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In a warm and quiet concrete car park outside the Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, we had a quick chat with Ian & Efrim from A Silver Mt. Zion…

So, you have a live album in the works then?

Ian: Yeah, we recorded a bunch of our shows in Canada last summer on a multi track and um we really hoped it would be ready for this tour just to sell on the road but uh we haven’t had time to mix it yet really, its half done. We did about 10 shows and, there’s a lot of stuff to trawl through, hours and hours. just trying to get a combination of performance/recording quality or whatever but uh it’ll get done I hope in time for our us tour which is gonna happen the end of July.

Should be good…

Ian: Yeah I hope so, I mean I feel like our stuff changes a lot when we play live and we have been wanting to get a live document for a while, sell it for cheap. I don’t even know if we will put it out as an official thing or just sell it through the Constellation website or something… hopefully by the summer or fall…

[Efrim turns up]

Ian: Hey.

You played a few dates as The Silver Mount Elegies last year, how did that materialise? Are you planning on releasing it any time soon?

Ian: We recorded all of it, it took us a while to get everyone back together, but we were pretty happy with it. I think we were all pretty into that process which was pretty different for us, a lot of material in a really short space of time, and we kept it pretty raw y’know…

Yeah we have heard some bits of it, it’s pretty intense in places.

Ian: Yeah its pretty noisy, electric bass instead of acoustic bass. Eric (from Hangedup) is a pretty distinctive drummer so that adds a lot to it, also Efrim wrote a shit load of great words in such a short time, so it was a lot of fun to do. But yeah that will come out at some point hopefully.

What are your thoughts on authors such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein? Are you into that sort of stuff?

Efrim: They are both really different, I think Klein has her place yeah and I think the stuff she has written has been a revelation for a lot of people, kind of like Michael Moore in that way, and that’s great if that’s reaching people… And umm Chomsky has written so much yeah...

Yeah, Michael Moore seems to be making so much money off it…

Efrim: Yeah yeah yeah obviously I mean, in one of his books he has a thing about Godspeed being stopped in Okalahoma but he gets all the facts wrong and uh, uses a quote that I never said and calls me the lead singer and… it’s all pretty shitty and... actually it’s pretty offensive. I emailed him and I never got a response so...

Ian: He is being sued for $75,000,000 right now by a soldier who lost both his arms and was shown in Fahrenheit 9/11, I guess the footage was shot by NBC or CBS and he is just onscreen discussing his pain and I guess he is obviously a Bush supporter and continues to be behind the war and I guess they were sort of trying to use that footage to contextualise to a degree the way in which the bush administration follow up the veteran’s health and that, so now he has a big lawsuit on his hands. I mean, why wouldn’t he have cleared that stuff? But for Klein or Chomsky or whatever I don’t know what the role of the public intellectual is in Britain you know… Chomsky obviously has a huge readership worldwide and I think it’s a pretty solid guy in terms of having made a conscious decision to take up that role… he is just a reader and can soak up so much information but uh. You know he’s just someone who gets dismissed as being on the loonie left in north America so… you start to ask about these writers who are doing solid, pretty straight up work, the only thing he has had in the popular media is that among the thousands of words he had to say after 9/11 the only quote of his that gets repeated is this moral equation between the deaths of the twin towers versus the deaths at the hands of American bombs and how completely morally bankrupt that proves the left to be. I mean, he has no problems publishing his books and getting his films seen and… it’s a big subject, people ask us about what the political culture is like in north America these days, Canada being in the American shadow or whatever, but one of the things that is certainly true in the States, even more… for all of the leveling tendencies of the mass media and what if you are not curious enough to explore alternatives in the media or internet than it can seem like a very quiescent news. But if your the least bit curious and have a little bit of impulse to dig a bit deeper, particularly on the internet there is an amazingly huge amount of people that are devoting their lives to documenting what’s really going on, it certainly does produce its counterbalance. There is more and more of it now and you have to expect that stuff to be popularised in any of the other conventional ways. I think Efrim and I are at times pretty unhealthy political blog junkies to some extent, you see the stuff being talked about online months before it trickles up into an issue that might actually do some damage. Chomsky has a lot of constructive things to say about how knowledge and info end up getting distributed and how to access that stuff alongside anything else he has to say about American foreign policy and history is.

It’s a pretty wide subject indeed, everyone has their own beliefs and ideas on these things yeah.

Back to the band, how do you go about writing and recording things? Is it a full group idea, or do you just come up with the basics and the rest of the band build things up?

Efrim: We have been doing it for a while now, and it’s not as though it comes naturally but we are comfortable with the process. I hope we are getting better and I feel like we are, but it’s not easy although it’s not terribly hard either.

Regarding Constellation, on your website there was a note saying there was to be a limited 7” series? Is that still in the works? Do you have any other plans afoot?

