Operators at the Fox Cabaret, Friday, Jan. 30 and Saturday, Jan. 31 at 9 p.m. (foxcabaret.com).
Born and raised on Vancouver Island Dan Boeckner returns to B.C. next week with his new band Operators for a two-night stand at The Fox Cabaret.
Built around a fascination with techno dance club tracks the lineup includes Macedonian synth wiz Devojka and Divine Fits' drummer Sam Brown working in tandem with Boeckner, also known for his involvement with Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs and Divine Fits.
The band made its debut in May, 2014 at Canadian Music Week and has been working on new music ever since. They've released an EP and plan to have a full album out later this year. In the meantime Operators have been living on a steady diet of touring.
North Shore News: Checking out who else hails from Lake Cowichan, B.C. it turns out there's been a couple of NHL hockey players.
Dan Boeckner: And Dawn Coe-Jones, PGA golfer.
North Shore News: And a stuntwoman.
Dan Boeckner: Who?
North Shore News: Crystal Dalman. She's been in The Amazing Spider-Man and X-Men among other things.
Dan Boeckner: No way. I went to school with her. I didn't even know that. I knew she was in movies but I didn't know what she'd done. That's awesome.
North Shore News: Also Fritz Perls ended up there. The guy who invented Gestalt Therapy. He eventually made his way to Lake Cowichan and set up shop there. What was island life like for you. How did you get into music there?
Dan Boeckner: I got involved into music through my parents. My dad was tangentially involved in the psychedelic music scene in Vancouver because he went to university there. I think he wrote lyrics and roadied for a band called My Indole Ring who were like a heavy psych rock band so he had a really good taste in music. When I was a kid he would play The Beatles. He had pretty tripped out psychedelic records. I remember the first time I really heard insane guitar feedback stuff was a Big Brother and the Holding Company record with Janis Joplin. There's some pretty intense skronk on that record. I have him to thank for that. Getting older I was really aware that I was pretty out of place in that town. I became friends with this guy named Emmett and I think I have him to thank for my career in music. In Grade 5 or 6 he gave me a cassette that he'd taped for me, one side was Master of Puppets by Metallica and the other side was Gwar's Scum Dogs of the Universe and I wore that thing out. The Metallica record just blew my mind because up to that point I just knew what was on the radio. It was the first thing that I had that was really mine and then from there I just kind of expanded. The daughter of the town librarian actually gave me a Pixies tape and that was another big brainbusting moment for me. And then I started my own band and that was that. That was the gateway drug: the Metallica tape.
North Shore News: What was the music scene like for your first band Atlas Strategic?
Dan Boeckner: It was difficult. I imagine Victoria as a greenhouse in the middle of a desert. Victoria always felt really isolated. A lot of touring bands wouldn't come and play there. We had our fair share in the post-hardcore scene but more often than not it would get skipped on a tour - especially with American bands and that made everybody feel kind of isolated. I think just geographically, too, being on an island. Now that I'm older and I've toured I get it: you're playing for $100 a night and paying $120 to put your band on a ferry boat. Maybe not a sound economic decision but at the time everybody in the scene felt like we were isolated.
We felt like Vancouver was the cool place, or Seattle, but I think that had a positive effect in that this weird mutated strain of defiance was there in a lot of Victoria acts like Frog Eyes. In all of the projects that Carey (Mercer's) done there's this sort of don't give a f#?kness about what he's throwing down - like Russian literary references and then speaking in the voice of somebody who's a Canadian redneck, often in the same song. Victoria nurtured those kinds of freaks.
The only problem with those scenes is you get into a cycle where you just end up playing to your friends every month and you always end up opening for your friends out of town. There's only so many options and eventually you have to leave. There's almost this schism after you leave - people maybe become resentful that certain people become successful and leave. Frog Eyes is a good example of all this stuff that Spencer (Krug's) done. It's like a velvet rut but I think it's an incredibly fertile place to start. It's a good place to grow your ideas.
North Shore News: Vancouver was the next big city. Why did you go all the way to Montreal? Why the move east?
Dan Boeckner: I'd already lived in Vancouver. I had two periods of my life early on after high school where I lived in Vancouver. Vancouver in the late '90s, early 2000s was just awash in really bad drugs and bad living. I developed kind of a negative stigma towards Vancouver and I needed to leave there.
I'd gone to visit Montreal in the late '90s just because a lot of my older friends were there, such as Chad Jones who was in this legendary Victoria band M Blanket and eventually went on to do solo records with Contellation. He'd gone to Montreal before anybody else and I always heard from him what an idyllic paradise it was for artists so I went out there on the bus one summer. I think I was there for six weeks total and then went back home but I loved it. Everybody else was moving to Montreal and it just seemed like the thing to do. The girl I was dating also lived in Montreal so that's always a big motivator.
North Shore News: What did you like about it? Was it the energy?
Dan Boeckner: I'd never experienced anything like that. At that point in my life I'd travelled very little. I went to Japan on a school exchange. My town was twinned with a town in northern Japan (Ohtaki/Date City). I went and did that when I was really young. It's pretty hilarious because the town in northern Japan was pretty much like a bizarre Japanese version of Cowichan Lake. Small, not close to anything. I was halfway across the world but except for the fact that everybody spoke Japanese and the food was different everything was essentially the same.
