Preview
CHAD VAN GAALAN
Saturday, November 15
Liberty Lounge
"I’m really bad with interviews," Chad Van Gaalen warns me as we settle into our table at a local pub. He has already begun to pick at the corner of the label on his beer bottle, appearing intently focused on the task.
"I don’t really know what to say," he adds quietly, and pauses, apparently trying to think of something to begin the conversation on the right foot. He glances up and says hopefully, "In the past three days, I just finished doing a double album of country songs…."
He needn’t worry: rare is the artist about whom there is so much to say. Van Gaalen is ostensibly here to talk up his new CD, Infiniheart, and the consequent CD release party. But to discuss his latest musical endeavour, you need to explore the past eight or nine years that Van Gaalen has been writing and recording music, painting, travelling and making late-night talk show appearances. He may not be the loud, brash type, but this is a person who is not afraid to express himself.
Van Gaalen cut his musical teeth largely on his own, avoiding the all-too-typical route of playing in a couple of bands before deciding to take full control of his music. The hours he has logged behind the console of his home recording studio are only known to him, but they have resulted in what he estimates to be roughly 200 albums worth of material. "I try to fill up the whole 80 minutes usually – just put the songs down as they come out, and then give them to friends," he says, spinning tight circles on the table with the bottom of his bottle.
These home recorded CDs are extremely limited, but clearly track an artist coming into his own. At times poppy, often experimental, Van Gaalen’s music mirrors his personality: quiet, reflective, intimate. His songs are engaging, but often leave you with the feeling there is more to it than you first picked up on – as such, repeated listens aren’t just warranted, but necessary.
After a number of these "friends and acquaintances" releases, Van Gaalen became slightly less selective about who received a copy, eventually releasing some to the purchasing public via the local indie record stores. They were still CDRs, packaged in handmade paper covers with original artwork created by Van Gaalen himself. Largely (though not entirely) anonymous, the discs piqued the interest of a few music fans around the city, and those fans were soon talking Van Gaalen up to whoever would listen.
That, skipping a bunch of details and a couple of years, brings us to now – the days leading up to the release of Infiniheart. With tracks culled from the hours and hours of previously recorded materials, Infiniheart is by and large a pop record, which is something Van Gaalen himself was surprised by.
"Usually there’s a lot more instrumentals, but the songs on the disc almost all have lyrics. The thing with this CD is that I never expected anybody to be interested in it – I just sort of do it for me and my friends.
"This is a collection from five different albums, just songs (we) thought would be more palatable than long instrumentals. It started out as an electronic album and it ended up being a pop album. I never would have released a lot of this before… but it’s nice to see them together like that.
"It’s pretty strange listening to it, knowing it’s going to be out there and listened to, especially the songs with lyrics – they’re really personal, which is why I think I started it off as (a record that was) going to be mostly instrumental."
His reluctance to put lyrics to songs isn’t due to a lack of stories to tell. Van Gaalen has travelled extensively, busking and making music with friends around the continent, perhaps most notably with indie rock icon Mary Timony of Helium. He is keen to talk about his landscape-painting expeditions, or the animated short commissioned by the National Film Board that he is currently finishing. And if you bring up his appearance on Late Night with Dave Letterman to perform a stupid human trick, he’ll tell you about the resulting trip to Los Angeles to do the same thing on Last Call with Carson Daly. But when conversation returns to his music, he refocuses his efforts on the now largely destroyed beer bottle label.
"I don’t like to think about (my music) too much, or talk about it. I don’t ask questions," he explains. "That’s why I’m pretty bad with interviews – I don’t know what really goes on when I write. I just try not to look at it too closely and let it be what it is."
Opening the Flemish Eye
According to Ian Russell of Catch and Release records, there are usually two ways to start a record label – it’s either a labour of vanity for an artist to get their own music out, or someone with a bunch of money trying to release records.
Calgary’s Catch and Release records breaks the mould and bridges that gap by working with artists to pool efforts, resources and capital to get the music out there. Russell says the diversity of their artists has helped the label survive while other local labels have come and gone.
Since 1999, Catch and Release have released 17 albums and gained distribution through Sonic Unyon and Scratch records. Now Russell has focused his efforts and started a new imprint called Flemish Eye. In February of this year, he applied for a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Receiving half the money he asked for was enough to release the latest album from Hot Little Rocket and a new album from Calgary’s Chad Van Gaalen.
"My proposal was that I would start a new imprint that would be a slightly more specific kind of music," says Russell. "The scheme for Catch and Release was always pretty grand. We will put out pretty much anything as long as it’s quality – as long as people seem determined to pursue it. I wanted to try and streamline, and specify the kind of music we were doing, and put out three releases that were pretty similar."
Although he admits to barely breaking even, the impact of Catch and Release on the local music scene has been felt. It’s still too early to tell what the fate of Flemish Eye will be, but plans are afoot to release the debut album by Calgary’s The Cape May to complete the label’s introductory three record cycle.
"I think the secret to our success is no success," says Russell. "It’s amazing how having no success cannot confuse things at all." |
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