Ian: Ha, yeah I think that’s was Don's idea that one... I mean we are gonna be 10 years old next year and we always run with a local mandate in terms of seeking bands to release which remains pretty core to our mandate but I think there are 2 things we have talked about in the last few years. One is what our willingness would be. There are lots of reasons why we kept the focus local or regional, the least of which is because it seems like the most sensible way to erect a kind of sustainable economic model. In many ways we feel like cultural production is better served by more people approaching it that way. Especially given that the trend in so called 'indie' labels is to kind of win the lottery in a sense. Y’know sign with the best known label that has nothing to do with your town and for which you’re going to feel no particular compulsion to have that success whatever it’s going to be for whatever length of time regardless of anything else that is going on in your own back yard. That’s on one hand, on the other there are artists and musicians that we think we could do a good job with or we think we would like to work with. We have now put out a record by Carla Bozulich which kind of breaks the mould although again it was recorded in Montréal and a lot of people that we know helped out with it. I think also what we are also starting to reckon with is that we have built this infrastructure, not just Constellation but Efrim and Thierry have the recording studio and so on, there is like a nice set of institutions and physical spaces that we would like to invite people to more often maybe...

There is nothing like that where we are from, just nothing. There are people trying but north Wales is pretty void of much really. Not many places to play if you’re in a band...

Ian: That’s how it felt in Montréal 12 years ago or so. It just takes a couple of people that are committed, and then gradually it can happen anywhere. You have a really small country here really compared to the size of the music industry here, and it does really feel like a very incestuous carnival here so I can see sometimes how the music industry, particularity here in Britain how so much of it conspires against keeping a local focus or building little notes.

Efrim: It’s also to do with regionalism, it seems so… in the forefront of everything in Britain. From an outsider it seems like you all tag people as 'you’re from so and so' and then there is the accent thing, it’s already there. In Canada its not, you sort of have to assert it a bit if that makes any sense, bring it to a smaller local level... I mean 'this is my neighborhood' you’re talking about our neighborhood....does that make sense?

Ian: Yeah, I think because Canadian cultural production and entertainment at large operates very much in the shadow of American culture, what Efrim is saying, it’s not so much as defining the Canadian culture versus the American culture its more the mono corporate model is so persuasive and the strategies for creating a buzz are so nakedly obvious that there is a dominant structure that is very easy to identify and then the tiny little bit of courage it takes to actually speak to it as you are engaging in a real practice it kinda blows me away that more people don’t vocalize this stuff, but its largely American indie labels in the 80s that created the model and the infrastructure that we make use of... operationally...

Efrim: Uhh...

Ian: You don’t agree?!

Efrim: The sad thing is you know, you play music and you buy music, I don’t think there are any labels left that uh I love or idealize, I don’t think there are any of the old hardcore independent American labels who I haven’t heard that I haven’t heard a fucking horror story about! It’s sad, it’s weird… I mean we were all like idealizing this stuff and trying to put it into practice in our own town and you know, once it started working out we started getting access to stories… like… ahh fuck!

Ian: Now that’s true yeah, by the same token there continues to be in North America in particular the United States huge scenes surrounding hardcore that completely bypass any kind of retail distribution, it's completely fed by zines and basement concerts and a circuit. It's a complete alternative to any other, the only problem is that stuff is that its very narrowly defined in terms of genre and it has too feel a fairly suffocated situation aesthetically and maybe even ethically. That stuff still exists... pick up an issue of Punk Planet or whatever in the US and you will see adverts issue in issue out, all cut and paste by labels that you have never heard of who sell a few thousand copies no doubt. Its the same with Constellation, we mostly sell a few thousand copies of most things we put out, its just we happen to sell tiny amounts in lots of different countries, these labels sell the same amount in a few states. So there is that too, yeah it’s… it’s true that there is not quite as much principal solidarity than you might have thought in the process.

Moving back to the band, the singing aspect is now a pretty important part of your sound, how did the idea come up and do you enjoy singing together?

Efrim: Uhhh... it just sorta happened it wasn’t a conscious decision or anything. And it feels good to be able to sing together and it feels good to be able to use words in that context, to try to speak clearly…

Yeah some of the lyrics are quite poignant, do you spend a lot of time coming up with them, do you actually want to actually make a point?

Efrim: We like our songs to be about something.

Ian: As someone who sings some of the words that Efrim writes, like everyone else, that there is a level, just within the band on an intimate and personal level that despite how strong the lyrics are, it's felt like a huge evolution within the band as musicians. Very few of us have actually sung before properly, we are clearly untrained voices that just try and belt it out… but it has contributed immensely yeah.

Do you enjoy it?

Ian: Yeah it’s a whole other level of engagement. Efrim has really pushed and encouraged people to join in and write a certain number of the lyrics with group singing in mind… it’s not a calculated strategy in any way but it’s been pretty important to us in our semi circle on stage to be singing with and singing at each other and to try to communicate that the band is a little community up there. That ethic and vibe is kinda consistent with a lot of things we are trying to be that as a band that hopefully when people see us live that it helps communicate something... we are just kinda hollering. The past few tours we have done, in rooms like that… and its packed and its warm and… it stays quiet… it’s never a dull moment for us on stage either. It’s nice to feel that people are hopefully listening a little more closely and that it creates a space for the words... it’s rewarding yeah…

Okay, and one final one, uhh, on the way up here we were listening to Underworld of all bands and yeah…any chance your going to be listening to them in the tour bus?!?!

Ian: Uhh… I’m not even sure I know what Underworld is...

Efrim: Feeling slippy and all that!?

Born slippy.

Efrim: Born Slippy yeah I mean I could listen to stuff like that...

Ian: Yeah I mean if you asked everyone in the band you would end up with a list of 35 or 70 say different lists or whatever…

Yeah indeed anyway, thanks muchly for speaking to us tonight…

Efrim: Thanks.

Ian: This parking lot has been good to us…

Thanks to www.nothingatall.net