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Loud and Louder: Aaron from Isis Interviews Trevor from Pelican

The two post-metal heavyweights talked and things got deep.

Aaron Turner and Trevor de Brauw (Photos by Faith Coloccia and Mark Dawursk)

Trevor de Brauw and Aaron Turner represent the two loudest bands ever to exist.

Trevor has been blowing out eardrums on guitar for over a decade in instrumental post-metal band, Pelican. And Aaron has been crushing on vocals and guitar in the legendary Isis in addition to a million other bands. He has also been an integral part of Pelican over the years, having designed the artwork for the band’s debut album, 2003’s Australasia. He also contributed guitar work to the Pelican’s 2009 album, What We All Come to Need. And as the founder of Hydra Head Records, he is responsible for releasing several of the band’s records. So who better to lead a conversation about Pelican’s new album, Forever Becoming? We let the two talk and things got existential and deep…

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Aaron: I know this is kind of old news, but the lineup change in Pelican and the fact that you guys have really spread out geographically has obviously changed things quite a bit. I think you guys have gone past the point where a lot of bands might have chosen not to go on given that you did have a significant lineup change and people are doing different things. What keeps Pelican interesting for you and what keeps all of you motivated to keep it going?
Trevor: We all pursue other music on the side but I think there’s something that we get out of the interplay between the people in Pelican that we don’t get elsewhere. I think we pull more out of each other than we get out of other acts. I do a considerable number of bands and most of them are pretty free form, so the composition will have a flexible format and there’s space for free interpretation. Pelican obviously is an entity where things are rigid and defined, and everything is really plotted out, which is almost counterintuitive given how we’re all spread out. There’s just something about the way we connect with each other and communicate musically that calls for us to push ourselves harder than we push ourselves in other outlets. I’m not sure what it is about this band that creates those conditions.

As far as keeping it going after Laurent [Schroeder-Lebec] stepped out, there was sort of a chain events that led to him leaving. The way that he left put us in a position where it didn’t feel as dramatic as it would have had it happened at a different point. We played with him through 2010 and then in 2011, the three of us wanted to tour and he didn’t and he suggested we go out with a fill-in. We did that and we had this chemistry live with Dallas [Thomas] and it felt really good and at the end of that year, we recorded the EP with Laurent and there was something about the creating of that EP that really made us feel creative and energized again. We wanted to keep writing. That was the point where he didn’t feel like writing another record but we really wanted to. So that was the final moment where he was like, “If you feel compelled to write a record, you should but I don’t want to do it and I’m just gonna leave.” Some people think that would’ve been an impetus to stop but because we had those experiences without him as a unit, and because we felt energized to write again, it seemed like less of a roadblock than it might have if it happened in another period.

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A lot of people I know, and this holds true for me too, are motivated by the personal impetus and drive to make music. Is there exterior stuff that’s a motivational factor for you guys to keep going? Or things that make it hard to keep going? I’m thinking specifically about how few people actually buy records these days or how a lot of people don’t experience music in the same way. They click through stuff online and don’t maybe give it as much time as they used to.
I think we have the virtue of having stepped away from it as a career. Up to a certain point, I think the exterior factors mattered more. Up until What We All Come To Need when we were all touring constantly and most of us would have part time jobs but the band was the primary thing and we’d be foraging when we got home for whatever money we could get. We did that for as long as we could, psychologically. Then we left the road and got jobs. Now the band occupies a really different space in our lives. It’s back to just being our creative passion rather than something we’re pursuing as a career. I think all of us really enjoy that a lot better because it takes on a different meaning. I feel like anyone who gets into this music is because they’re driven to make it. You don’t make experimental music to make a career. Or to make friends even.

Yeah.
When you find an audience, it’s kind of like this fortunate accident. It was a fortunate accident that led us to a career. I don’t regret any of that stuff and I don’t think it was a mistake. It was something that was capable of happening of the time because people had long attentions spans and bought records for a short period there.

