In 2012, Brasstronaut frontman Edo Van Breeman and Zolas frontman Zachary Gray made their debut performance as a duo at a nightclub in Paris. There was a slight problem, however: they didn’t have a band name, had no recorded output and, until a week prior, had never played music together. This performance was hastily thrown together after their pair were asked to appear in Afflicted, a found-footage-style vampire film made by fellow Vancouverites Derek Lee and Clif Prowse. In the flick, Van Breeman and Gray played travelling musicians; their Parisian concert is the setting for a pivotal scene in which one of the main characters meets a woman who infects him with a vampiric virus.Continued below…Shortly before leaving for Paris to film the scene, the two friends met up and cobbled together a 20-minute set with no greater ambition than getting through the performance without making fools out of themselves. At the gig, something unexpected happened (and we’re not talking about a vampire attack): not only did they make it through the gig unscathed, but the Parisian audience loved it, and Van Breeman and Gray decided to turn their fictional movie band into a real project called Unalaska. Some of the songs composed for that Parisian scene appear on Unalaska’s self-titled debut EP, due out digitally on October 16 and on vinyl on November 13 through Light Organ Records. With four moody pop-noir soundscapes based around skin-crawling beats, dual vocals, post-punk guitar lines and hair-raising synths, it subtly evokes its horror-movie origins without resorting to spooky-ooky tackiness.Both Van Breeman and Gray are already busy with other projects; the former is a prolific film composer and has a new Brasstronaut album on the way, while the latter is working on a Zolas full-length and was the primary composer of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “LA Hallucinations” from the recent E•MO•TION. Still, the pair are planning more Unalaska releases and tour dates soon, and they sat down with Noisey in Vancouver to discuss their filmic formation, skydiving, how alcohol and sleep deprivation almost turned Edo into a real-life vampire.
Zachary Gray: I was hanging out with Chris Ferguson, the producer of the movie, when he got the phone call telling him that he was officially getting the grant that he needed to shoot in Europe like he was hoping to for this tiny movie that he was trying to make. He had already gotten a few private investors and then wanted to get a bit more funding, and so he got the grant. We were celebrating, and he drunkenly said, ”We’ve got to figure out a way to get you in the movie,” just so I could come hang out. And then he said, “Well there are these two characters that are Australian backpackers right now. They could just be musicians from Vancouver. So just find someone to be in a fake band with.” So I called Edo. We had just become friends. We’d both had major heartbreak at some point in the last year and a half and we bonded over that for the first time.
Edo Van Breeman: Oh now I remember—you tricked me and you said, “Do you want to be in this movie. It’s going to entail skydiving into a soccer stadium in Paris.” I was like, “Yeah!”
Gray: That was the pitch—all we have to do is skydive into a soccer stadium in Paris, because there was a skydiving scene. And we have to play a 20-minute set in a nightclub in Paris because they don’t have the money to do actually rent out a venue and hire extras and stuff, so they wanted to put our fake band on a bill with an actual Parisian band and sneak cameras in and shoot it guerrilla style. He said yes. I was totally exaggerating about the soccer stadium, it was just a skydiving scene. Was it that disappointing?
Breeman: No, because we actually did go skydiving. I would never go skydiving again.How did the show go?
Gray: We came up with 20 minutes of music just because we had to fill the time and actually purport to be a real band. The messed up thing was that, we played this set to maybe a hundred French people—obviously no one had any idea who we were because we didn’t exist—we finished set and, to my absolute horror, I’ve never had a better reaction after a show than from that show. All the things that I’ve done over the years that I’ve really meant to be good, that I put so much work and intention into and it was this thing that we had done over a week and a half, last-minute, just so we would have something to play. We were getting all these French people coming up and being like, [Adopts French accent] ‘What are you called and where can we get your music?’ We had nothing to tell them because we had no name and no music.Was the music properly composed, or did you make it up on the spot?
Gray: The music was less improvised that the lines that we were saying. When [our characters] were getting drunk, we were actually just fully drunk.
Breeman: Those were day-for-night scenes, the ones where I appear the most drunk, so we blocked out all of the windows. But it didn’t matter because I was so hungover and hadn’t slept. There was a week when we got to Paris where I didn’t sleep. So I was the true vampire in the beginning of that shoot, because I literally elected to just not sleep. We were shooting during the day and I had jet-lag at night.
Breeman: Air Volcano was Jay Arner, Dave Prowse [from Japandroidshttp://noisey.vice.com/blog/yo-japandroids-where-you-at-dawgs] and I scoring the skydiving scene. There were two scenes that we scored. Clif wanted me to somehow get his brother’s performance into the movie. I talked to Jay and Dave about it, because they were already recording somewhere. So we got a little Japandroids cameo into there. I don’t know why we called it Air Volanco, I’m trying to remember.I actually know why you called it Air Volcano. Jay told me that Clif said he wanted something that sounded like Explosions in the Sky, so you called it Air Volcano.
