>>PREVIEW
RUSSIAN ARTIST FACTORY
Saturday, November 26
Ironwood Stage and Grill
It conjures up images of plump, matronly babushkas squatting on benches, painting matryoshka nesting dolls, but the Russian Artist Factory actually began life as a grimmer, grittier, more evocative image.
"A good friend of mine did the Trans-Siberian Railway in ’92-’93, right when the Soviet Union was kind of crumbling and transitioning itself," explains head Artist Factory artist Peter Willis. "The picture was taken from a train window in northern Mongolia, a thousand kilometres from anywhere. It’s just this factory in the middle of nowhere and there’s five or six apartment buildings crumbling around it and that’s all there was."
This dark, industrial tableau inspired counter-revolutionary fantasies in Willis’s right brain.
"When I saw this picture, I thought maybe there was this little enclave where all these Russian avant-garde artists would secretly churn out art while the communists were kind of stamping out art everywhere else," he says.
Originally from Mississauga, the worldly Willis arrived in Calgary after a six-year posting in Copenhagen, Denmark. There, he apprenticed his craft under the tutelage of a mysterious Dane named Andy, to whom the Swingset Basejump EP is dedicated. The cover features an old, Soviet Union flag with a musical eighth-note replacing the hammer in the hammer and sickle.
"When I started to record this I had this vision of the flag and that kind of set it in stone," Willis says, who wrote, sang, arranged, performed, produced, programmed and engineered all the parts, on all six songs, of his auspicious debut.
"I think a lot of the time in terms of orchestration, adding and taking away, kind of constructing, again that’s where the factory thing kind of works. I really like constructing songs."
Starting with the piano, tracks are built up, layered and then peeled back and deconstructed during the mix-down phase.
"It took a year to get all the parts into place and that’s working on it pretty religiously, putting aside three days every week. I really wanted to record an album – by myself, doing everything – and make it sound like you could play it on the radio."
From the chiming, tambourine intro, to the massive toe tapping, sing-along of the final chorus, Basejump’s title cut sets off in a decidedly pop direction. The lyrics express a gentle urgency. It’s a near picture perfect pop single – upbeat, catchy and sufficiently clever to deftly sidestep all the clichéd pitfalls that plague so much radio-friendly pop fodder.
The song manages to stick firmly in your head without ever becoming annoying and, despite the numerous man-hours invested in its creation, it sounds remarkably fresh.
When Willis was ready to bring his pop stylings to the proletarian masses, it quickly became apparent that a solo piano presentation wouldn’t quite cut it.
"You can have a really intimate concert with a piano and a guitar, but I wanted to bring something bigger, I wanted to bring it to life, so I thought, OK, lets try to get a band together," he says.
New to the scene, Willis turned to Fast Forward’s famous "Musicians Wanted" ads. Almost immediately, he found drummer Keith McTaggart, who’d played Ringo in a Beatles tribute band called Rubber Soul, and guitarist, Damien Johnson, who’d played George Martin. The three met for coffee.
"If someone’s really good and you play really well together, that’s great, but if you don’t get along at all, that’s horrible," Willis explains. "We all got along very well."
When McTaggart switched to bass they found another drummer, Jay Hughes. Four days later, they played their first show.
"The songs are the same but the instrumentation’s a little different for the live show. It’s also kind of kicked up a bit. It’s a bit more of a rocky, stamp- your feet, clap-your-hands show."
In Calgary, Willis and his comrades see a ready-made market for their flag and their unique brand of pop.
"There’s not really a lot of music, on the radio or otherwise, that’s piano-based pop anymore. I hope people catch on to it," Willis says energetically. "Everything just seems to be going in some good direction. Hopefully the bricks will all fall in the right spots." |
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