>>PREVIEW
A SILVER MT. ZION
Sunday, August 13
Broken City
There is a fire burning in Montreal – one of passionate, brightly blazing and undefeatable sparks. These sparks smoulder with an unusual intensity, unlike any flames found anywhere else in the world. These flames are ablaze in the bands of Constellation records, within each member of its multi-faceted roster. You can hear it in their music, read it in their liner notes, websites and wonderfully eerie album art. Most obviously of all, you can detect it in their voices – in the articulate, insoluble way that they speak.
The post-rock group A Silver Mount Zion was first introduced in 1999 as a three-piece, including Efrim Menuck, the infamous unofficial leader of Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GYBE) and two other members of that band. Mount Zion were originally assembled to experiment with musical and lyrical ideas not possible in the context of GYBE, and their first album He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms… was partly inspired by the death of Menuck’s dog Wanda. He had hoped to record an intimate collection of songs in her memory, but did not see it as feasible through the format of his other, larger group.
As the sands of time scattered, Mount Zion continued to mutate, stepping out of Godspeed’s shadow, growing in membership and altering in name with each subsequent release. Now known as Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la-band, they have become a solid seven-piece punk rock orchestra, increasingly explicit with their political protests and in the midst of their first American tour.
"There’s definitely a fair amount of healthy anxiety that goes into going down to the States," says Ian Ilavsky, a multi-instrumentalist among many in Mount Zion and a co-founder of Constellation. "Maybe it’s the same for any band, but I think especially for us, a group who has tried to some extent to make clear our uncomfortable relationship as Canadians with the big beast to the South. We’ve put out a lot of records and have yet to ever play down here, so there’s a weird, potentially volatile anticipation from both our small, but seemingly devoted fan-base and from ourselves as players.
"Our biggest fear is not that it falls flat, but more that people are just non-plussed. Fortunately, thus far we’ve made the kind of sparks ignite, within reason, that we had hoped for."
The protest qualities of the band’s recent releases stem from a frustration not just with politics, but with popular culture, music, media and the people behind it all. Describing the industry as a "superficial carnival," Ilavsky says that he longs for something more substantial and hopes that his projects can inspire others to bring their own perspective to the music or art they create.
"We write and rally behind the kind of songs that we do because we want to keep making music, and we feel privileged and lucky and guilty and soft and weak in many ways, for continuing to do that while not applying ourselves to more direct action, political or otherwise," he says. "We resist the notion of political art, because we resist the notion of political, and we resist the notion of art. What we’re doing is some kind of action, and more people should think about their privileged creative pursuit as something defined by making moves towards the wider world.
Silver Mt. Zion is all about taking risks, especially in the often safe, and cookie-cutter world of indie rock.
"You have to take risks, be willing to be awkward and clumsy and take on those empty charges or pretension. I just think more people need to be making stronger judgments at whatever risks, with whatever little platforms they can stake out. How is it that we’re even having some special, separate conversation about political art in this day and age? How is it that that qualifier can only apply to such a small amount of music, especially these days, that’s cluttering the rock landscape? It’s a complete source of amazement and dismay to me."
After this tour, Mount Zion plan to release their first live album Fuck You Drakulas, culled from a series of 2005 performances in Quebec, Ontario and New York with updated interpretations of tracks from throughout their discography. Looking deeper into the crystal ball, Ilavsky also explains that his plans for the future will revolve around Constellation. His friends, bandmates and comrades-in-arms will continue to use the label as a soapbox for their creativity and artistic expression.
"I think if we’re guilty of anything it’s that we’ve become increasingly distanced from the music industry," he says. "If we’ve failed to do anything in the last few years, it’s to use the resources and the experience managing a label that we do have to become more explicit and more regularly articulate about what we believe in, whether with writing or with podcasts or I’m not exactly sure what.
"It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot lately, so hopefully through our website and a few other conduits, we will try to engage more directly with some of the themes and issues that don’t really have anything to do with music at all. We also want to reflect more honestly what our actual interests are, of which music is only a part. Hopefully we can find the time, because we certainly have the motivation." |
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