Caspian Interview

by Chris on August 10th, 2009

Is an introduction for this band really necessary? Caspian has only been around for five or six years, but they’ve already released three earth-shattering records and don’t plan on stopping any time soon. In fact, they’ve just released their second full-length Tertia to be heard by the masses, and are about to embark on a European tour. Sun On The Sand contributor Chris Visser caught up with guitarist Philip Jamieson to discuss the new record, the future of the music industry, and plans for the future. Our thanks go out to Philip and as always, Joel and Lindsay at Mylene Sheath.

We asked some of these questions to your labelmates Actors & Actresses, and we were interested in your reaction as well. Your label, Mylene Sheath, has partnered with Gimme Sound to give away its releases for free with the promise that the bands would receive half of the ad revenue. What are your thoughts on this partnership and Gimme Sound itself?

It has proven to be a successful experiment for us so far. Essentially, we are able to get our music out to people for free in perfect quality while still making some money off of our work. People are still exposed to the music outside of the artistic context that comes with the physical packaging, but that can take away from the aesthetic vision that we had for the album’s presentation though. Nothing compares to taking the shrink wrap off of a CD or vinyl and holding the package in your hand on your first listen. That ritual is one that a lot of people consider sacred for a good reason. That said, I download stuff constantly and realize that millions of other people do as well. Gimme Sound recognizes this and tries to accommodate both the listener and the artist which strangely enough comes off as revolutionary. You’d think someone would have thought of it before.

What role, if any, do you see the Gimme Sound business model playing in the future of the music industry?

Hopefully it catches on with some bigger bands and the site grows. It’s a progressive business model and can help offset some of the problems with file-sharing. Downloading music for free can perpetuate a negative sense of privilege. When people assume that something should be free, it does eventually devalue the art in question, whether people realize it or not. If you were offered a free car, your first thought would probably be, “That’s amazing! But something has got to be seriously wrong with it.” It’d be sad to generate that same kind of feeling towards art, but that’s where we may be headed in our culture of entitlement. I know a car, for example, and music are very different things but there is a common thread in the line of thinking. Eventually, people might come to expect a lot less from music, simply because it’s free, and artists in turn start pumping out uninspired material. What I’m talking about has nothing to do with people making money or getting rich or whatever – it’s about the way people approach artists and their work. Gimme Sound obviously does better at getting the artist involved (by actually paying and supporting them) than your standard free download blog or whatever, so they are playing a very interesting role in this developing issue. All of my commentary on downloading aside though, I have to admit that thousands of people have heard of us because of file-sharing who may not have without it, and that right there is an enormous deal for a band like us. It’s a tough issue to see clearly.

Are you afraid that this business model will lead to a decrease in your album sales?

Well, technically, every time someone downloads the record from them, it counts as an album sale since we get paid almost the same rate from it. And hopefully, if people like the music from the download, they’ll feel encouraged to buy a physical copy to have the full package the way it was meant to be experienced. I guess we will just have to wait and see. You kind of put yourself out on the chopping block with this kind of setup, since if people download it for free and don’t like it, they aren’t going to buy it from you. That creates vulnerability, obviously, but ultimately, people get to hear the music and decide for themselves which we are not afraid of at all.

All of your records can be purchases on vinyl. How do you feel about vinyl and the recent so-called “vinyl resurgence”?

Vinyl is great. Obviously, there is a larger canvas to display the artwork on which is my favorite aspect of it. Also, I think the process of sitting down and playing a record is something people crave for a good reason. You can’t haul around a record player with you or play it in the car or whatever. You have to sit down in a room and actually listen and involve yourself in a bit of a process – a ritual like I mentioned before. For people who care a lot about their music it’s a bit like going to church. In general, there’s just a great mentality surrounding the enjoyment of music when it comes to vinyl.

You’ve been working with Mylene Sheath since The Four Trees, a label which has some of the biggest names in current post-rock. How has your experience with them been?

They’re genuine and sincere people. They care deeply about each record they put out and work hard promoting them. We like being up to speed on everything that is happening surrounding the promotion of our albums, facts and figures, etc. and they are very prompt to provide us with all the information we need, which is great. The customer service for the label is, hands down, the best in all of indie rock and that is not an exaggeration. To us, that’s a huge deal. It’s important that fans of Caspian get treated perfectly and Mylene Sheath pull that off effortlessly. Joel and Lindsay are basically just two huge music fans who want to put out records with great care towards their artists and the music community. I know seemingly every band says that about their label, but this is no joke here.

