk, tempered by a sense of hope and nostalgia for the wilderness of their Nova Scotia Canada home, and "the lamp-lit shadows of our hometown�. Unable, and unwilling to give up his day job, where he "lifts things for money", lead singer Nick Bevan-John constantly awaits time off where he can drink, play, write, and record music with Ceti Alpha's Mike Conrad-Keys, Rhys Bevan-John-Bass and Andrew Wright-drums.

"These are the songs you might hear in your head outside sticky-floored bars, as you brace against the chill and look for a taxi home."
-Johnny Shaw "local drinker"