JANUARY 2009 - ARTHUR - INTERVIEW

Bruce Peninsula, a Toronto-based, twelve-piece, indie-gospel, post-punk choir are coming to the Gordon Best Theatre January 28. After an extraordinary performance at this year’s Peterborough Folk Festival, Bruce Peninsula have released their much anticipated full length album A Mountain is a Mouth, converting many to their devotional following. Arthur spoke with Matt Cully of the band about their beginnings, the contention surrounding their use of Alan Lomax’s recordings and why they will make you a believer too.

Bruce Peninsula began as a duo, but you now name twelve musicians in your ranks. How did the band begin and how did it develop into what it has become?

Matt Cully: Bruce Peninsula evolved from a group of friends engaged in various artistic pursuits in and around Toronto. The band came together in the spring of 2006, when Misha Bower and I were asked to perform at a local fundraiser.

With the addition of Neil Haverty that summer the band began to incorporate more material that is original and many local musicians were added to the live line-up to aid the increasing scope of the music. Most notably an all female choir developed which featured familiar faces in the Toronto scene and quickly became integral to the overall sound.

The substantial involvement of Steve McKay on drums and Andrew Barker on Bass would further define the core identity of the group, allowing for a more focused schedule for composing and rehearsing.

In the liner notes to your 7”, you claim “songs are spirits: the immanent ‘here’ of your present, the ‘there’ of the not-yet, and the ‘always-already’ of your spectral past.” How did the songs on A Mountain is a Mouth come about and where did they come from? What do you think makes them speak to people today?

MC: The early influence of roots music on our sound in our set quickly began to develop in diverse ways with the addition of new performers and an increased emphasis on original work.

The influence of early folk music wasn’t just an aesthetic one. It was also a reminder that music comes from communities of people who use it to express and understand very basic things about their own nature. Music is independent of the shifting forms of technology and markets that regulate our experience of it. I only mention this because I think it’s a kind of common sense approach to music that has receded into the oblivion of modern living.

Many of the songs on AMIAM, like your previously released 7”, stylistically and thematically reference the sounds of spirituals, work songs and the traditions associated with the American South. In the liner notes to your 7” you discuss the point of the band: “recontextualizing the past” and questioning “why music so far removed from our contemporary experience seems to speak so directly to it?” Two of the three songs on your 7” are anonymous traditional songs, based on the field recordings of folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax. What are your thoughts regarding Lomax, and the fact that he has been accused of not crediting the African-American slaves who originated or sang many of these songs?

MC: First I would have to correct this assumption about Lomax, insofar as I believe his entire project was predicated on understanding the culture of American folk music and in some way giving credit or value to the art forms he documented.

In my experience, the only cases where he left out individual names were for large groups of singers in which case he would describe them in some general way. For instance, the version of Rosie, which we based our interpretation on, is credited to Cell Block 309, Parchment Prison. The original author of Rosie remains impossible to determine because it seems to have become popular through word of mouth. There are at least five versions within the Lomax collection alone.

I think Lomax ultimately had good intentions and an undeniable respect for the music of early Americans, independent of race, creed or colour. Along with his father and other musicologists who documented the music for research rather than profit, Lomax was a powerful force in redefining issues of equality and civil liberties.

As for Bruce Peninsula, the question from our 7-inch you quoted is really central. Any engagement we have with music from the past is always a result of some undeniable influence it has on our lives today. If every culture is meant to express its own zeitgeist, then it is certainly a peculiar thing to be obsessed with music from a completely different time and place. There is a risk of doing things in poor taste that could cause offence rather than reverence. As you bring a song into your frame of reference, you begin to impose all sorts of values, emotions, styles that weren’t relevant to the original performer.

What is important for us is to treat any material we interpret with respect and dignity. I subscribe to the idea that the best criticism of art is to produce new art. … This is also a way to celebrate those things that have had positive effects on your growth as an artist. Even if we’ve failed in our endeavour, our intentions remain genuine and ultimately humble.

I think I should add that we are actively trying to de-emphasize the influence of roots music on our sound. Our new material is moving in other directions and we don’t want to be thought of in only one limited way.

I feel like our music is concerned with the transmission of a kind of primal joy; one that includes suffering, pain, euphoria, love, doubt – all the things that push and pull us. It will certainly take many forms and evolve with each new experience.

Your contextualization of these traditional songs is different in many ways to Lomax’s recordings. How do you negotiate reinterpreting narratives without reinforcing the romanticization of the subject and context in which they were created?

MC: Certainly, the problem of idealizing the conditions of early America is something we take seriously. Western pop music emerged from spirituals, blues, jazz and European classical music, all of which developed through some relationship of privilege and oppression. Our interpretations reflect our own contemporary sensibilities and I think of them as additions to the folk tradition rather than cover songs.

In fact the idea of a cover song is tied up with all kinds of issues of authorship and copy write that are now once again becoming obsolete. In the original recording of Drinking All Day, Vera Ward Hall, in discussion with Lomax, reveals that she doesn’t know where she learned the song, she just heard people singing it where she lives. In fact, she doesn’t remember the entire song and indicates that it is actually much longer. This idea of songs as disembodied, free-floating entities is crucial to our approach. It’s something that is currently being played out online with new music once again being passed around through word of mouth.