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Yup.
Now, none of us are counting on that stuff. We’re in a really fortunate position I think because we have grown as a band and we’ve grown together as musicians and we create music that we’re more passionate about now than what we were creating in the past. We have a deeper connection to the stuff. We’ve gotten through all those roadblocks—having an audience—well, we still have an audience. [laughs] That’s really fortunate. I shouldn’t talk about it like there aren’t people that care and support it. We get to do all this shit that I never thought I’d get to do in my life. We just toured Europe this summer. I don’t take any of that shit for granted. There’s something about doing it for a living where you start to take things for granted. Like, if you’re playing in Helsinki, you’re like, “Oh this is really cool but I’m sure we’ll be back next year.” Now that we tour infrequently and we’re not making a living from it, those experiences seem a lot more precious.

It makes sense if your motivation is more about wanting to keep doing it and less about having to perpetuate a career. From an outside perspective, there’s kind of a parallel with some of the stuff I’ve been through where you did it because it was your passion and it inadvertently turned into a career for a while and that’s cool but that’s almost antithetical to the original intent in doing it.
We went through periods where we touring so much and people were taking us for granted and the number of people in the room was declining and I feel like maybe in a way that was a big part of it. Because the morale starts to drop. And then you’re like, “Do people not fucking care about this band anymore?” Because we care about it. It plays head-trips with you.

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This trip that we’re taking to the east coast in a couple weeks is our first time there since our last album, so we’ll see. We haven’t been there in like four years. In Europe, more people came out. We were touring twice a year. Our booking agent finally said, “Don’t tour here anymore.” I just try not to think about if people are gonna come or not, because it doesn’t matter. We’ve played, and I know you have too, shows to rooms with 10 people in it. And as long as you’re getting out of your music what you want, it doesn’t matter how many people are in the room. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. You talked about the lives you guys started having outside the band which have obviously grown since your activities with Pelican have diminished some. Specifically, I’m thinking of how you’ve recently become a father and some of the other guys have gone through big changes too. I wonder if all of those things have a had a noticeable impact on what you bring to Pelican and maybe even how it’s affected the band creatively.
Yeah, I think that it’s hard to see it in any kind of specific sense but I think that all those things are like emotional influences. Anything in your life is an emotional influence on your art in a way because touring and making records was a routine for us. You start to get locked in a cycle. Your lifestyle influence is the same on every record. And now that we’ve broken out of that and we’re doing something different with our lives, it brings a whole different set of emotional influences to the table. And obviously, parenthood is a big one. I guess I don’t want to talk about it too much, but I just feel like, as a parent, there’s this deeper emotionality to life that is not as present before. I was cognizant that there was a deep beauty to the way the world was connected. But it was an idea and I didn’t connect with it. But now the connection is much clearer.

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I think that’s a good point and well said. Again, I think emotional motivators are so important and that’s especially interesting when it comes to instrumental music since there isn’t any overtly specific message so it’s cool to know what’s going on in the lives of the people who are making that.
That’s actually a trap you see bands fall into that do have lyrics. They get in this lifestyle of touring and recording and writing and then touring again and then by the fourth album, their songs are like, “I was on the road in Hong Kong…” We’ve already done that album instrumentally. [laughs] Now it’s the dad-and-day-job record.

[laughs] Speaking of day jobs, being a PR person, you clearly have a lot of day-to-day insight into how things are changing and how people consume music and how music is promoted. I’m wondering if that feeds into Pelican and how you approach it.
I don’t think so. I thought a lot about how I wanted to present the album to people in the press before I did it and I thought a lot about which people I’d want to talk to about the record. But in terms of approaching the material or anything else, I don’t think it really came to play in it.

To a large extent, people are downloading records. So a lot of times, they’re not getting artwork, they’re not getting credits, not even song titles sometimes. How do you invest intent in your music in a way where you hope to convey something to people in a context where people are only getting the music? I get the sense that there is a lot of meaning in the way you choose titles and construct songs. Has that changed anything about the way you write music or present it to the world?
No, but you are making me feel very naïve. [laughs] We basically did just make an hour-long album that is very thematic and the sequencing is crafted to convey a very emotional journey. I don’t know how to convey that to somebody. It’s very self-centered to expect somebody to sit down nowadays and listen to a record for an hour.