Breeman: Okay, that makes sense. Well, it sort of makes sense.Zach, how did you end up working with Carly Rae Jepson on “LA Hallucinations”?
Grey: I thought I was writing a super bubblegummy bling song, but somehow I seem incapable of doing that, so it ended up being a kind of bittersweet bling song that’s slightly tinged with remorse. I couldn’t sing it myself and so I pitched it for the Carly album. She was interested, and she came in and sung it and we worked on it some more. We thought that we might have a shot and then we found out that there were 250 songs in the pile. To be honest, I think we had some naïve arrogance that our song was just really great. Somehow we ended up in the final tracklist.Alex Hudson is a writer living in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter.
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Noisey: How did you guys end up being in Afflicted?
Zachary Gray: I was hanging out with Chris Ferguson, the producer of the movie, when he got the phone call telling him that he was officially getting the grant that he needed to shoot in Europe like he was hoping to for this tiny movie that he was trying to make. He had already gotten a few private investors and then wanted to get a bit more funding, and so he got the grant. We were celebrating, and he drunkenly said, ”We’ve got to figure out a way to get you in the movie,” just so I could come hang out. And then he said, “Well there are these two characters that are Australian backpackers right now. They could just be musicians from Vancouver. So just find someone to be in a fake band with.” So I called Edo. We had just become friends. We’d both had major heartbreak at some point in the last year and a half and we bonded over that for the first time.
Edo Van Breeman: Oh now I remember—you tricked me and you said, “Do you want to be in this movie. It’s going to entail skydiving into a soccer stadium in Paris.” I was like, “Yeah!”
Gray: That was the pitch—all we have to do is skydive into a soccer stadium in Paris, because there was a skydiving scene. And we have to play a 20-minute set in a nightclub in Paris because they don’t have the money to do actually rent out a venue and hire extras and stuff, so they wanted to put our fake band on a bill with an actual Parisian band and sneak cameras in and shoot it guerrilla style. He said yes. I was totally exaggerating about the soccer stadium, it was just a skydiving scene. Was it that disappointing?
Breeman: No, because we actually did go skydiving. I would never go skydiving again.
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Gray: We came up with 20 minutes of music just because we had to fill the time and actually purport to be a real band. The messed up thing was that, we played this set to maybe a hundred French people—obviously no one had any idea who we were because we didn’t exist—we finished set and, to my absolute horror, I’ve never had a better reaction after a show than from that show. All the things that I’ve done over the years that I’ve really meant to be good, that I put so much work and intention into and it was this thing that we had done over a week and a half, last-minute, just so we would have something to play. We were getting all these French people coming up and being like, [Adopts French accent] ‘What are you called and where can we get your music?’ We had nothing to tell them because we had no name and no music.Was the music properly composed, or did you make it up on the spot?
Gray: The music was less improvised that the lines that we were saying. When [our characters] were getting drunk, we were actually just fully drunk.
Breeman: Those were day-for-night scenes, the ones where I appear the most drunk, so we blocked out all of the windows. But it didn’t matter because I was so hungover and hadn’t slept. There was a week when we got to Paris where I didn’t sleep. So I was the true vampire in the beginning of that shoot, because I literally elected to just not sleep. We were shooting during the day and I had jet-lag at night.
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Unalaska wasn’t the only fake band in Afflicted, since Edo composed some of the soundtrack with a one-off project called Air Volcano. Edo, what can you tell me about Air Volcano?
Breeman: Air Volcano was Jay Arner, Dave Prowse [from Japandroidshttp://noisey.vice.com/blog/yo-japandroids-where-you-at-dawgs] and I scoring the skydiving scene. There were two scenes that we scored. Clif wanted me to somehow get his brother’s performance into the movie. I talked to Jay and Dave about it, because they were already recording somewhere. So we got a little Japandroids cameo into there. I don’t know why we called it Air Volanco, I’m trying to remember.I actually know why you called it Air Volcano. Jay told me that Clif said he wanted something that sounded like Explosions in the Sky, so you called it Air Volcano.
Breeman: Okay, that makes sense. Well, it sort of makes sense.Zach, how did you end up working with Carly Rae Jepson on “LA Hallucinations”?
Grey: I thought I was writing a super bubblegummy bling song, but somehow I seem incapable of doing that, so it ended up being a kind of bittersweet bling song that’s slightly tinged with remorse. I couldn’t sing it myself and so I pitched it for the Carly album. She was interested, and she came in and sung it and we worked on it some more. We thought that we might have a shot and then we found out that there were 250 songs in the pile. To be honest, I think we had some naïve arrogance that our song was just really great. Somehow we ended up in the final tracklist.Alex Hudson is a writer living in Vancouver. Follow him on Twitter.