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A
couple of months back I got this great looking CD in the mail.
It was from a band called The Pax Cecilia and upon first
impression what struck me the most was the fact that the band
was giving away this record for free.
A couple of spins later I decided to inquire the band about the
likelihood of an interview. Not only was their approach to
marketing themselves quite unorthodox, especially in these times
of unlawful free downloads, but the music within the disc easily
surpassed in quality most releases by any established indie.
At times soaring madly while at others offering an expansive
sound that borders in organic ambien rock The Pax Cecilia is one
of the most imposing unsigned bands I have ever come across.
Multi-instrumentalist and spelling king Kent Fairman was was
kind enough to grant us the interview. Read on and spread the
word.
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First of all, congratulations on the record. Is excellent, great
contrast between the heavy and the calmed. Second, most people
playing underground music don’t get into the game to become
rich, but you guys are giving this record for free? What’s the
reasoning behind this? Why not go with a established label?
Thanks for the congrats! Our free CD distribution started
out with our last CD, and really took on a significance as we
saw people respond to it. Initially, it was just an attempt to
separate the work of art from the commercial aspect, the ‘value’
of something is so intrinsically linked with its price nowadays,
and we just don't see that applying to something that we want to
share with everyone, something that should be available to
everyone, regardless of whether they can fit it into their
budget. Not to mention, in today's digital age, most people do
have access to free music regardless, but we feel that a strong
presentation, with the full artwork and packaging, is crucial to
the full appreciation of what we are creating, and some kind of
intimacy gets lost in simply downloading the tracks.
About labels, I guess I'd say that they are a kind of
double-edged sword, especially in our situation, where we are
establishing ourselves by releasing a free CD. But I admire what
labels do, and I've seen some that are especially notable for
persisting through great personal sacrifice, without asking
their artists to compromise their values. So I do hope, in the
future, we can establish some good mutual relationships with
labels, but who knows what those relationships will entail.
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The
packaging is another treat and that only adds to the expenses.
Well, the expenses were high. We did exactly what we
wanted to with this record. We recorded where we wanted to, made
it sound the way we envisioned, and took complete liberties with
the packaging. And we paid the price financially because of it,
but it was completely worth it to make something that mattered
to us. To combat our rising costs, we've opened up a donation
system through paypal, so that individuals, if they like what we
are doing, can support the band directly. It's not a perfect
system, but I think that it is a good experiment to avoid the
commodification of our music and to see if the public is really
willing and able to support a group of artists.
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What
can you tell us about the idea behind the artwork?
It all is supposed to serve to give another perspective on
the ideas we were working towards with the music. The poster is
crucial, it illustrates, in allegory, a lot of the exact themes
that we are expressing in lyrics and musically. Greg was
responsible for all of the actual artwork, though I think a lot
of his symbolism derives from conversations we were all involved
in, conversations about the definition of progress, the purposes
of struggle, and the value of life.
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Blessed Are the Bonds, is quite the record. I mean the
songs are giant and there are definite extremes at work. How was
the songwriting process? Was there any cut and paste or the
contrasts in rhythms and tempos simply flowed?
The songwriting process was its usual creative nightmare.
There were five guys working very closely together on this
record, five guys each with different backgrounds and different
tastes and different ideas. The songs are so varied because they
end up expressing all of our moods and preferences over the two
years that we composed it. It was the tension that made this
record what it is, the arguments and the compromises and the
idealists against the pragmatists.
I feel like, with our last release Nouveau, there was a
lot of cut and paste. A few cool parts that we had developed
that we kind of matched together. With Blessed Are the Bonds
we made a serious effort to avoid that. We might have
started each song with just one guitar part, one piano part, but
the rest of the song grew from that. Even our ideas about what
the song was about grew from that initial riff, and in turn that
nurtured the songwriting, until the songwriting itself revealed
more about what the song was about. So I guess each song, and
the whole album, is somewhat of a self-manifestation.
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The
first song “The Tragedy” surprised me because of all the
orchestral sounds and its absence of what’s your typical metal
music. Yet, someone with no knowledge of the band can check it
out and immediately recognize The Pax Cecilia as a hard band. My
question is how hard/metal/hardcore is The Pax Cecilia?
I'm not really sure I can answer that. If it's a question
of what we identify ourselves with, I'm not sure we can narrow
it down anymore. Our heavier songwriting comes from a desire to
express something brutally powerful, think. But then, so does
some of our orchestral writing, in a different way. We have been
exposed to all kinds of musical styles and the effects they
have, and it is always about manipulating those styles to
express whatever we find we want to express. ‘Metal’ music has
conventions attached to it, as does ‘classical’, as does ‘rock’.
We aren't going to escape those conventions by recasting them in
a different songwriting structure, so we try to use them to our
advantage, in order to communicate something. I think that
heavy bands that have come before us have already done very much
to show that metal doesn't have to be just metal, it can also
explore other territories, it doesn't have to identify itself
with a genre, music listeners don't have to be catered to with
something they can completely grasp at the first listen... and
that is what I think is really potent about music, anyways, its
intangibility.
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There is this feeling of Blessed are the Bonds as a concept
record. The songs sort of melt into each other and there seems
to be a theme to the whole thing. All the titles are quite
direct, “The Tragedy”, “The Tomb Song”, “The Progress”, “The
Wasteland”, etc. Is this approach to music limiting or
liberating? I ask this, because I am thinking of the necessity
to connect the songs would prohibit you from exploring certain
sounds and words. Thoughts?
