DO MAKE SAY THINK interview

words: DAN HANCOX

They hand-print record sleeves. They don't have contracts - with anyone. They record in barns. Their bands write songs inspired by holy war. Their bands crush pennies with train rolling stock.

My mission, though I didn't know it yet, was to discover that Canada's Constellation label - probably the most mystique-driven group of artists in the world - is home to a bunch of ordinary Joes who, to my instinctive disappointment, are not a cabalistic collective of anarcho-doomsayers with a penchant for scenic photography. Do Make Say Think don't even live in a network of underground caves.

My suspicions were first aroused by an online review of the Do Makes' third album And Yet And Yet, which commented that the band made "pure headphone-listening instrumental music… without the bombastic earth shattering orchestration, white hot sound, or anarchistic political mantras of their label mates Godspeed You! Black Emperor". This sounded to me, to paraphrase Monty Python, like a cup of tea without milk or sugar. Or tea.

As I gradually delved deeper into the back catalogue, I began to see the error of my ways; and to realise that demanding apocalyptic sounds and attitudes was naïve if they didn't come naturally. I came to to revel in the altogether more subtle feel given off by the Do Makes' jazz-infused post-rock. The title of their latest album, Winter Hymn Country Hymn Secret Hymn, seemed to embody their style best of all: theirs is deeply autumnal, rural sounding guitar music, with the quiet humility of religious devotion (the hymnal kind as opposed to Silver Mt. Zion's choral affairs or Godspeed's fire and brimstone).
Having said that, it's a funny kind of congregation that this brigade of Torontonians (Toronto residents, I am assured by Google) resemble. At points during their show at the Spitz, there are arrayed on the tiny stage two drummers, two trumpeters, and two saxophonists. Guitarist Justin Small would look rather lonely alongside this triumvirate of duos were he not clearly having a great deal of fun. The Do Makes have come via Scandinavia and a brief jaunt on the continent to be in - where else - Shoreditch this evening, and as I sit down with Justin at one of the Spitz's outside tables, early-period Prodigy blares from speakers on the other side of the cavernous, empty Spitalfields market. How sublimely inappropriate. The scruffy, sweet guitarist has been with the band from the outset, through the band's various oscillations from experimental, loose jazz to watertight, soaring post-rock.


This latest album was recorded in several different locations. I start by asking whether this undermined its cohesiveness?
"I think if anything it made it more cohesive. It's the way we enjoy recording the most. We don't really record in studios, like we've only ever done a couple of songs in studios."
And some in a barn in the past?
"Yeah… We normally do most of our recording at this old college radio station, and this time we went out to a farmhouse for the first part, and then we went to this old hotel in Quebec. We just called them up and they gave us the run of the place."
How did you arrive at a three part structure? "Well actually it was kind of accidental. There was no way we were gonna cut any songs after we'd finished recording, but then we couldn't fit it all on to one piece of vinyl. So Don and Ian (of Constellation) agreed to have this three-sided vinyl. And then we named the record without even thinking about it, and they clued into that - with three sides of vinyl, calling each side of vinyl one of the three titles on the record, and it ended up working really well."

So what about the process of naming songs? When you don't have a chorus or a lyrical concept to work round, how do you go about giving the songs titles? Titles like Auberge Le Mouton Noir and 107 Reasons Why can't just come out of thin air…
"We sort of debate for a while about it. Usually it happens that some song titles will occur naturally and then just stick, but usually we have to debate about it for a while. The songs always have a title for us from the beginning, but then when they're finished we have to name them for the public, and this is often a separate thing."
So it's obviously important to you how the music is presented to the public?
"Yeah, there's discussion, more than argument, but still it's a debate: people have certain ideas, some more political, some more emotional, y'know. Some people want full sentences…"

Because War on Want is a pretty obviously political title isn't it (being the name of an anti-poverty campaign group)?
"Well not in Canada actually. I've heard about the organisation since, but in Canada it isn't anything, it just… it really struck me as a really powerful phrase. I got to name that song you see… in fact it almost made it to the title of the record, but in the end we didn't feel the direction of the record was fitting…it seemed a little dark maybe? We weren't going for a politically-motivated, dark record."

I recount the now infamous story about a member of the Godspeed audience crying out in a packed Hackney Ocean "this is for the people of Jenin!" during an intensely quiet build-up to East Hastings. Explaining the overwhelmingly cynical mainstream media response to this incident (hey, look how uptight and hyper-serious these Canadians are to induce such po-facedness, the argument runs), I ask Justin how his generally apolitical band respond to that kind of face-off, on such an issue as Palestine and its western supporters. He pauses, I expect an asinine bit of fence-sitting, but instead get:
"I think it's fucking great. I admire them for it. Not enough bands are willing to take ideas like that forward. We may not take a political stance like some of the Constellation artists, but most of us feel really strongly about those kind of contemporary issues. The difference is that we don't bring in issues of struggle because our music is more of a personal nature. But that kind of approach can be a cop-out too, it can be as weak as people who let their politics guide them 100 per cent. Both approaches have their strong and weak points." He pauses, satisfied with this delineation. "But (Godspeed) as a collective set themselves up for their own criticism, and they don't give a shit..."

