Besnard Lakes: Dreams of turntables and espionage
Jace Lasek of the Besnard Lakes is a vinyl junkie.
It doesn’t matter to him that most of the world is now downloading music rather than listening to it on a turntable. He still considers the vinyl album the ultimate gauge of a band’s worth, and each Besnard Lakes album is crafted with the turntable listener first in mind.
“We use the vinyl record as a template while in the studio,” says Lasek, who cofounded the Montreal band with his wife, Olga Goreas, in 2003. “We’re constantly thinking about side breaks, and we never make records over 46 minutes. After you get over 42, 44, you lose sound quality with vinyl -- and that’s a priority for us. We’re always thinking about the flow, not about individual singles. We want to make record that’s a cohesive whole, with no junk, no filler.”
Lasek’s devotion is full-time. When he isn’t making Besnard Lakes albums, he’s running a recording studio in Montreal. Before that, he was a hard-core fan who was inspired by great albums, “the gems that were incredible front to back, the labored-over records that don’t have any filler.” He lists “any Bee Gees album from 1965 to ’73,” as well as Pretty Things’ “SF Sorrow” and “Parachute,” the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” Dennis Wilson’s “Pacific Ocean Blue,” Spiritualized’s “Lazer Guided Melodies” and My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” as among his favorites.
It doesn’t matter to him that most of the world is now downloading music rather than listening to it on a turntable. He still considers the vinyl album the ultimate gauge of a band’s worth, and each Besnard Lakes album is crafted with the turntable listener first in mind.
“We use the vinyl record as a template while in the studio,” says Lasek, who cofounded the Montreal band with his wife, Olga Goreas, in 2003. “We’re constantly thinking about side breaks, and we never make records over 46 minutes. After you get over 42, 44, you lose sound quality with vinyl -- and that’s a priority for us. We’re always thinking about the flow, not about individual singles. We want to make record that’s a cohesive whole, with no junk, no filler.”
Lasek’s devotion is full-time. When he isn’t making Besnard Lakes albums, he’s running a recording studio in Montreal. Before that, he was a hard-core fan who was inspired by great albums, “the gems that were incredible front to back, the labored-over records that don’t have any filler.” He lists “any Bee Gees album from 1965 to ’73,” as well as Pretty Things’ “SF Sorrow” and “Parachute,” the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds,” Dennis Wilson’s “Pacific Ocean Blue,” Spiritualized’s “Lazer Guided Melodies” and My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless” as among his favorites.
That’s a heady, diverse list, and bits and pieces of those records are reanimated and amplified in Besnard Lake’s dense, swirling brand of slow-build psychedelia, particularly on the recent “The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night” (Jagjaguwar).
The album is built on several longer, multi-part tracks that stretch past seven minutes.
“We like creating mood, allowing the song to gather emotion,” Lasek says. “With each song, it’s like you’re entering a little world. We want the listener to get lost in the song. It needs time to get under your skin, so it can’t be three minutes long. And we string those songs together to create a beginning-to-end experience, a way of forgetting about the world for 45 minutes. I don’t do drugs, but this is a drug record.”
The atmosphere is further enhanced by Lasek’s unusual subject matter. Since the band’s first album, “Volume 1” in 2003, he has been writing about the shadowy world of international espionage (Goreas’ songs are more personal, but she is now including references to Lasek’s spies in some of her lyrics).
The guitarist says he latched on to the theme after discovering “The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations,” a four-CD set of shortwave radio transmissions that communicated coded messages to spies in the field.
“It blew my mind,” Lasek says. “I thought I could develop that idea through my lyrics because I feel I don’t have much to write about. If I write about my experiences, it just sounds like everyone else. This is a way of making the lyrics more vibrant, more fun for me and the listener.”
Lasek says he doesn’t plot out the narrative ahead of time, but instead lets the music inspire what happens to his shadowy creations.
“Initially, I thought I would kill the spies off in this record, but that didn’t happen,” he says. “Instead I ended up developing the characters even more. The spy theme had been ambiguous, but this time I put it in the forefront so people would know there was a story happening over last three albums. Olga threw some spy scenes in some of her songs, and that gave it a cool view in that it raised a whole bunch of questions. Was this guy really a spy as he was observing this other person, or was he just an average person walking through the streets imagining he was a spy? Is he crazy or is he legitimate?”
It has led to lots of speculation among the band’s most ardent fans, who develop their own theories.
“I’ve had people come up to me and say what they think a song is about, and they’ll tell me these elaborate stories,” Lasek says. “The songs become their story. I was on this BBC program with Guy Garvey from Elbow, and we were talking about ‘Rides the Rails’ from the previous album. And he asks me about the character in the song: ‘What’s he running from?’ And I said I didn’t know. Then he thanked me and said, ‘I don’t want to know the answer. I wanted to draw my own conclusions.’ There needs to be more of that ongoing mystery. Otherwise it’s all just guy-girl stuff.”
greg@gregkot.com
The Besnard Lakes with the Ponys: 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, free; millenniumpark.org.
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