Other than that I'd only been to Seattle with a church youth group. I hadn't done anything really. I think going to what, at that point in my life, was the closest thing to Europe I'd ever been to. Going to the East Coast where the buildings were made out of brick and it was super hot in the summer and super cold in the winter.
There was a diverse immigrant population in Montreal with all different kinds of food and places to go. There were a lot of cultures I'd never come into contact with before. It really set something off in my head and when I got back to the West Coast after the first visit it seemed very limiting. That was a big factor.
Also I felt like people were really doing things there. There were people my age who were running a venue or were in bands who were touring America and took their work really seriously and that appealed to me. And they seemed very welcoming too.
There wasn't this sense of weird mid-size town competition.That made a big impression on me and that sort of bled into the multiple-project nature of all the bands that came out of that scene.
North Shore News: Even today references to you keep all your bands attached to your name: Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits, Operators, Dan Boeckner. Is that an accurate statement?
Dan Boeckner: That's an absolute accurate statement. Some people have one band and it goes through multiple changes and then eventually kind of peters out but I like having work you know. I like doing different projects. I don't like having a lot of time off.
North Shore News: There's different sensibilities at work in Divine Fits but everything seems to fit. How is it working with that lineup?
Dan Boeckner: It's really easy because Britt's had about 15 years experience writing songs in bands and I've had 10, 12. We both have the same impatient nature about writing songs where we just want the song to be a song immediately, so a lot of really brutal decisions get made quickly. Like, 'Oh this part's not working, this part is gone, this part doesn't exist anymore, think of a new part. This vocal isn't working forget about it, try something else.' Obviously working with Sam - who's in Operators as well - Sam is just an amazingly intuitive drummer. You can play him something and he will find the drum beat that is supposed to go with it even if you don't know what that is.
North Shore News: Is that work process similar in all your bands?
Dan Boeckner: No, it varies from band to band. Handsome Furs was essentially an autocracy. I programmed all the stuff and wrote the lyrics and then we performed the songs on stage and they sort of developed but Handsome Furs was sort of an isolated writing process for me. Which at the time felt really good because Wolf Parade had become such a democracy or maybe more like a Marxist collective. I think that's a better representation of Wolf Parade - it's a Marxist collective where the songwriting process can occasionally be really slow, you know, where parts are analyzed, ripped up, tried again. We'd beat something into the ground until we decided it didn't work anymore.
The good thing about the Wolf Parade process working with Spencer is he has a mathematical approach, or at least at the time he did, which was completely alien to the kind of language of music that I would be talking in. So we would just weld these things together like a weird Frankenstein monster of a song. The process for Wolf Parade was this weird kind of alchemy. Divine Fits I think is more of a traditional songwriting thing and Operators moves very quickly too. I will bring in like a basic plate and Dev and Sam will just rip it up and recombine it in to something cool.
North Shore News: How did you meet Devojka?
Dan Boeckner: I met her on tour. She was in a band that opened up for Handsome Furs. A couple of times she opened up for Handsome Furs in Macedonia with her own project. I was living in California and didn't realize she had got back from Macedonia. I had these songs and we started working on this stuff together and it worked pretty much immediately.
North Shore News: There's a video of you guys performing in the studio at KEXP in Seattle and she's really working behind a battery of synths and stuff.
Dan Boeckner: Yea, she mans this table. We don't use computers on stage, we're not running tracks. We're not using Ableton or anything like that. We're using all hardware and she has to man, at any given time, four different things: bass, drum parts, midrange stuff, transitions - it's an incredibly complex set-up.
North Shore News: In the KEXP video you mention early Skinny Puppy as a reference for Operators' sound. Good West Coast connection there. On tracks like "Ancient," trance music comes to mind as well where they continue to build in intensity.
Dan Boeckner: That's been a big influence on me - modern electronic trance stuff like James Holden or Perc, sort of the melted sound, you know the deconstructed trance music. That's really been a big influence, and early disco and definitely the early industrial stuff like Skinny Puppy for the programming. There's a weird alien sound to some of those early Skinny Puppy records like the track "Icebreaker." They are working in a more terrifying dark world than I think Operators wants to be in but just the sound palate alone and the disorienting nature of their music is something that is ingrained in me.
North Shore News: EP1 is out now - what's next for Operators?
Dan Boeckner: We're going to put out a single in the next couple of weeks. Just a stand alone track that is one of my favourite songs that we wrote. I think it might be my favourite song that we wrote. It's called "Ecstasy in My House." And then we're going to be recording some more stuff and putting out a full length this year.
North Shore News: Have you been playing "Ecstasy" live?
Dan Boeckner: We have. We've been on tour with Future Islands and we got to play a couple of shows at Terminal 5 in New York which is this great big venue. Really amazing, I always love playing there. "Ecstasy" is pretty trance heavy and so to get to play that in front of that many people and watch them move around and respond to that song was really great. One of my favourite moments on this last tour.