With so many elements of percussion, wind instruments and plenty of fading-in-and-out guitar lines, how was Winter Hymn… put together?
"the whole thing was pretty kitchen sink. We did it on ProTools, and we just threw everything into it and then spent a couple of months mixing it all down." So it's not a problem capturing the spontaneity of the original recordings then?
"No. Weeell… I don't smoke as many joints as I used to when we first started eight years ago. It's no longer an issue of mine to sit around for ages jamming with a delay pedal. I like to go more for the throat. But maybe that's just an issue with weed. I don't have a relationship with it anymore." This fact seems to make Justin happy, clearer perhaps. Although having said that it doesn't stop members of the band pulling off some remarkable party tricks during the show later that night: namely smoking joints and breathing out through their trumpets, while playing, no less! But it's never been all hippy jazz-fusion jams by any means. The Do Makes - these apparently quiet, focused people - have backgrounds in everything from industrial metal to hardcore to funk to big-band jazz to grindcore.
"Most of us are in about four bands, at least."

Most notably, and amusingly, I've read about a mock-metal band called Gesundheit (!), which surely cannot be true?
"No that's absolutely right, we're about to tour right after we wrap up this Do Makes tour. Four of us are doing a five-week Gesundheit tour, we're taking it round Scandinavia, Croatia, Czech Republic, but we can't book any dates in Britain unfortunately."
So is it parody metal?
"Well some people might think it is: y'know, here's a bunch of indie rockers, or art-rockers playing metal for laughs, but we're actually all from that background. Apart from Ryan, whose band it is, he's never really been a metal dude - he's in his forties, and he's a jazz guy, so he just decided to do this - maybe it's his mid-life crisis, who knows? So we all just jumped on. There's some elements to it that are pretty ridiculous, it's an alcohol-fuelled band, it's a really rough-round-the-edges band, with masks and all kinds of shit… But the music's amazing. We just try and ignore the indie-rock crowd entirely with that and go for the metal people. Metal people don't know who the fuck Do Make Say Think is, they don't care… They don't care about Constellation, they don't care about any of that shit they just care about metal."
This, of course, demands that I explain The Darkness phenomenon. He digs, but is careful to divide true metalheads ('Skids' in Canada - "once a skid, always a skid") and the fashionistas.
"Yeah some guy in Scandinavia I talked to was talking about how it's hip now for all the indie-rockers to say they like metal, that they're into Slayer… I can't gauge a trend but I saw Slayer last year and they were awesome. There was no irony, no cheekiness involved, they were just a great fucking band. If you're gonna listen to that kind of music you've got to be proud about it. You can always tell the people who think it's funny, or are doing it as a fashion thing, because they never last very long. The metal community is a lot different to the indie community or the pop community, cos a lot of these people just dip their feet into it and find it's just not very welcoming to, er… hacks. When I was a kid it was all British metal: Maiden, Motorhead, Napalm Death, all that stuff."

So what about electronica? In an interesting addition to the band's multi-genre dabbling, they have previously played to chill-out rooms in raves. The new record incorporates some subtle but nonetheless significant unhuman bleepy noises in its finale, Hoorary! Hooray! Hooray!
"Yeah well we had use of the computer this time, so we tried to use its capabilities a bit more but still keep things sounding natural. Some criticism has come our way because the album's not very tight. I think people are a little confused because it's our loosest record, our most un-together record, but the way it was created was so totally meticulous. The details are unbelievable."

This sounds something like the band I have come to know and love: calculatedly reckless, orchestrating abandon. But the record is nothing if not tight. The live shows, in their sometimes messy, sometimes star-scraping glory, are a different story altogether.
"We get messier as the tour goes on, as we get more confident and easy-going about playing the material. But then it ends up getting tighter again, as we find improvisations that we like, and choose to stick to them."

The conversation wanders around the Constellation cottage industry ("there's too many copies for all the sleeves to be hand-made now"), allusions to approaches from HBO for use of their music ("they get pretty disillusioned pretty quickly" he grins), and, naturally, playing gigs in institutions. By which I do not mean the Inland Revenue.
"We were in Italy a few years ago and just showed up at the club, and it turned out to be in an insane asylum. We weren't playing for the patients or anything, there was this nightclub in the middle of the asylum, so it was a… fine show. A lot of weird stuff seemed to be happening, but maybe it was just cos we were in Italy and it was a strange tour. But it was like (the location) permeated the vibe of the show; we were in this place and it was kinda creepy, kinda weird. And the next morning we woke up to find a lot of screaming people and a lot of mentally… damaged people. So that got pretty weird. We didn’t stick around too long…"


Justin seems to keep his phasers set on nonchalant for the entire evening; relaxed when talking about confrontational gigs, only gently perturbed by fair-weather metalheads, and even calm at the suggestion that Constellation might, in some distant sense, hold back a band like Do Make Say Think as much as it liberates them. For cynical types have suggested that the cosy air of like-minded souls and righteous independence at the label might breed complacency, or inhibit the challenges that come from facing a less welcoming audience.
"Well I don’t think we'd be here now if it wasn't for Constellation. And anyway, we're happy to drive ourselves…"