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Music

Premiere: Stream L Con's 'The Distance of the Moon' Which Was Recorded Entirely in a Church

Listen to the exclusive stream of L Con's 7-inch which sounds like chicken soup for the soul.

Photo By Jamie Onions

Great art doesn’t always come freely. The universe is a big place, cluttering minds and gumming up inspiration with its immensity like a sort of reverse Blank Page Syndrome. As a member of Del Bel and a solo musician working under the moniker L Con, Lisa Conway has found a reliable tool for negotiating this situation through working with prompts and placing restrictions on where her work can go. With Del Bel, Conway has previously turned to Jack London stories for inspiration, and recently helped create an alternative score to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, performed live alongside a screening of the film at the Christie Pitts Film Festival last month in Toronto. On her 2013 L Con release The Ballads Reimagined, she restricted all instrumentation to fretless instruments. Now, L Con is readying the release of a seven-inch with a track on each side named for and inspired directly by a short story from Cosmicomics, a 1965 collection authored by famed Italian writer Italo Calvino telling variably fact-informed stories about the universe’s creation and a character named Qfwfq that is as old as the universe and has taken the form of both a cognizant amoeba and a man.

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Titled The Distance of the Moon, the seven-inch features early versions of material that will later appear on Moon Milk, a 12-song full-length that, all told, will cover each of the stories in Calvino’s collection in early 2016. If The Distance of the Moon is any indication of the direction of the album, it will be one that, like its source material, creates a world of its own. Whether it be the cold, robotic percussion of the title song which tracks the alien sounds of a spritely clarinet fitted to an earthier saxophone drift while “Without Colours” is a sparser affair dominated by primordial folk vocals from band member Mary Wood (a.k.a. Warbler). Conway wrote the songs as site-specific material for a songwriting residency in Sackville, New Brunswick in 2013, but a master’s program involving sound art and electroacoustic composition at Belfast, Ireland’s Sonic Arts Research (SARC) prevented her from recording them until recently. The seven-inch is just one component of the project, and on Aug. 8, the day after The Distance of the Moon’s release, L Con is presenting a sound installation called Moon Phone at the Rhino in Toronto as part of the Parkdale Film + Video Showcase. Noisey got in touch with Conway while she was working away at the bugs.

Noisey: These songs really create their own universe. What can you tell me about them?
Lisa Conway: I wrote all of these songs a number of years ago, actually, when I was doing a residency in Sackville, New Brunswick, and my methodology was reading a story and then starting to write right after that and deciding to write a song for each story. The form of the songs kind of just evolved over working on them for a long time. Especially for “The Distance of the Moon,” we were a little bit constricted. It’s changed a bit for the album version because we were able to make it longer. The arrangement on the seven-inch is definitely a little bit more condensed than I would have liked. In terms of the B-side, with Mary taking the lead, we’ve been friends for a long time and she’s a really wonderful and talented singer so it’s really exciting for me as a songwriter to write a song that someone else gets to sing, because I don’t get to do that very often. So it’s really exciting to work with someone else and see what they can bring. And she has a real background in traditional folk singing, so that’s why I wanted to keep it very sparse and really mostly have it be her for pretty much the whole song.

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Moon Milk is based on Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Cosmicomics. Why did you find this source material so fascinating?
Well, I’d never done a residency before, so I was feeling a little bit intimidated and I felt like I had to be very productive. And I was only in Sackville for just under three weeks, so I thought it would be a really interesting exercise. I was going through a big phase of reading Italo Calvino and I really liked his writing, so I thought it would be an exciting exercise to write a collection of songs based entirely on a collection of stories. The really amazing thing about these stories is that even though they’re based in space and they jump from scientific fact, at the heart of them, the themes are really universal and they’re about love and loneliness and they could be set in any time I think at the end of the day, so that really spoke to me.