Since post-rock/instrumental rock is such a dense genre filled with so many acts that sound exactly the same, do you find yourselves approaching songwriting intending to stand apart?

Yes and no. That is a loaded question. The bottom line is that we write music that we genuinely enjoy. Plain and simple. I know people say that all the time but we are dead serious about it. We like the music we write and it makes us smile when we play it. That is our “approach” to songwriting. We figure the point of this band is to accomplish that, first and foremost, and then find other people along the way that enjoy it as well. It’s not rocket science. Do we want to stand apart? Sure. Who doesn’t? We want to develop a distinct sound and sonic approach to music. That is not because we feel some sense of obligation or duty to “post-rock” or any other bands who play it, though. We don’t really care at all about how much this genre of music develops since, to be blunt, we hardly ever listen to it. We’re more concerned about how our band develops. We have a duty to Caspian and that’s where it stops. If people think that sounds insular or self-absorbed, then so be it. People who are consciously trying to “stand apart” in their genre of music need to get back in touch with the reasons they picked up an instrument in the first place. Wanting to evolve and push boundaries should be informed by internal motivations to grow as an artist, not as a “member” of a genre that needs to move forward or whatever. To be frank, I don’t feel like we have earned the right yet to totally turn our sound upside down and reinvent ourselves from top to bottom yet anyways. One of the reasons we all are proud of Tertia is because we didn’t have to compromise the foundational, central elements of our sound in order to create something that we felt pushed the band forward into some new territory here. That was a genuinely satisfying experience for all of us as musicians, and has nothing to do with “standing apart” from other bands.

Do you find yourselves consciously trying to “top” You Are The Conductor and The Four Trees or do you try to steer clear of any comparisons?

Every album represents a specific moment in time, and when you try to top an old record, you’re challenging an era that is already dead and gone. Trying to do that would be uncomfortable and awkward. We will never make the same record twice and don’t much desire to. On The Four Trees, we dug very deep into songwriting bag of tricks. That’s one of the reasons why Tertia was as challenging as it was for us. We could include a four-second silent pause like we did with ‘Crawlspace’, for example, into every song and knock people out, but that would be kind of boring and predictable. We could approach songwriting, mood, tones, album flow, melodic interaction, riffs – everything – like we did on past records, but then there is no sense of exploration or growth. We assume that the people who listened to our old records have grown in different ways in two years, just like we have, and that hopefully they want something that sounds a little different and exercises different parts of themselves – ideally, maybe even parts of themselves they didn’t know were there to begin with. That is our goal. If we’re trying to “top” our old records on any level, I guess it would just be trying to match the passion and intensity in which we went about creating those older albums. For Tertia, I think we definitely topped them if you look at it that way.

How has the reaction to Tertia been? Have you been following it closely?

We will come across the random message board from time to time in a Google search or something, I guess. I created an account on one of them since it seemed like a good way to interact with people. I’m going to try not to read reviews when they eventually come out, but I’m sure that’ll last for a day or two. Joe usually keeps everyone well-informed anyways. We are not afraid of hearing criticism, and we are not lusting after praise, but being exposed too much to either of those when they come from someone else’s own subjective opinion can create a deep, deep sense of corruption, artistically, that is hard to shake.

On Tertia, the sound is much more immediate than last records. Was this a conscious decision? Was it brought on by influential bands you were listening to before and during the recording process, or did it just kind of happen?

That probably has a little to do with what I discussed above regarding our duty to grow as a band and try new things. And yes, a lot of it just felt natural for us when writing. It felt pure. We did discuss wanting to go more into that realm before we started work on Tertia a little bit, but that was a long, long time ago, and no matter how hard we try to govern how our writing process develops or what we want to go for with a record, what we do impulsively and sounds good to us always wins out. The immediacy thing is a rare moment when what felt right and what we wanted to get into intersected at the right time.

‘Epochs In Dmaj’ seems to be an interlude-y kind of song. What made you want to release it first for fans to hear?

