[Interview] Lowebrau
* Pour lire la version française de cette entrevue cliquez ICI!
Here is the final step before our celebration which will take place on November 3rd. To conclude the coverage of the artists who will perform on our second anniversary show, here is a generous interview with Canadian musician Mark Lowe, better known as Lowebrau.
It was in the comfort of his home that he answered our questions about his rich musical and artistic career. If you like your electronic music noisy and distorted, you will certainly be happy to discover this extremely warm and talented artist. Enjoy reading, hoping to see you at our party!
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You grew up in Saskatchewan and you moved to Montreal at a certain point in your life. Can you describe to me how were things over there and what motivated you to move East?
There was no real scene for the music I liked in Saskatchewan. I also spent 13 years in Calgary as well before coming to Montreal. There was a small noise and experimental electronics community when I was living there, but not a lot. Maybe the scene has grown in the eight years since I’ve been there, I really don’t know for sure. But when I was there, there was almost nothing. You could count the number of electronic musicians on your hand… That’s mainly why I came to Montreal but also because of school, I was enrolled in the MFA program at Concordia. For what I wanted to do at the time in 2011, Montreal was it because, honestly, it was easy, cheap, and the music scene here was good.
Which elements guided you towards music in general, but more specifically electronic music, when you were younger?
I’ve always enjoyed electronic music and weird sounds ever since I was a kid. I was actually breaking my toys so they would sound weirder and I was curious about how they worked. I was inexplicably drawn to electronic music. Possibly because it’s such a plastic medium with infinite possibilities. When music videos first came on TV and I first heard New Wave, I was like “wow”. It became a constant fixture in our house. My youngest memory of the first electronic song I heard was when I was maybe 7 or 8, some older kid put his headphones on me and it was Rockit by Herbie Hancock. It blew my eight year old mind. I’d never heard anything like it before. In Saskatchewan, it was always either country, metal or rock. You rarely heard anything else, especially in farming communities. If you were into electronic music openly it’s almost like you were asking to be harassed and bullied. Movie soundtracks and foley arts also influenced me a lot when I was younger. They still do!
Let’s talk about your music a little bit. You have been around Montreal for almost a decade and we can see you often playing shows around town. But one thing that strikes me the most is the absence of physical or official releases. Is there an explanation for that or you just prefer doing live stuff over records?
I really do like playing live. I love the chaos and challenge of it, the indeterminacy of it. It’s more exciting to me, but I also love the studio process. I think maybe the reason why I haven’t release anything for a few years is because I’m incredibly indecisive. It’s difficult to make the final decision about what I’m going to give to people, its the hardest thing for me. I’m constantly changing ideas or working in different genres and it’s just so chaotic and doesn’t make sense together. So, I’m just trying to make relational sense of everything before I put something out. Sometimes I don’t feel like my material is good enough or doesn’t represent what I want to convey, and sometimes I think too much about it (basically detrimental self-doubt?). I did a self-released tape in 2015. The only reason I made that was because I did a small tour on the west coast of the United States and I wanted to have some merch to sell. I do have a few tracks out there on compilations though. The most notable being the Power Puerto Rico fundraiser compilation organized by Danji Buck-Moore (anabasine) and Leticia Trandafir (softcoresoft) as an aid benefit for Hurricane Maria relief in the fall of 2017.
You once described me your creative process and it was really fascinating, can you explain us how you make music on a daily basis?
I think everyone might say the same thing, that their methods and practices change over the years, even day to day. At the moment, I’m mainly using the gear I perform my live sets with; an MPC1000 sampler which is sequencing a few different semi-modular synthesizers while also playing percussive parts and other sounds. Because I’m using a sampler, I’m creating my own percussion/drum sounds, rhythmic undulation samples, and other ‘noise’ that become the bed sounds for my tracks and sets. A lot of my practice is recording and processing sounds. I’m sampling my synths, broken gear, circuits I’ve made, content from the internet, and field recordings. I hear the rhythms, beats, and melodies everywhere in life so I’m just sampling, sampling, sampling, sampling, processing, processing, processing, processing. So it’s a lot of listening and messing around with sounds before I get down to composition and sequencing actually.
