World Club

The indie music scene in Vancouver is among the best in the world, producing some of the most influential independent groups internationally. Acts such as Black Mountain, the New Pornographers and Mother Mother top the list as quality samples from the creative pool in Canada’s West coast. The musical styling of East Vancouver’s most promising band, World Club is quickly being recognized as another great in the making.
Rather than relying on the success of past styles, however, World Club chooses to forge their own path in music. They attempt to create with no formula or model and don’t attempt to capitalize on sounds or genres of their predecessors. What they really want to accomplish is the purity of creation. Despite this lofty goal, they are not the alienating type of musicians who make music for their own gratuitous self-satisfaction. World Club wants to create agreeable compositions that are still original and for people to like these sounds. I would compare their vision, not style, to the likes of bands such as The Fall or My Bloody Valentine, who maintained their original focus and integrity, becoming innovators in their own right.
What allows them to be so wildly creative is the diversity of individual members. Randy Szmek, for instance, could be listening to the likes of French composer Oliver Messiaen or German composer Carl Orff, musicians creating mainly dramatic music with primal rhythms and raw emotional effects. Band member Tyler Dunn’s musical tastes range from 70’s experimental Ornet Coleman or modern popular trail blazers Pavement. Janine Prevost, keyboardist and vocals, is a naturally creative individual who works more intuitively, responding to her impulses, trusting her natural inclinations and making music by ear. Drummer Josh Harskamp is nicknamed “von Labor-Kamp” for his tireless work ethic and determination to create quality music, never cutting corners, and setting a high standard for the band and all other bands in the community. There is no central writer in the group, they all take their various interests and talents to create a cacophony of melodic sounds.
World Club’s music is not only sensorial, it is also political; they have a message they wish to share in the experimentation. Their sense of urgency is directed to their audience as a wake up call to use life while it’s here. It is an inspiring message through creativity – but also a cautionary tale. Josh describes the process of originality and what it means to the band: “Sentimentality is a sin”. Using nostalgia as the basis of creation is completely unoriginal and is avoided in their process. However, they are not trying to alienate, they are trying to express. Innovation is risky but they believe this risk will pay off.
This band has emerged entirely in the digital age of music. Since they were young enough to consume their own tastes they have been listening to CD’s – not tapes. They are the first generation where the MP3 has always been and there was never another option. This has made them appreciate and crave the physical connection of a live show. They have recently come off a western American tour traveling down from Vancouver all the way to another musical mecca, Austin Texas. This trip and touring aspect helps connect the band to each other and their audience by the physical proximity of their performance to the viewer. Their music, while largely produced digitally, is intended for the stage. World Club attempts to bridge the digital with the physical and connects the creative process to the final outcome. World club is constantly reinventing the wheel, understanding that a sphere is more versatile.
For a free sample of their music, please visit their website:
http://worldclub.bandcamp.com/
- Oops! Magazine

When I arrive early to meet World Club at an East Vancouver pub, I casually take a seat at the bar and place a drink order. “Comin’ in to work?” the man drinking next to me asks, mistaking me for an employee. “Kind of,” I say scanning the faces in the room, “I’m here to interview World Club.” A waitress with a burgundy coloured bob sets a pint down in front of me. “Who’s in the club?” he persists. I’m not exactly sure, so I say nothing and wait.
A while later, in walks a striking blonde accompanied by who I’m guessing are her three fellow bandmates. The blonde introduces herself as Janine Prevost, shakes my hand and invites me to take a seat at a glass table top framing an old map of the Georgia Strait. In a few minutes we’re joined by Tyler Dunn, Josh Harskamp, and Randy Szmek, who set their drinks down and take off their heavy coats. Together the four make up the uniquely experimental soundscape that is World Club.

