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The Vancouver-based band MotherSpace doesn’t seem to have a lot of coverage, but this needs to change. The three members William Young, Delean Ellerbeck and Andrew Kent were roommates in an old house in suburban East Van at the time of recording Last Legs. The result is an impassioned and harmonious five-track EP. Instrumentally, MotherSpace is composed of guitar, synthesizer, drums with an added floor tom and a keyboard.
The album begins with “Same Old,” which features a steady, rythmic drum pattern and guitar feedback build up for about a minute that is finally broken by Young’s political dissatisfaction manifest in lyrical form. Political jams can be overdone and sometimes arduous, yet most good art must be taken in the social-political context in which it was created. Even if you disagree, you can tune out the content while enjoying the structure of Last Legs, because for anyone that likes indie, this album has musical merits that can’t be outweighed by political apathy. Perhaps it’s been overstated though. Only track one is really worth this mention.
Though all the songs involve political critique, it’s hard to notice exactly what they’re singing about. You’ll be more entranced by the enchanting instrumentals.
“Ring Ring” is the particularly lovely third track, dominated by soft keyboards and chorus with all three members. In the same way that Amber Webber sings in unison with Stephen McBean from Black Mountain, Ellerbeck is perfectly well tuned to match Young. And while all three members sing, it’s hard to overlook the alluring femininity of Ellerbeck’s voice.
In track four, Ellerbeck sounds like Karen O singing into a telephone mic. One synthesizer plays an eerie echo throughout the background, while a more prominent guitar fuzz is heard just below those Karenesque vocals. It ends abruptly and “Geostationary Eye” kicks in. This is where it becomes obvious that backyard sounds lurk somewhere behind the rest of the music. For twenty-five minutes of Last Legs, about the entire EP, a recording of their house’s backyard, though almost inaudible, is the foundation of this album.
You won’t be able to rip this one off, so you’ll have to find your way to Zulu or Red Cat where it is available for purchase. - Discorder
I’m sitting with Nam Shub — Bill Young (guitar/vocals), Scotty Boe (synths), Caton Diab (bass), and Matty Harris (drums) — in the alley outside Diab’s house, drinking beer and learning Cantonese from tiny bottle collectors. Between squirrel sightings and chemtrail conspiracies, the band chronicles their three-year history leading up to last month’s release of their first album, Cascadia. “We went through a lot of different sounds early on,” Young explains, “and many of the songs on the record came together over that time [two years ago]. We recorded them in November of that year, so we’ve been sitting on them for a while now.”
One listen to Cascadia’s dynamic opener “Original Wizards” gives a pretty clear idea of what Young means by “different sounds.” A chaotic blend of glitchy synths, sharp bass lines and shoegazey, vibrating guitar leads come together in a psychedelic mash that, at 11 minutes, is a spacey medley that borders on jam-session. One might think that the long wait for Nam Shub’s debut is partly thanks to the vast complexity of sound on each of its six tracks, but according to the group, the reality was a lot more logistical.
“We recorded the songs over two days, live, in 2010. Once every two months we’d try to have a mixing session,” recants Diab, “but some of it was a financial issue.” The album’s saving grace came in the form of Chris Cantrell, of File Under: Music, a local independent group that develops and supports Vancouver artists. “He kicked our asses into gear. He was starting his own label at the time, and he wanted to use us as his guinea pig.”
Fast-forward the release process, and Nam Shub are excited to have something physical out in the world. The group was adamant about putting Cascadia onto vinyl, and it’s easy to tell that the band is excited about seeing it in the stacks at local record stores. But the boys are equally excited to pave ahead as a constantly evolving psychotic music machine.
“I visualize creativity as a room in a house, and each creative project or album that I’ve started working on is a new thing in that room, a new piece of furniture. It’s not until you finish that thing that you have the space to start working on [something new],” Young says.
“It’s like having a yard-sale,” Diab pitches in. “Nam Shub is a yard-sale.”
Despite the songs on Cascadia being two years old, the band insists that it’s two years fresh. “There’s a whole bunch of potential trajectories for our sound,” Young muses.
“We could drop a seven-inch of the most abrasive noise ever, and then an album of straight-up kraut[rock],” adds Harris, “and it would still work in the context of the band.”
Wind the clock back a few days before our alley meeting, and I’m standing in Zoo Zhop having my mind melted by the quartet’s sonic-bending skills. If you took a little bit of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, added a healthy dose of Toronto’s Holy Fuck, and then threw it into a woodchipper and smoked the result, you might have something similar to what was taking place in the tiny venue. Boe cues up found sound, field recordings and synthesized speeches between and during songs (despite his insistence that he’s, “Just here to turn knobs, man.”) and the crowd can’t quite figure out whether they should close their eyes and meditate or dance spastically next to one another. On the trippy, beautiful “Orbit,” it’s easy to understand why it might be hard to choose, and according to Young, that’s exactly the way the band wants it.
“Tapping into people’s minds, in a subliminal sense, musically I find really interesting. Music is this beautiful space where you can communicate with people, potentially, on a deeper, non-conceptual level. It’s not rooted in the filters of language, so you can really affect people in different and new ways.”
Improvisation plays a big part in Nam Shub’s constantly-shifting soundscape, even if the crowd doesn’t always realize it. “It’s actually a point of contention within the band,” Diab adds, “how long we get to jam [at shows] and how long we have to play actual songs.” For most of the band’s gigs, it seems like the mix is 50/50.