Prompts seem to factor into a lot of your projects. Can you explain your writing process a bit?
I’ve been writing songs for a long time, and I have to kind of trick myself into doing it now. It’s not like I sit down and divine inspiration comes from a magical place. I have to kind of force myself to do it a little bit, and even though that sounds uninspired, things usually turn out to be pretty wonderful. I guess setting rules and limitations for myself I find really useful at least as a jumping point. Some of the songs I even literally just took the letters from the story and wrote a melodic line based on the notes and used that as a jumping point just because you need to start with something. So I guess I like setting rules and then once I feel like they should be broken, I can break them.

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And I think that’s a good practice for anything, because once you set restrictions for yourself, you force yourself to improvise around them.
Yeah, and I think you become more creative as well. With The Ballads Reimagined, my rule was that we didn’t have any fretted instruments, which was neat, but very frustrating in terms of tuning as well. So it’s nice that the restrictions on this album that I’ve set for myself are just thematic and in terms of sounds and instrumentation and timbres, I’m letting myself do whatever I want, which is pretty exciting. So there can be guitar solos, and there are, which is pretty cool.

You just spent a year studying sound art and electroacoustic composition at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Ireland. What did that consist of?
Did your studies inform this record in any way? It was a pretty open program. And all of the projects and compositions that we did were very rooted in using technology, so all of the composing I did in a computer, and we talked about sound and recorded sound really well and played around with analogue synthesizers and did some coding and stuff like that, but I guess it was just a really good reminder about sonic quality and sounds and thinking about the way we listen to things, and I think it was a good kick in the butt to think about recording and being careful, and that it’s really a decision when you make a recording in terms of the microphone you use and the space that you’re in. So in terms of the approach now, doing the seven-inch in the Music Gallery—which is a church so there’s a lot of natural reverb there—that was definitely influenced by my year of thinking about sound and thinking about what I liked about certain sounds and what I didn’t like about certain sounds, and just being very deliberate about what I wanted to put on the record.

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Was this a master’s program? Did you have a thesis?
So it was a master’s of Sonic Art and my thesis was creative. I wrote a piece that was for 32 speakers. There’s a sonic laboratory at the research centre which is four levels of eight rings of speakers, and I made a work within that space and thought a lot about dynamics in terms of diffusing sounds throughout the speakers and most of the sounds I got from this really old analogue synthesizer, which was really, really fun to play with, but also fairly unpredictable. But I guess it keys into what I’m making with the record, too, because it was a good reminder of being really excited about analogue sounds but also really embracing the fact that you can manipulate them and edit them with digital technology. So recording things that you like and then utilizing computers to make them behave in the way you intend to.

Like you said, the Music Gallery is a church, so you have a lot of space for the sound to wander through before it travels back to you, and I imagine that, thematically, that works for a project like this.
It has very thin walls, though. And I would warn anyone… I always record there for some reason on garbage day—I always manage to do that—which I think is Tuesday, so now I know. So the city is definitely in the background, too.

Photo via band's Tumblr

There’s another arm to this project, this sound installation, Moon Phone, which will be at the Rhino the day after the seven-inch comes out. I don’t know how much you want to give away, but what can you tell me about that?
I was actually working on it right before you called. I’m hacking an old rotary phone and using Arduino technology to turn it into a device in which you can dial up the moon. And I guess that’s all that I’m gonna give away. I’ll have to invent a phone number. I still don’t know what the moon’s phone number will be.

Was the Rhino a venue that you sought out for this? You seem to be very invested in sound’s physical nature and the interaction between sound and space.
The Rhino is just happening because it’s a venue that just happened to work out with the Parkdale Film and Video Showcase. I think the installation itself is actually going to be at Capital [Espresso], it’s a coffee shop at the corner of Queen and Dunn. So it’ll just be there if you want to grab a coffee and listen to the moon, but I think that the Rhino and the Parkdale Film and Video Showcase have just had a good relationship in working together and it’s just logistical, rather than spatial, that it’ll be there.

What’s next for you after Moon Milk?
I’m still doing shows with Del Bel, and I have a bunch of other songs—like an EP at least—that I need to record after I get this record out of the way. Stuff that I’m really excited about, but I really wanted to stick to the theme and the concept of the record, so I didn’t want to put them on there.

Tom Beedham is an arts and culture journalist living in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter