No. 14 - Zoomin' with Rich Aucoin edition 🪂
When all this *gestures broadly* is over, and we can go see live music again, Rich Aucoin is the first person I want to see. For more than a dozen years, the Halifax musician has mesmerized crowds with his energetic, uplifting live shows that double as group therapy.
But Aucoin has always been more than just a (outstanding) live act. He and director Noah Pink won the inaugural Prism Prize back in 2013 for their video for “Brian Wilson is A.L.i.V.E” and innovative music clips have continued to play an important role in his success.
Sometimes undervalued though have been Aucoin’s albums, many of which have been written specifically to sync with pre-exisiting visuals (How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The Little Pricne, Alice in Wonderland). It’s here that the Halifax-based musician distills the uplifting communcal message of his live shows into three and four minute hook-filled nuggets.
Ahead of the release of the deluxe edition of his most recent album, United States, I caught up with Aucoin on Zoom (where his famed parachute was hanging from the ceiling) to find out what it’s like for an indie artist promoting an album in the pandemic, the origins of United States, and his upcoming, synth-heavy follow-up.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this, but once we're allowed to see shows again, you’re the first person I hope to see play live.
Yeah, a lot of people have told me, "Oh, man, as soon as people are able to, your shows will be at the top of everyone's mind." But I don't know whether it's going to be like the opening of a floodgate, or if it'll be, “Okay, let's do it, but we don't have everyone here yet because not everyone has the vaccine.” I don't know, whether it's going to all unfold or whether the soft-seater acts are going to be playing shows to people, maybe not distanced, but kind of in a more reserved way, while my show and punk shows and hardcore shows will be like the last thing to come online because people are technically able to mosh or be sweated on by one another, but maybe not fully trusting in it. So it'll be interesting to see what happens.
The last show that I played was on March 13 in Quebec last year. Before I got on the plane, I was 99 percent sure the show was going to be canceled. Like, “Are you sure you want me to get on this plane?” My drummer had already was like, "No, there's no way I'm leaving right now." But I was like, “I kind of need to do it for the money right now.” So I flew up and during the process of me setting up for soundcheck, the Quebec government was like, no shows. So the organizers of the show basically said, “Well, you're set up. Chances are none of us have COVID. Do you want to play a private show just for us?” So I played to the organizers and their close friends. There's probably like 20-ish of us in a space that was supposed to be a sold-out, 200 cap room. And I remember right before we got under the parachute for the last time I flipped it up and I was like, "I promise there's no COVID under here” and there was this hesitation for the first time, no one wanting to run under it. But everyone still stayed distanced underneath, because it was the big parachute meant for a few 100 people. I don't know, whether my first show back will be like, "Alright, let's get under this," and I run under and everyone stays on the edge.
You put out an album in the middle of all this. As someone who’s kind of made their name through their live show, how have you found promoting it from your home?
It's been so weird. Not playing the shows, I'm not even playing the songs. It's an album that I'm forgetting. Before I tour it, I have to have some really serious rehearsals for not only my band, but myself. Luckily because of getting to a certain level, at least in the Canadian music scene, I was able to do the regular things that I do when I release an album like q and stuff like that. But doing q exactly like we're doing this right now. You almost have to remind yourself of the level of what you're about to do. If you're in the q studio, you wake up and load-in is 7:30 in the morning and you're there all day, there's a lot of staff, there are cameras and you get nervous energy bubbles before you go on. But this time I'm just talking to Tom [Powers, q host] in my sweat pants and having to remind myself that that's what I’m doing and not just chatting with a friend in my bedroom. I've done all the important things for the record from this exact spot in exactly the way we're doing right now. It's got this sense of informality that has been really surreal. It doesn't feel like you're actually doing the things that we would do in a kind of more grandiose way.
I think on a personal level, I’ve always been able to stay in the moment and be really excited about making connections one person at a time at shows. I always quote "It's a Long Way to the Top If You Want to Rock ‘n’ Roll," because it's been a long slog of touring and having people experience the show to kind of really get it. I haven't had the kind of break-out success recording-wise that artists that are more popular than myself have, like some happy accident or maybe the music's just better. Something that connects and does a lot of that legwork. Most of the time, I tend to not think about it that much because I have these immediate feedback scenarios. 100 people really liked the show tonight and that's all that matters. You're selling the album off stage. With that all removed, you get more into looking at stupid things like your Spotify numbers wondering "Why isn't that going up?" Spotify is such an abusive relationship. You know you can't talk publicly about how bad of a deal it is cause you also want them to give you the grace of getting on an editorial playlist. But at the same time, you're just like, "fuuuuuck..." The big things about releasing an album without the physical touring and excitement and a lot of the joy that you get as an artist - I think of seeing people, connecting with them and them enjoying your music - that's a really big important thing at least for me and one of the reasons why I enjoy making music. So with that removed, it really becomes a bit more just being very more focused on these things, just really hitting your head against the wall. So a lot of mental health breaks. Luckily being out on the ocean here is quite lovely and I surf. I really value my time away from the parts where I'm sitting thinking, "How do I make this my job?"
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like you like the record has done better than your previous ones in terms of things like CBC Radio airplay.
Yeah, it's interesting. I always make these rules for each record and one of the things for this new one was trying to really play traditional pop structures. The BPMs are all within a certain thing. I wanted to be as hi-fi as possible. With Release, and working with Howie Beck, when I listened to it now, it was made to sync up with Alice in Wonderland. So there's a reason why certain things are the length they are. But there are so many sections that are 32 bars too long. Because United States was the first record that I made that didn't sync to something I could actually follow those rules a bit more. Getting my first CBC number one and my first CBC daytime play, it has been interesting to see those things happen for the first time. I might try and focus a couple of tracks to take a crack at it again for the next record. But I am making a very long synth record that has a lot more Vangelis and Morricone, big long instrumental things as opposed to, like Chromeo. So it's been great to see those things, but also you can also see how short-lived a lot of those things that were goals before can be. I'm still at this point in my music where I haven't hit a thing that's given me that bump to that next level. I always describe my career as that I've been at-bat and I'm hitting a lot of foul balls that could be home runs. So people are like, "He's got potential! He might do it!" As long as I just don't strike out.
As you mentionmed, all of your albums before United States were written to sync up with a pre-existing movie or visual of some sort. What made you decide to skip that this time out?
Just because it takes way too long and I think I really looked at it and I think five percent of my audience actually cares if it syncs to something. Everyone else is just going to listen to the song. I was also writing it on the bicycle while I biked across the States in 2018. So in part to do it faster and in part, because a lot of it was demoed in the evenings. I would make an instrumental and some beats and I would sing the melodies and pull over on the side of the road and make little notes in my note app, and the record kind of came together like that.
Was soul music something that influenced this record? I hear a lot of that, particularly in the backing vocals.
I got to finally do my pilgrimage to Memphis. I had been to Nashville quite a bit. Country music's great and all, but soul music is much more my jam. So going to Stax and the Museum of Rock 'n' Soul, that experience I think really like made me be like, "Yeah this record's got to have these backing vocals and that kind of sound.” A lot of the record was also jumping off from David Bowie Young Americans thing which I referenced in "How it Breaks."
You said that you're already working on your next album and that it’s going in a different direction from United States.
I luckily got to do one of those artist-in-residences at the National Music Center in Calgary. I was the last artist that went through before the lockdown and the goal on this record is for it to be the record with the most synths in history on it. I actually could go for the record of the longest correspondence with Guinness Book of World Records as well because they keep rejecting this idea saying it's not quantifiable and I keep offering another way we could look at it. But basically, there's going to be hundreds and hundreds of synths on this record, which might end up being a double record. I got to record 70 synths at the museum, some of which are one-of-a-kind or some of the rarest synths in the world, like Tonto and stuff like that. So I'm piecing that together now. Part of me was like "Oh, I could have been working on it more during the lockdown." But I feel like your outside experiences are inevitably going to like creep into your work and I didn't want the record to be tainted with this "all is lost" sort of feeling. So I shelved it for eight months while I worked on a film score last year for a film that was at TIFF. I can't wait until it gets to streaming because it's such a beautiful film. It's called No Ordinary Man and it's about this trans-masculine jazz pianist from the 50s and 60s. That was the perfect project to come along and give me real-world deadlines. I did that while putting off the synth record.
Everybody could be working on something over the past year, but sometimes you just can't.
Film scoring is something I'd really like to get into more. I'd like to have my schedule be a third of the time playing live, a third of the time making my own music, and then a third of the time doing film scoring for other people. When it came along it was just a perfect thing to work on just to force me to be productive with a real deadline. I'm sure I would have tinkered on this synth record, but not been happy with the work I was doing on it.
You recently tweeted about your love for Daft Punk, which got me thinking a bit. Your early records and shows embraced a baroque pop sound that a lot of artists were experimenting with at the time, using horns and glockenspiels and whatnot. But I remember there being these dance parties at the Marquee around 2007 that you played, and that seemed to coincide with your music taking a more dance-oriented approach. Were they a pivotal band for you in the evolution of your sound?