Outside the autumn air is cool and calm, but inside the pub is warm and noisy with the banter of the Tuesday night crowd. The casually dressed foursome formally introduce themselves, spelling out their last names, which until then had been a mystery to me. They’re the type of artists who value privacy, more interested in being recognized by their sound than by the details of their personal lives. Together they’ve played all over Vancouver’s indie scene. From their basement beginnings to opening for Japandroids and touring across the United States, they’ve garnered a reputation without much self-promotion and without any official management.
Tuning out the sound of top 40 coming through the bar’s speakers and the loud chatter coming from adjacent tables, we settle into a discussion of Live-able Via-bility, the group’s most recent and most involved project to date. The idea for the collection came into fruition last February, just three weeks before recording at the Factory Studios in Vancouver with friend and audio engineer Hayz Fisher. In one session, the quartet recorded a continuous set, approximately 38 minutes long, then spent the following three months adding layers of samples and vocals over the master.
“It turned into way more of an intense project than we had originally decided it would be,” Szmek tells me, “We were calling it a mixtape at first.”
Harskamp adds, “by the time we were done, it felt more substantial than that, but it’s still not the World Club album. It’s not our first album, that’s coming, we’re working on that now.”
The waitress with the burgundy bob interrupts, sliding a plate of food across the table to Dunn who carries on describing how they turned the 38-minute continuous recording into discrete tracks between bites of his reuben and fries: “You can listen to it all the way through and the songs transition into each other because we rehearsed it that way.” He emphasizes that the songs all started as their own entities, but they then sought ways to make transitions between the numbers. Recording in this way took track sequencing out of the equation, making the most out of their studio time and what resources they had available.
Live-able Via-bility is more than the result of a recording opportunity. As its title suggests, it’s a kind of philosophy that demands you make use of what’s in your environment if you’re going to accomplish something. The group’s approach to collaboration is influenced by this mentality. No one member of the band is responsible for playing a single instrument, a formula Dunn calls an outdated business model. Instead, the group pools their creative resources in order to produce sounds that are representative of their particular time and place. They’re not interested in repeating existing and readily available sounds. When describing World Club’s music, all the familiar genres fall short; it’s better described as a process they’ve referred to as “sound design.”
Dunn says the songs on Live-able Via-bility reflect the sort of uneasiness of “being in your mid-20s and not knowing what to do with your life,” while Szmek offers that “it’s about being economic within the chaos and moving forward.” Movement and transition are appropriate words to describe both the band’s forward thinking approach to music-making and the project’s overall sonic quality.
Each track flows easily into the next in a mix of up-tempo drum beats, psychotropic vocals and prismatic synth interludes. Epic opener “Manmade Lake” is a strong intro to the kaleidoscopic recordings. Prevost’s dreamy vocals and the ethereal, clock-chiming synths on “Tide in and go Fading” are a stark contrast to the more lyrically provocative “Tents/Tense,” with its allusions to recent political turmoil in the U.S. The track then trails into the siren sounds and primal drum line of “Vaguenomics.” The next three songs shift downward, spiral-like, into choral vocal arrangements. The skittered “World Swallower” ties a frenetic, polychromatic bow on the whole thing.
Dunn uses the analogy of moving through different rooms in a house to describe the way they envision the listener shifting through Live-able ?Via-bility. There’s an edginess to the group and a savvy confidence to what they’re doing, whether they’re conscious of it or not.
The pub is getting a bit louder. Prevost slides the audio recorder closer to Dunn who’s now telling me about his vision for what they do next: “we want it to be almost kind of pretty, something that’s not monochromatic at all.”
The four debate whether the new album has actually begun, but it’s really only a matter of time, Szmek assures. “We’re being as creative as possible,” he pauses, “and I think we have started it, but it’s more in an unconscious state at the moment. What it’s going to exist as … well, we’re usually very wrong because it sort of takes on its own shape.” - Discorder

Deep within World Club’s fluttering haze grows a wicked sensation. Dazzling arpeggio is laced with a syrupy lean; choralic spillage from the unseen arcade of absent minded pinball and jittery hit-men. Trapped within this lost cosmos, sinusoids bleed through temporal rifts and burn wild with disco Doppler. Grip where all the mirrors merge. - Wierd Canada

This songs is decidedly stream-of-conscious, delivered like the act of drinking coffee in the window of a corner cafe while reading the paper. Nonchalant and easy, it starts to be refracted like the steam off the cup, twisting and turning and fumbling toward the sky. Sayeth the Vancouver band:

Things flow from track to track because it was recorded (the “band” instruments at least) in a single take… We passed these songs among ourselves through the spring, allowing them to grow slowly by ripping stuff off youtube, a 1967 year in review LP, and playing with our voices. This is a pretty earthy way of describing something so digital and synthetic, Liveable Viability is about using your environment to your advantage. - yvynyl

Vancouver group, World Club, has got a strange intertwined sound of samples & fuzz, topped off by an almost telecaster’s narration, especially noticed on “Tents/Tense”. The other half of World Club has the group going through a shoegaze appeal and when coming across both mixtures, the group really stands out as something definitely worth checking out. - AWD CASTLES

After about a year World Club has finally released their fourth installment entitled “Live-able Via-bility” and over the heavy drones, pleasant rifts and unsettling reverb lies one of the most diverse unsigned experimental rockers of 2011.
Not much is known about these Vancover, Canada noise makers, but I’m hear to listen let’s see if this goes as well as Trevor and Ever.
And common if you don’t believe me listen to “Weight of a Mountain“. Grab the newest completely free below and don’t be afraid to tell your friends, this album went up yesterday night:
- Earmilk