So compositionally, it’s just organically happening I guess, I’m not trying to force something. I find that the hardest thing is when something pops into my head and I get an idea for an exact track then trying to transcribe that into reality. It’s a lot more difficult than when something organically frees itself from the sounds that I’m using. Like switching between two different modes of focus.
You have a few different musical projects, especially some more noisy ones. Can you tell us a bit more about that and how do you find balance between all of them?
It always depends on my mood. It’s like someday I wanna do really clean electronic dance music or ambiance and another day I just wanna do noise or EBM style music. Some other times, I just wanna play guitar. It really depends on the mood of the day. I was playing guitar in a studio project started by my friend Bruno (Hyena Hive and Maussade) and Jean-Sébastien Truchy called Moloss. It’s kind of a scream/grindcore meets black metal meets progmetal (honestly hard to put a genre on it). Since Jean-Sébastien has such a hectic schedule with multiple projects and family life, we’re on indefinite hiatus.
Are you listening to similar music that you are doing or do you need to take a break from loud and noisy stuff from time to time?
I listen to a lot of different things and honestly, I like to listen to classical and jazz in the morning. I listen to everything really and generally go with what suits my mood. Mainly, I like listening to internet radio streaming like NTS, Berlin Community Radio, n10.as, CKUT, Soundcloud feed, Mixcloud, and other similar sites. I like to be surprised by random mixes. I buy a lot of stuff on Bandcamp. I haven’t listened to my music collection lately though, sometimes on my phone while walking around. I think now that Fall and Winter are upon us, I’ll probably do some more deep listening of my collections.
You will be playing our second anniversary show on November 3rd and I would like to know how do you prepare for a live set?
Most of my preparation happens internally. I’ll create a linear kind of a mood of the set in my head. It’s more of an emotional feeling instead of a direct literal translation of a musical set. It’s like a story arc. I want to introduce the set sonically and then make decisions on how it builds; is it one long flowing set, if there’s a crescendo or not, do I cohesively resolve everything by the end of it, or do I just play separate tracks. Depending on the show and wether I’m opening or not will dictate how I think about it. Most of the time only 50 to 60 percent is like set in stone before I’m going to the venue. There is quite a lot of improvisation. I’ve played a few shows where 90 percent of the performance was sequenced and I was just like: Let’s go! But I miss having the element of spontaneity with those sets.
The last show I played, my computer that had all my sequences on it died a week before the event and I basically had to rewrite all the tracks from scratch within a week. It’s not the first time that it’s happened to me. When you play on really old equipment, you gotta expect it. That show was REALLY improvised. I made a few skeletons for five tracks, just beats and underlying rhythms that I was going to work with. The rest was all intuition, listening, feeling.
You had a rough year for a lot of different reasons. I would like to know how this affect the way you create music? Is doing art helping you going throughs all these difficult things?
Yeah, it was a rough one. The worst part about it was that I didn’t want to make music at all. This was the first time in my life I went through a rough period were I didn’t use music as a therapy to help me get through it. I was completely paralyzed by it, like I didn’t want to do anything, I couldn’t do anything. I just lost connection to music and art, to anything at all, it’s been the darkest period of my life honestly. Just recently I’ve been starting to play music again and make new stuff.
Earlier this year you choose to change your artist name back to your real one. You are now officially back with your old moniker. What happened in the first place and why are you going back to Lowebrau?