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I don’t know if it’s self-centered. It might be presumptuous. But in constructing a record that way, do you feel like you’re catering more to people who are willing to do that and people who want the full experience?
I don’t want to sound like a dick but I don’t think about how people are gonna consume it at all. The work is what it is and it has to exist in a certain way because that’s the way we perceive it. At the end of the day, does it matter if people listen to it out of order or get a different meaning out of it or don’t see the artwork? I don’t fucking care how people use it once it’s out in the world. What’s important to me is that it was put out and put out right. In the early part of my career, I used to care about stuff like that. People used to say we were a metal band and I was like, “No no, you don’t understand, man. We’re a punk band!” I’d get hung up on labels or what kind of people are listening to it but none of that shit matters. You create the work and that’s all you can do. And then five years later, you look back on it and say, “Ah, I really fucked it up!”

It seems to me that people who have focus in a way that you seem to have do have some integrity that’s increasingly important. I think making something special and putting care into the tracks and artwork, it almost gives people more incentive to fully absorb it.
Well, I would like that. [laughs] I would like it if everyone just bought the record on vinyl so they could see the actual artwork and spend time with it.

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I think you might be lucky in that sense because it seems like a lot of Pelican fans are still very much interested in vinyl. You talked about intent, given that you guys are an instrumental band, do you ever feel limited by that? Like you have ideas that you want to convey or things you feel strongly about but there’s no way to do it other than the chords you choose and the titles assigned to the songs? Have you ever been tempted to add a singer or some sort of associated lyrics to a song that has meaning?
Not really. I think to us, the meanings have always been really personal. All our records have themes and the titles play into that theme. Usually we get halfway through a record before we start coming up with what ties the songs together. Then we finish the album based on the concepts that we arrived at. Because of that, the first half of the record is an exercise in following the muse and following whatever inspiration comes from within. And then trying to figure out what it all means. In a way, there’s not a real drive to communicate a specific meaning to anything. It comes to us.

Yeah.
Again, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what it means to other people, it’s what it means to us.

Given that slant on it, is there anybody in the band who’s mostly responsible for bringing that stuff to the table and is there ever any sort of contention?
No, not really. I think it’s usually based around what’s going on in our lives as a group. With this new record, the theme is sort of about mortality and coming to terms with it and recognizing that death is only one step in the endless cycle of life and all life comes from dead matter. And that plays into a lot of different things. The very obvious one is that our band came to an end and then found a new beginning. But also, there were individual patterns in all of our lives. Like Bryan [Herweg] was living in LA and there were some changes in his life and he moved back to Chicago. I had the birth of my son and my mom passed away. Each of us had these individual patterns where one chapter would close and another one began and that kind of seemed to define the period between albums. It’s always something like that.

It seems to me that there’s sort of an overwhelming glut of musical nihilism going on at the moment. There’s a turn towards music that sounds cold and uncaring and in some cases, outright destructive. There are a lot of themes about apocalypse and things like that. You were referencing the lifecycle and I was wondering if you have any insight or perspective on the big picture on life at the moment and the way things are going in our country and the world and if that plays into the way you make music.
Man, you’ve got some big questions! [laughs]

OK, strike that one. How was recording?
[laughs] I like that you worded it, “Do you have any insights” because I mean, no. I’m not a very insightful person. The country is obviously going in a really dark direction and that has a lot to do with why nihilism is on the rise as a musical phenomenon. It seems like music just goes in these cycles. It just seems like there was a lot of cynicism in music in the ‘80s and then the ‘90s was this boom of brightness. Not necessarily cheery but really inspired and positive vibes coming out of bands. It seems like maybe this is just another cycle of that, musically. There’s obviously a lot of negativity in the country and the world. You’ve got the world economy on the brink of collapse because a few rich assholes wanna shut down the government to prove a point. Yeah, why wouldn’t you feel cynical and nihilistic when it’s being rubbed in your face all the time that you have no real power to make change in the world?

Would you say that your general outlook is more positive? You just brought a child into the world. Maybe in your personal sphere, your outlook isn’t so bleak?
I just feel like there’s a lot of negativity in the world and everything in this world is very flexible. Everything changes so I try not to look at all the negativity as this permanent thing. Things that are not sustainable like governments that get themselves caught in a deadlock and cease to function, they have a habit of dying out and something else springs up in their place.

Forever Becoming is out this week from Southern Lord.