For Music Waste in June, Nam Shub helped celebrate the opening of the Nines, the new multi-function gallery, for its inaugural aural experience. Despite a heavy parking ticket, the band enjoyed the new experience, particularly since the musicians are all heavily involved in the Red Gate Collective’s ongoing attempts to establish a new location.
“Any new venue is a good venue,” says Harris, but Boe seems to echo the sentiments of the group when he says, “It was a funny venue for us to be booked in. Three of the walls are glass, and we’re a loud band.”
“The bands that played before us were about a thousand decibel levels [quieter],” Diab adds. “And the organizer tells us before our set, ‘That was really nice. It was good what those bands did, and we’re looking forward to you guys. Just keep it around the same level, okay?’ It’s a big problem because we’re loud as shit. We’re constantly turning up volume to match each other, so by the end of [that] show we had the whole place vibrating. We had each frequency meeting in the middle to create some sort of drone, the almighty ‘ohm’.” It’s a happy byproduct that the “ohm” is usually dance-friendly, too. - Discorder
Riddley Walker's passionate and confident songwriting reminds me of all the things that brought me to the Pacific Northwest over a decade ago... and it's not just the painfully ecstatic guitar psychedelia, invigorating percussion and vocal harmonies (though old school Built To Spill fans might want to take note). It's more likely the reverb drenched joyful melancholia, the kind that only comes from months of grey rain-filled skies on the one hand and the awe inspiring landscape of old growth mountains spilling right up to the ocean like massive earthen glaciers about to crumble. All of that is captured on a beautifully recorded and even more beautifully performed 3 song EP by Riddley Walker called Solar Flares & Splitting Atoms. - N/A
Discography
Solar Flares and Splitting Atoms EP - http://riddleywalker.bandcamp.com/
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Bio
I started Riddley Walker as catharsis from a personally tumultuous period in my life. I was living in existential crisis, with unresolved trauma, and a recently defunct band. I needed to write personal songs that could help me come to terms with my life. I wrote songs that spoke to me as a child, songs that told me the truth that we live in a changing climate, that people can be both infinitely loving and terribly cruel, that we are losing track of our lives in an overflowing multitude of technology, that we will all die. Through the admission of some of the scarier aspects of our existence I tried to teach myself a non-attachment to this life, and with that came a deep resonance with the sublime. Through a meditation on the immanence of death we can perhaps truly celebrate life unimpeded and unattached. Through an imagined placement in a post-apocalyptic world maybe we can be grateful for all we have and realize our potential, so easily squandered.
It was while I was writing these songs that I met Byron. We immediately knew that we not only would be very good friends, but musical and artistic collaborators together in search of the “Harsh Sublime.” His musical contribution was intricate, expressive drumming coloured by a childhood devoid of pop culture yet filled with jazz. Matched with the droney psychedelic folk-rock that I was already playing the songs found their shape, force and dynamics.
We started recording Anthropocene in April/May of 2011 at my uncle’s house on Salt Spring Island, where we took a creative excursion with MYTHS member Lief Hall. Long days and deep nights yielded visions of what the songs were to become over the coming two-year period. The drums would pummel and morph like kaleidoscopic locomotives, the vocals would soar above like traveling crows, and the guitar would drive along pulsing like heavy breath. In that week we hiked to the summit of Mount Erskine and sang to the vista about our humble lives. We learned of Bin Laden’s assassination, and Stephen Harper’s election victory, and were reminded of our placement within the present and it’s negotiation with the eternality of time and space. “It isn’t enough to conjure an escape towards the sublime through the music, we must use the force of sound and lyric as a revolutionary act, however futile,” we thought.
Upon our return to Vancouver we did another session with C. Diab (a band mate in my other project, Nam Shub) of ethereal improvised drone in the dying days of the Red Gate art space (now resurrected in a new location). After Byron left for San Francisco to get his master’s degree in visual arts I kept shaping and molding the songs in collaborative correspondence with him. We would make use of his all too brief and intermittent excursions northward to work away at the album.
The result is influenced by my love for Mount Eerie, and that project’s deeply layered appreciation for and articulation of the rain-drenched Pacific Northwest home that we share. The Post-Apocalyptic Anarchist aesthetics of Godspeed You Black Emperor and A Silver Mt. Zion served as an example of how to directly interface with politics without writing “topical” music. Andy Goldsworthy’s humble naturalistic conversation with chaos and emergence reminded us to remain generous in an abundant world. Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, free-flowing, conceptually collaged and mantric, was a lyrical lighthouse. Grouper’s statically-charged drone-song showed us the power of intimacy within the fog. Tame Impala’s grainy-colorful driving psychedelia, and even the enduring anthemic qualities of CCR’s straight-forward “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” informed us of the compelling and immediate nature of rock and roll.
"Riddley Walker's passionate and confident songwriting reminds me of all the things that brought me to the Pacific Northwest over a decade ago... and it's not just the painfully ecstatic guitar psychedelia, invigorating percussion and vocal harmonies (though old school Built To Spill fans might want to take note). It's more likely the reverb drenched joyful melancholia, the kind that only comes from months of grey rain-filled skies on the one hand and the awe inspiring landscape of old growth mountains spilling right up to the ocean like massive earthen glaciers about to crumble. All of that is captured on a beautifully recorded and even more beautifully performed 3 song EP by Riddley Walker called Solar Flares & Splitting Atoms." - Gabriel Mindel Saloman (Yellow Swans)
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