Bell Orchestre

(Sitting in the Courthouse (57 Adelaide Street East))

The Singing Lamb: This is a really nice venue; have you been here before?

Pietro Amato: No! It’s a crazy club place; it reminds me of one of those places that would be in lower St. Laurent (in Montreal).

Kaveh Nabatian: It’s the first place I’ve ever played that had glowing tables.

Stefan Schneider: It’s kind of a cross between a beautiful, fancy hall and a dance club; it’s gorgeous.

Yeah, rarely do you see a disco ball hanging right beneath a chandelier.

Kaveh: There should be more of it.

Pietro: Have you been to the bathrooms? There are these lions and it’s fucking amazing! We should’ve done this interview in the bathrooms!

Kaveh: Too bad there’s no visual.

Do you guys like playing alternative venues like this?

Stefan: I definitely do; I love changing it up. Like, we played a series of six shows and in Ottawa we played a really nice church. We always like playing churches.

Kaveh: A beautiful old art deco hall in Montreal; we played a rock club last night. A couple of months ago we played a symphony orchestra hall.

Pietro: Quebec City, we played in a theatre company house. That was also really cool. It’s more fun for this band to play in places that are kind of conducive to getting people to listen to the music rather than being in a bar where they’re making a lot of noise and people are just there to drink and talk. So this kind of venue is nice where people kind of settle in. As long as it’s not the crowd that normally comes here…to dance.

Stefan: It looks like a venue that’s conducive to just sitting on the couch and talking loud. Yeah, it’s cool but I hope we have an attentive audience.

There’s a lot of couches on the floor…

Pietro: Yeah, there’s a lot but it’s a lounge.

Kaveh: I think the new record of music we’ve put out is like a listening experience. There are a couple of songs you can definitely dance to but in general, it’s more of a listening experience so I think it’s okay if there are couches. If you want to sit down, you can sit down and relax; close your eyes and listen to music if they want. Or lie down.

Just don’t fall asleep!

Pietro: I love falling asleep at classical music concerts; it’s my favourite thing. I go to see the fucking symphony orchestra and I fall asleep. And at the end I go, “Did I just waste thirty bucks?” and then I’m like, “No, I had a great time. Made me have some really good dreams!”

Stefan: Yeah, I don’t really fall asleep in those chairs. If there were pillows and mattresses at the symphony orchestra, I would go all the time.

Do you like it when people sleep at your shows?

Pietro: Well yeah!

Kaveh: Generally, it’s just people who are tripping out to the music and lying down. Standing up can get tiring for an hour and a half. It’s definitely visual; there’s lots going on onstage but you can shut your eyes and it’s very evocative.

Stefan: Yeah, one of my favourite things to do is to fall asleep to really loud music, blasting out of my stereo systems. It’s kind of like an experience at one of our shows. That’s a dream.

Is there anywhere you dream of playing one day?

Pietro: Yeah, many. Especially tall ships; I think a tour on a tall ship would be really fun.

Kaveh: Spaceships.

Pietro: Yeah, if we could tour on a spaceship and tour around different planets that would be really fun.

Stefan: I was thinking of an underwater tour of the ocean. We’ll be playing music for the schools of fish.

Kaveh: You should jam with the dolphins! But on a more concrete level, for me, just to play in places where people don’t often play. Like, we played the Baltic’s last year and that was really amazing and not a lot of bands play there so we got to go to an anarchist squat and beautiful theatres and all sorts of different stuff. I’d like to do similar like that in Latin America.

Pietro: Dawson City would be fun.

Kaveh: Yeah, or Mexico! I think we’d like to play in small towns in Mexico. Yeah, just to get away from the whole hipster rock and roll kind of thing.

Stefan: And prisons; we’d seriously like to play in them. We’re actually working on doing that in the near future.

Many people describe your music as “cinematic”. Do you feel like your music would make for good soundtrack music? Would you ever score a film?

Kaveh: I think we’d love to do it but the thing is the music as it is right now moves a lot, really quickly and the reality is that movies don’t move as quickly as our music. So I think movies have tried to put our stuff on it and it just doesn’t work because moods change. Like, Sigur Ros does really good movie music because it’s really, really slow-moving but I think if we were given a movie we would do a good job scoring, we’d just have to change the way we perform.

Stefan: That said, I think when people listen to our music, they get a lot of images and I think that’s why people say it’s cinematic.

Pietro: There’s no singer to tell you what the song is about so it lets your imagination run a bit more and you can get into the bubble of the music.

If you could describe your new album as a movie, how would you describe it?

Kaveh: I think it’ll work well with cinema that has layers. Movies where they don’t tell you what to think, kind of like our music – it doesn’t have a singer to tell you what to think. Movies are more of a poetic, metaphoric imagery that I think our music shows so I think, I don’t know, the Mirror by Tchaikovsky or a movie about the end of the world or the beginning of the world.

Stefan: Not a narrative or anything like that.

Kaveh: Yeah, it wouldn’t work well with a Juno-type of movie. Like, American-hipster, indie…

Stefan: Hey, it could. It could be called American Hipster!

Let’s talk about the new album. Do you feel like it’s a continuation of the first album or a completely different chapter?

Pietro: I think it’s a continuation but also an evolution. The music has evolved and we’ve all evolved. Well, since the first record came out, it’s been five years? We recorded the first record in ’03, so definitely the music has changed but it still the same people that are involved in creating it so in that sense its a continuation and an evolution.

Stefan: We’ve all evolved musically since then, we’re all doing various things so as time passes, it will have naturally evolved.

Kaveh: It’s also a little more of a subtler record. It’s not as bombastic as the first record. The louder, more bombastic moments are chosen more carefully and there are these subtle build ups and subtleties everywhere.

And finally, if you were a singing animal, what would you be?

Kaveh: (at Pietro) He would be a lone moose.

Pietro: I would.

Stefan: With no one else.

Kaveh: (at Stefan) What would you be? An octopus?

Stefan: Let me finish that DVD, Planet Earth and I’ll probably have a few animals to be. Because every time I watch it, there are these new amazing animals. There’s this one climate where all the animals are just mini, like the deer are just 30 cm high…

Kaveh: Does this really exist?

Stefan: Yeah, dude it’s amazing! And the deer’s calves are the size of kittens and they’re little baby dear and all the trees are little! I feel like I’m one of those.

Kaveh: I don’t believe you.

Stefan: No! When we get back to Montreal, I’ll show you. I’d be a baby dear. I’d be one of the calves; I’ll be, like 7 cm tall.

Kaveh: What would I be?

Stefan: Some sort of orang-utan.

Pietro: Generally, we’re all monkeys in Bell Orchestre, but we’re all different kinds.

Stefan: You’d be a jungle animal of some sort. So yeah, an orang-utan.

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