We found as the album developed, whether from chance or
subconscious motive, that the album began to tell itself. The
songs found themselves in an order that made sense both
conceptually and musically, the rises and falls of the music
ended up being the perfect narrative to what we were attempting
to say with the words, and later on, with the art. We tied the
songs together to help emphasize the feel of story or journey.
Also, the overt track titles are to make a story more apparent,
we wanted the names to be provocative enough that a listener
would attempt to find the connections in and narrative
throughout the music. Music itself may not be the most concrete
story-telling medium, but it's so infinitely interpretive that
it allows for anybody to find some significance in it. or that's
at least what we hope for, we tried to add all kinds of
recurring musical themes, and heavy aural contrasts, to aid the
sense of journey.
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There are trombones, and piano, etc. In a live setting, how
would you manage to translate this massive and ambitious record
without minimizing its impact?
This is actually something we struggled with; our first
show back, after recording this album, we made it a point to
play the entire album, as closely to the actual record as our
means allowed. Some sections were successes and some were not,
but from that we were able to examine what actually can work in
a live setting, and what just gets lost in translation. Again,
the idea of presentation is so important. The live show is
different from a recorded CD, the giving over of the experience
is a much different task, a lot of the subtleties of the
recorded songs get left behind in favor of energy and volume,
which, I think, are two vital parts of a live show. Those are
just the changes that have had to be made with some of the
songs, they weren't easy decisions, and the process is ongoing,
but we are figuring out how to reinvigorate the songs without
losing their original intentions.
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I am not familiar with your previous release Nouveau, but from
what I’ve read some things have changed. How would you describe
as the main difference between Nouveau and Blessed are the
Bonds?
Oh, I keep telling everyone that Blessed Are the Bonds is
obviously a more mature album, but that really doesn't explain
anything. I guess you could say that there were a lot less
frivolous decisions involved with this album. Every step, every
addition, every idea was deliberated with hair-splitting
tediousness. With Nouveau we knew a lot less about our
instruments, about the recording process, and about ourselves.
It was the album that resulted from some inspired kids picking
up instruments. Blessed Are the Bonds is different in the way
that, though we still didn't know exactly what we wanted when we
began, we had a much better idea of what we were capable of
doing, and instead of being afraid of our limitations and
potentialities, we let them guide us.
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The
fact that your music is so big (for lack of a better term) says
a lot about your attitude towards it. How do you view what you
see? Is it art or entertainment? Is there a difference?
I already made the slip of addressing Blessed Are the Bonds
as
‘art’ earlier, so maybe that gives away a little much without
fair explanation. I think I would say that all music, in some
way, exists as both art and entertainment. Everything that is
enjoyed by a listener brings some form of pleasure to them, even
if its strictly academic enjoyment, and in that way is certainly
entertainment. All music, likewise, does something to connect
you or detach you from your world, whether it’s just a hook
reminding you of a time in your life, or a song that shifts your
emotions, in that way the language of music communicates
intangibly, and I would call that art.
What not all music focuses on is the intellectual, attaching
those feelings with something identifiable, with some meaning.
Most times the lyrics carry that duty, with not a lot of regard
to how the music itself informs that communication. That's
something that is underplayed, how can the music be used to
exalt or contrast what is being played out in the words, and
otherwise conceptually? And how can the lyrics attach some kind
of intellectual significance to the emotional response brought
about by instrumental passages? It's all seriously
under-explored, especially because of formulaic song structure
developed in the blues and efficiently maximized in popular
music today.
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The
guitars on “The Progress” are absolutely killer. The song is
heavy, fucking hard and it is all the more to it because of the
long buildout of the first two cuts.
Believe it or not, that is some of the first material that was
written for this album. It was actually going to be a twenty
minute song, keeping pretty consistently heavy, and we began
working with ideas for “The Tree" to contrast it. Everything
else grew from those two moods then, i'd say.
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I am
always looking for great music, please give me a few of your
favorites. These may have influenced you to pick up an
instrument or may have just tickled your fancy yesterday.
Because this section always seems to get the longest, I'll try
to keep my list to a minimum, to the artists that are my
favorites right now; Buried Inside, with their album
Chronoclast, really opened my eyes to the experience of a big,
cohesive album. It is completely one dark mood, with recurring
themes and drastic rises and falls. Blessed Are the Bonds in no
way touches the immensity of that record, but its something to
strive for. Both of Joanna Newsom's two latest albums Milk-eyed
Mender and y's, touched me on an emotional level that I can't
entirely explain, the songwriting between the two albums is
impossibly different, and yet her personality and her beauty
remains through the transition. I did not discover her until
late into the writing of Blessed, but I would expect her to
influence me in some profound ways. As for much older music,
I've been really taken by Elgar's cello concerto. I'm constantly
amazed at how composers are able to express such a huge
emotional capacity in the confines of the rigid classical forms.
it's something i'll probably keep being fascinated with until I
die.
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Last
words. What’s next for the band?
This is the hardest question of all. We have plans galore, some
very conflicting plans. We have been looking for quite some time
for independent films to score, and that is certainly a long
term goal for all of us. I think another long-term plan is to go
over to Europe to play some shows, we have been so well-received
there so far. But as far as an actual musical release goes, who
knows? Some of us think that a much more straightforward heavy
album would be an appropriate follow-up to Blessed, some of us
want to delve even deeper into conceptual elements and the
possibilities of recording technologies. I think that we have
pretty much decided to let what we produce lead the way. Forcing
ourselves in a particular direction can't yield any positive
results, I don't think. I think we will just keep our senses
open to the world, and our minds open to new ideas and new
inspirations.
Official Site
MySpace
Read
Deaf
Sparrow's
Blessed Are the Bonds
review here |