That is one of my favorite tracks on Tertia, personally. With our albums, and Tertia especially, a sense of narrative and storytelling is absolutely critical to the flow and pace of the album. Every story has its main characters and its supporting ones. A song like ‘Epochs In Dmaj’ obviously isn’t the knockout punch kind of track of the record, but it serves an essential function of adding color and shape to the story we are trying to convey. Musically, it involves some of the more keyboard-and-sampling-based elements that were getting us excited this time around, and it seemed like a good opportunity to put some of them on display. I love that track.

‘Vienna’ and ‘Sycamore’ seem to follow the more typical post-rock formula, which some have now started to refer to, tongue-in-cheek, as “crescendocore.” Why did these two songs make the record, as some might say they don’t seem to fit well with the other songs?

One of the most central inspirations behind what we do is our desire to try and mirror life experience. Not every moment of every day is some huge, epic, glorious walk in the park. There are slower, more quiet kind of days and ‘Vienna’ represents that. It’s an opportunity to reflect on all that has happened prior on the record. A chance to slow down. I imagine at the age of eighty or something, hopefully everyone gets a chance to sit on a back porch, calm down, and remember every detail from their lives quietly and in peace. ‘Vienna’ is, amongst some other personal things, very much that kind of song to me. ‘Sycamore’ has been our trademark set closer for the last two years at live shows, and it was time to record it and get onto a record. Like I said, Tertia is another attempt at storytelling, and having those two songs at the very end of the story seemed like it gave the ending a surprise you maybe wouldn’t have seen coming, since they are both very different than the rest of the album. Considering this is a darker record for us, that aspect of it mirrored the emotion we wish to convey most as a band: hope.

Some say that Tertia is the closest the band has come to doing justice to your live show. Was this an intentional in the recording process?

Having three guitarists on this record ended up giving it a more live, raw, and vibrant kind of atmosphere. In the past ,Cal and I would multi-track all of our guitar ideas for a song, whereas this time we got to explore them much more in the developmental stages of writing and performing, since there was another guitar in the mix. We still view the live show and an album as two totally different beasts, and approach them both one hundred percent differently, but this time, due to the nature of the way it was written and recorded, it did have more of a “live feel”, I guess.

How do you approach the songwriting process as a band? Is there one principal composer, do you all just jam for a while, or is it an amalgam of things?

The songwriting process is so difficult to explain. For Tertia, I did a lot of demoing by myself on my own time, and then would bring it to the band to flesh out. We didn’t do as much jamming this time around; the process was a bit more methodical. At first for this record, we had some communication problems, but we broke through after a couple discussions and then started pumping out ideas fast. Everyone brings their own flair to the table, always tempered by other band members’ honest reactions to them.

In general, what are your biggest influences to your songwriting?

I think it would be different for everyone in the band. Personally speaking, mood and atmosphere are central to everything. Everything. My favorite musicians are people that create a genuine atmosphere. That’s one of the reasons why artists like Mark Kozelek, Burial, or Fennesz – who sound nothing like Caspian at all – grip me more than anything else out there. Caspian is also a very reactionary kind of thing. Life experience is very influential in what we create.

You’ll be embarking on a European tour soon. How are you feeling about it? Is this the biggest tour you’ve had to date?

Yes, this is the biggest so far. We did a seven-week US tour in Autumn 2007, but this will be even bigger than that. Very excited.

Are there any plans for a large US tour when you get home?

We will be doing a full US tour sometime early 2010, probably starting in late February at the latest.

Do you have any plans for any sort of Atlas Ladder release, either hard copy or otherwise?

I would like to put together an Atlas Ladder record sometime in 2010. No guarantees but its something I want to work on.

2009 is more than half way over. What’s caught your attention this year?

I love the new albums by The Field, Mew, Tim Hecker, Jack Rose…I’ve played Mark Kozelek’s Lost Verses Live probably like a hundred times now at this point. It’s excellent, and maybe my favorite release from him to date.

Are there any upcoming 2009 releases that you’re especially looking forward to?

I can’t think of one…I’m really out of the loop these days.

Finally, is there anything else you would to share?

When we get a chance, we always want to say thank you to people for supporting the band in whatever capacity. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate it, and we hope people are enjoying the new record and can make it out to a show if we play in your area over the next year or so. Much love from up here in Beverly, to you, from us.

Interview conducted by Chris Visser