It’s always difficult to be open and fair when it comes to writing about your friends. In the world of “serious” journalism, having an intimate connection to your subject is often poo-poohed (as is that word) and usually if something or someone is newsworthy, the story is passed on to someone who is unbiased towards the subject.
In the online world of blogs this kind of journalism is looked upon as more of a venal sin than a mortal one. I’ll take my contrition and tell you up front that I know the subject of this post. I met him years ago, before he was hobnobbing with some of Montreal’s best musicians and recording songs in a home studio. When I met Archivist, he was a basketball-playing-beat-poet reading university student. And I was smitten.
And so I am smitten once again.
It started with a cover he sent me of Xiu Xiu’s “Fabulous Muscles”.
It continued with a correspondence and eventually, an interview.
It doesn’t end with our discussion. It continues with a MySpace, a couple MP3s*, and hopefully, plays on your iPod.
How did the name Archivist come about?
I wanted a name that captured my sort of conscious pilfering of music of all sorts through the ages. Everything: John Jacob Niles to Morissey; Leadbelly to Kate Bush; Cohen to Panda Bear. I am forever cracked-up by this undying discourse of the original, and music seems to be so driven by this cult of the new, but really it's just this tiny self-reflexive and insulated world. I wanted to begin with the idea that music is highly conventional; as one man said, 'business as fucking usual.' It's a tissue of quotation, it appeals to a formulated sensibility in us, you know? And so, my stuff has a number of samples in it, 'field recordings,' accidental sounds; sort of autobiographical archives. Into this lust for moremoremore; the pervasiveness of irony; and this 'difference' that is really just shambling sameness, I wanted to kind of insinuate memory: remembering undifference. The archive is a funny machine. While it is essentially a mnemonic device it also actively writes history. Too, if not for the prosthetic memory of such archives as, say, the internet, perhaps memory as it has been understood prior to this late moment of postmodernity-- something experiential and internal-- would not be so threatened as it seems now to be. I want to be a watcher. I want to absorb ideas and present them sonically. But keeping in mind always that it's just my own little solipsistic stage.
Do you find it difficult to be from Montreal in times like these, when everyone from there has instantly (and perhaps without merit) become blog/critic worthy? Do you find the city to be conducive to being creative, perhaps moreso than the other cities you have lived in?
There is this late-Victorian novel by a fellow named George Gissing called New Grub Street. It's about the writing climate of the era. It details a London rife with writers, everybody clambering to succeed, crawling over friends and lovers for a place in the begloomed sun. Some of them are hacks, some of them are selling out. All of these ideas are still circulating. Musicians today who gnaw the bitter bone will tell you about the decline of the music scene, its superficiality. These criticisms are not new. There is a document from five-hundred B.C. that talks about how the world will end soon, the barbarians are at the gate, the next generation is monstrous and over-indulged, that people do not believe in anything and that the emperor is corrupted. These ideas aren't new. That being said. I like the climate. I like the creativity. There are so many talented people here, and in Toronto. I wish everyone could get at least one disc out, get heard. There was once a time when labels gave people three records to break before cutting them loose. (Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run was his third strike, for instance.) Things change. Everyone can record, everyone can launch their own album. Critics too work this way. Anyone can launch a blog, say what's on their mind. How many are looking to get pinned by a pitchfork right through their navels? Many, i wager. Is Montreal especially conducive to creativity? I don't know. I was having this conversation with a fellow whose band helped to break the scene here in Montreal, in 2004 or so, while i was living in New York. He said he'd be at concerts at Sala and suddenly the place was crawling with A & R guys. All in a matter of a month or so. I didn't know that Montreal. But then, on any given night you can walk into a bar on Bernard, or be walking down Parc of a sunday morning and see Jace from the Besnard's or Graham from Miracle Fortress or Murray from the Dears, and they're all making music you live to, and in that respect it's very surreal. New York will always have its Art Stars and their LES and Williamsburg folkies and avant garde performance artists, they will always have their geniuses. But Montreal has it's own little pocket of myth whose high water mark is a global measure (at least to certain nations of the leisure class, who have world enough and time to fret after Pop) and one which, I think, can no longer be considered sophomoric.
Do you work alone?
Yes. For the most part. I pen, perform and produce all Archivist music. I have had friends who play violin for me, or mouth organ here or there. Andrew Smith has done a couple of killer drum tracks for me, and of course I have an in-house bassist in Lisa Smith (of Pony Up fame –ed.), whose shown up on a track or so, and will likely be on more in the future. I like the work of development. I don't know what textures and arrangements will appear finally. I mean, this is perhaps an aspect of the name Archivist too. I can't help but privilege the recorded moment: the sharpening of space and time into a crystalized sonic event. But i like the creative work, and I am selfish for it, i want all of it, you know?
With the recording industry in the way it is, do you think it would be easier or harder to carve a career in music?
I'm not sure about this. I've spoken with people who have found it very difficult to make money with their bands, even if they've had relative success getting their name out. I'm quite certain some of it is who you know. But eventually, hopefully, it comes down to someone liking what you make. Will your music get out? Will it be well received? Who can say? Not if you choose the 'indie' route, which becomes ever less so politically charged as it once was, or not the same valence of political charge anyway. I do think there is more space on the margins. The peasants of the music industry will have their days in the sun. That being said, the initiates and the courtesans will be fewer. That's fine anyway. I think. It's always difficult, art as a career still makes my skin crawl, despite my understanding the pair are deeply imbricated.
Who would you like to work with?
I'm not sure. I'm not especially talented, and then there is always this question of what you could offer the other.
Having done already one cover, would you feel averse to recording other people's songs, or do they have to be your own, or at least, have a known connection to them?
I have one song I do called "Universe Questions," which is by a friend of mine from high-school. I just really like it and I get a bang out of performing it, so I will probably record it. But too I like working with other people's words. It's a reminder of sorts. You try and broach that liminal space between what some body else is trying to say and how it washes over your own person, experientially or whatever. Always this appropriation. I like that. So no, I do not feel averse to working with other people's stuff. It reminds one of the relationality of things; how everything is so metaphor sodden.
**
The Archivist lives, writes and loves in Montreal.
*MP3's for your listening pleasure
"Fabulous Muscles", by Archivist (Xiu Xiu Cover)
"For The Poetess", by Archvist
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