They were the band that I looked to, them and Justice, for making live music that is energetic and danceable. I've only done like three covers over the years and one of them is "Human After All," by Daft Punk and I posted it on YouTube. One of the nice things that is shows how interconnected everything is, an acquaintance who was also an acquaintance with them, showed them the video one night and then relayed back to me that they enjoyed the cover. I was like, "Yes! Achieved!" I also really like those bands that only release a manageable discography. They only released four records and you can really comb over all the songs.
But I like Wendy Carlos and Kraftwerk and one of the first bands that I dubbed my favourite band as a kid was Air. I just loved how many synthesizers they used and I keep trying to remind myself when making this record, what are the things that I really get into when I'm listening to synth music. A lot of it for me is instrumentals so this record is going to be mostly instrumental to really let the synths take the forefront. There are so many good synth songs like the New Order stuff that has to carve out of the way to leave from these big vocals. There are a million great synth songs with vocals on them, but I think for most of this record, it's going to be vocals to the side, except for a few tracks that I'll try and like stick into the format of a synthpop song. So yeah, Moon Safari changed my life when I got into that in '98. It's been nice to kind of revisit a lot of the synth music. I've made this massive synth playlist, to keep listening to all the time to be continuously inspired by.
The deluxe edition of United States is out April 23, featuring two new remixes and all the record’s instrumentals. Check out “Walls (Double A remix)” below.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
I wrote about Ontario’s Arm’s Length and their new EP Everything Nice for Exclaim!’s the April New Faves.
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
Gushing about beabadoobee is an easy thing to do. In a very short time, Beatrice Laus has gone from lo-fi bedroom musician, to buzzy indie star, to full-fledge pop-rock icon in the making. Coming hot on the heels of last year’s great Fake it Flowers is “Last Day on Earth” a breezy number that Laus co-wrote with Matt Healy and George Daniel from lablemates The 1975 as part of a forthcoming EP. I particularly love the part where she stops the “shoop-do-dos” to say “Wait, I got something to say” and then promptly forgets what it is.
Last year Stereogum pegged Laus as the “90s alt rock revival” artist most likely to make the “inevitable pop crossover.” If the rest of Our Extended Play sounds anything like this I don’t see why she wouldn’t.
Wavves have been unusually quiet lately, not having released new music since 2018. Now back on Fat Possum who put out King of the Beach, the best album from Nathan Williams’ bedroom pop-punk project back in 2010, “Sinking Feeling” feels both of apiece with Williams’ usual garage-y pop-punk earworms while marking a natural progression thanks to some nice production from TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. I’d kind of fallen off the Wavves bandwagon following their last couple of records, but this track has me seriously excited for the band’s next chapter.
Bachelor is the new indie-rock superteam of Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner. Judging by the two tracks the pair have released so far, the collab marks a far more upbeat vibe - some might call it “rockin” - than the low-key simmer both employ in their other projects. Their debut album drops May 28th through Polyvinyl and they’re hitting the road (it feels very weird to type that) in the fall with singer-songwriter (and one-third of Boygenius) Lucy Dacus.
I don’t know if (relatively) unknown artists name songs after much more famous people in order honour said famous person or to leach onto their Google search-juice. It’s probably a bit of both. Near as I can tell, Indiana-based artist Ethel Cain’s recent single “Michelle Pfeiffer” has nothing to do with the actress. It is, however, a slow-motion banger about leaving the person you love before you drag each other down. “Maybе we could be together in another life? Maybe this could be forever in another timeline?” pleads Lil Aaron (a friend and frequent collaborator of Kim Petras among many others) before Cain finally pulls the plug on the relationship: “I hate to let you go, but if I don’t then we both know I’ll bury us both.”
It’s easy to forget that there are whole worlds of sounds out there that rarely impact our North American/Western ears. K-Pop has certainly expanded many folks’ perceptions of pop-oriented music from other countries, but plenty of other artists are putting local spins on Western pop and rock forms. Case in point: Parannoul is a faceless and nameless musician making lo-fi shoegaze in their South Korean bedroom. Even their parents don’t know that they’re making music. Nevertheless, To See the Next Part of the Dream (which appears to currently be a Bandcamp only release) is some next level shit that trancends language and cultural barriers and makes me wonder what other masterpieces are sitting on some kid’s harddrive somewhere in the world.
There are people far more knowledgeable than I on the comings and goings of hip-hop boyband Brockhampton. But I quite like them and “Buzzcut,” the “hip-hop boyband’s” first new music since 2019 features Detroit oddball Danny Brown, whom I adore (seriously, check out his last LP, uknowhatimsayin¿). The “Buzzcut” video features approrpriately warped visual accompaniament to the swirling track and includes Brown emerging from Joba’s mouth (at least I think it’s Joba). Brockhampton’s new full-length, Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, dropped last week.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.