I was getting tired of people thinking of me as the ‘noise guy’ and identify that name with just noise. It’s obviously not all I do, I also play experimental, techno and ambient music. I didn’t want people to associate it with only noise. I was thinking about coming up with another name just for techno/dance music, but the hardest thing for an artist is to come up with a name. So, I decided to use my own name for a while but it didn’t feel right. After talking with friends at the show I did at New Year’s Eve last year and on other occasions, they told me to just own it, to do whatever I wanted with it. I realized they were right and that I just am Lowebrau. Since I haven’t had any major releases, it doesn’t really matter anyways. Haha!
You had a difficult time convincing Facebook to let you change it back to the original one. How did you succeed and what is your relation with social medias?
I had to constantly harass Facebook until they finally changed my name back. After 2 weeks, I started writing messages in all caps, keyboard shouting at them that it was ridiculous. They were saying that people were gonna be confused, but Bandcamp and Soundcloud changed it instantly…
For an artist, it’s important to use social media. It’s the main tool we use to promote our shows and releases. Like everyone, sometimes I spend too much time on them, but for the last few weeks I’ve been on less and less. I find Instagram entertaining, IG stories are fun and I like to see what my friends are doing all around the world. Facebook is annoying, I only use it to keep up with shows now. I don’t see the point in having a Facebook artist page anymore. If I make a post only ten people see it, it’s like being held hostage and you have to pay ransom for any sort of exposure. I remember when Facebook pages started, it was really easy and everybody was liking and responding. Now, even if you pay, they aren’t gonna show it to the people who would really like to see it, the algorithms seem to try to attract people who don’t give a shit about your stuff. It’s kind of pointless unless you’re already at some level of notoriety.
You are well known and respected in the music scene. We can see you at almost every show or even riding your bike around town with Ginger Breaker. What does this city represent to you and how did the Montreal music scene affected your musical evolution?
Ha, I don’t really know about that! It’s hard to say exactly what Montreal changed for me since the time that I’ve been here, but the city itself has changed quickly. Seeing more international acts and different approaches to making music has been a part of my changing sound palate for sure.
The one thing I do like about Montreal is that there is always people moving here and bringing new things to the table. Every season, there’s a lot of new young people who are coming for school or something else and new music is happening. It’s interesting. It’s changed a lot since I’ve been here, new people won’t necessarily see it. In the last few years we’ve lost so much. We’ve lost venues, we’ve lost musicians, people moved, bookers and promoters quit because they are getting older or moving on with their lives. People are trying to fill in all the time though, and it feels like it’s starting to pop again, but there seemed to be a lull for a while. I feel lucky that I was here during the last few years of La Brique, that was the most formative time for me. It was insane, people were coming from all over and amazing acts were playing. It was one of these rare places where all people from all scenes were playing the same venue. Everyone was showing up all the time because they knew they were gonna see something different. It wasn’t just a place to get wasted and high, there was good music and talented people experimenting with each others sounds, collaborating and sharing ideas. An anchor in the city for a community and creativity. It doesn’t really feel like that in any places I’ve been since. Probably a few people are feeling the same way I do, I’m glad I got to witness that. I’m kind of sad that people who are coming now missed that time in Montreal. I’m not saying it’s not good right now, but it’s not like it used to be.
There are new avenues opening up now, but not in the same way. There seems to be a homogeneity of sound happening in a lot of the electronic music scenes in Montreal, in my opinion, which at times can feel a bit boring. Doesn’t matter how skilled people are, doesn’t matter how good the music is, when you got to a show of five to seven acts booked in one night that all sound exactly the same, it’s not entertaining. Not to say that there aren’t a lot of new acts in the city that I really like!
Let’s end with this one, motorcycle season is almost over, how are you gonna survive the next few months?
Bourbon. Actually, I was shopping for cross-country skis today! Winter time is when everyone hunkers down; watching a ton of movies, series, cook, or make a lot of music. I’m probably gonna do all of these things. Work on a solid release. Get back to my fine arts side as well. I didn’t get out a lot last winter, but this year I want to go snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, etc. I need to be active. The older you get, the more active you need to be so as to not lose your body or your mind.
Thank you for your time!