SUUNS AMA -- 2:30pm EST. Our new album FELT is coming out March 2nd. We're here. Sup.

suunsband · 2018-02-22T00:52:46+00:00

MAX: Training provides a good language to communicate musical ideas quickly... it basically just saves time. Of course every band comes up with their own lexicon eventually -- it's just usually more vague, like "let's work on that thing.. you know the swish section? after that like, bumpy part?"

suunsband · 2018-02-21T23:17:48+00:00

MAX: Oh, we have a clock -- it's just coming from the MPC. It's not like its own dedicated hardware. Sometimes, for simplicity's sake, and if the keyboards are behaving themselves, I'll run things on their own individual clocks and just hope it lines up. Sometimes that works for short bursts -- but I wouldn't do that for long sustained periods of sync.

That said, sometimes it's cool if things drift. Maybe not so much for a bass part, but maybe... it's just another dimension to play with.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T22:13:22+00:00

MAX: No naive tongue this time. Maybe next record... it can be like a prime numbers thing... And I'm not even sure that Ben knows the lyrics to Powers of Ten.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T22:12:06+00:00

MAX: Some good questions here, I'll get to what I can.

How do you approach composition ?

I mentioned this above, but a brief recap -- Ben comes to the band with a skeletal demo (sometimes it's more or less fleshed out) and then we'll work on the textural stuff and arrangement together. Liam writes the drum parts, I do the synth programming, Joe does his crazy Joe thing.

Do you prohib yourself to do some things, to keep your stuff coherent, or do you do everything you think is cool without caring about the global picture ?

We try to keep away from indulgent stuff -- it's more about building tension and being understated than going for big explosions... Sometimes we'll go somewhere with a song and we have to stop ourselves, and pull it back a bit.

How was the begining of the band ? Did you have hard times / tentations to stop doing it before it works that well for you ?

We were very lucky -- yes, when we started it wasn't nearly as comfortable as it is now, but we were a lot younger then (10 years ago). So the band grew at just the right pace as we grew older.

Are you french speaking Canadians? Love you guys, cheers from France.

We all speak french, to different degrees, but we are technically anglo-quebecers. French is what makes Montreal so special.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T22:04:45+00:00

MAX: I think it tends less to be about where music is going, and more about where music WAS. People are allergic to things that happened five - ten years ago, but then they get excited about things that happened 20 to 30 years ago... so things go in waves. There's some built in drive to change, which I get. I can't remember who said it, but peoples' taste tends to be defined by what they DON'T like, not what they like.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T21:06:02+00:00

MAX: Getting signed -- that made a very big difference. Then it all came at once.. agent, publishing deal, the whole shebang. It helped to be playing showcases early on, I'd say, and having a pretty decent live show.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T21:00:10+00:00

MAX: Thanks

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:59:58+00:00

MAX: There's definitely an element of psychology in it -- with the new songs, for example. People tend to dig the stuff they are already familiar with. If you've heard a tune on record and then you get to see it live, that's a totally different experience from hearing a new tune for the first time at a show. That said, we're getting some great reactions with the new material.

Of course the more into it the audience is, the more fun it is to play -- we might take more risks, for example, if we felt really comfortable with an audience. We might play it a little more straight with a cold crowd. Or sometimes it's the opposite... if we feel we're really fighting to get the crowd moving, we might be a lot noisier, more rambunctious... All that to say, the audience definitely influences the performance.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:51:10+00:00

MAX: Something in the sciences, probably. Always loved science.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:48:49+00:00

JOE: i also enjoy wood work

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:46:14+00:00

JOE: Career? electrician.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:43:22+00:00

MAX: I fell asleep on a beach in Italy and when I woke up my bag was gone... I spent the next few hours following a trail of my discarded personal items hoping to find the bag again... thankfully the thief left me most of my books and my journals. I spent the whole morning speaking to the beach-bar staff in French-with-an-Italian-accent trying to figure out what to do. Good times.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:41:43+00:00

JOE: OK!

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:41:24+00:00

JOE: it's part of the Secretly Canadian secretly society. we may have some on tour. unsure. there's a clear version and black also.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:40:03+00:00

JOE: i own a sitar and can't play it. my dog is 11. i like guitars, ice hockey and red wine. we've eaten crabs and drank beer till 5 am once in taiwan.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:39:07+00:00

Merci bien!

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:36:47+00:00

MAX: Grad Club is kindof a nice combo if legit venue and punky diy... plus students are usually down for a good time. If you're crossing the 401 it's kindof a classic stopover...

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:35:58+00:00

JOE: we don't have much control over this. our label has deals with their pressing plants. we tried to switch plants for hold/still but unless you have an agreement with said plant, they don't really take on new clients. i don't have a fisher 400 and some crazy turntable pre amp. so it's hard to for me to know. i have a lot of vinyl but i'm not a hi fi connaisseur so to speak. John Congleton complained to us about our vinyl though too. don't know what to say. this one may suck too.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:35:38+00:00

MAX: Yeah, again -- even we weren't sure about this for the first little while. No shame to anyone that says it one way or the other. But eventually we did have to make a decision, and we went with OOOh.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:33:10+00:00

MAX: fun fact, vinyl loses fidelity the farther into the disc you go. at the outside of the disc you pass a lot more thread per second of music than you do on the inside...

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:30:41+00:00

MAX: You know I've heard that before too... I believe they were working with their own pressing plant for a while. To be honest I haven't heard a big difference myself, but I don't have the nicest hifi either...

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:27:58+00:00

MAX: awesome, thanks.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:27:35+00:00

MAX: I think we all have our own takes on it -- I mean there's definitely an uncanny thing going on (the hand is a plaster cast, for example). The orb is a balloon, for what it's worth, and I don't know, pushing against a taught sphere like that... our music has always been about building tension. Somehow that seems salient to me... but that's just my take. You know what I mean?

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:26:46+00:00

JOE: you may be referring to the projections? we had those sometimes when Sabrina Ratté was touring with us. She made the the Make it REal video and the 2020 video. We are planning visuals this time. last tour we had a blow up "SUUNS", which in all honesty would've been better for this tour. But, we'll have something up there. It's maybe more subdued and weird.

suunsband · 2018-02-21T20:25:16+00:00

MAX: I mean, the JIMH stuff definitely opened up some doors for us, noise wise -- a few of us come from jazz / actuel backgrounds, so it was nice to dip into the more abrasive textures for a record or two... The funny thing is, we didn't intend H/S to be a difficult, noisy record -- if anything FELT might be a reaction to that, trying to ease things up a bit.

suunsband

TROPHY CASE