Black Mountain - Live Freak Valley Festival 2022
Black Mountain - Live Freak Valley Festival 2022 - Part 2
“So, how was touring with Coldplay?” That’s the answer Black Mountain’s guitarist/co-vocalist Stephen McBean gives when asked what their least favourite interview question is (future interviewers take note), although, as bandmate Jeremy Schmidt explains, it’s “far enough in the distance now that it’s not so forward in people’s minds.”
The three of us are talking a day before the Canadian prog-rock five piece’s first ever New Zealand show at the Great South Pacific Tuning Fork, sitting on an outdoors bench on a sunny Auckland afternoon. The two band members are only too happy to discuss a range of topics, from side-projects to streaming.
The band have come to New Zealand for the first time on the wings of their fourth album, IV, an ambitious offering packed with classic rock references, both sonically and in its straightforward title. When I ask whether they were wary of choosing a title with connections to what many people see as untouchable rock albums, Schmidt instead confirms their ambitions.
“That’s exactly why we chose it. It’s a lineage that we like. And it was sort of brought up as a bit of a lark, like ‘Oh, well it’s the fourth record, we should call it IV, probably not gonna have a chance to do that again’.”
As a worthy side note, “toying with all that stuff” apparently briefly involved, among other things, the working title OS4. “Yeah that was a stupid one,” laughs McBean, while Schmidt clarifies, “The variations seemed amusing to us for like, about a day or two…”
While this is Black Mountain’s first time in Aotearoa, McBean’s other outfit, Pink Mountaintops visited in 2012. They are just one of many side projects linked to one or more of the prolific band members.
“Pink Mountaintops and Black Mountain, at the beginning, were kind of essentially born out of the same band, and those first two records, some of that stuff could have been on either record, it was just kind of what we recorded,” says McBean, who devoted a lot of time to Pink Mountaintops in the six-year gap between IV and Black Mountain’s previous album, 2010’s Wilderness Heart.
In this time, keyboardist Schmidt was also working on his own solo project, Sinoia Caves, with which he debuted IV track Mothers Of The Sun. “That was like an old song that we had worked on years ago and really didn’t want so see it fall by the wayside, and I knew that just suggesting we go back and work on something old was not going to be terribly appealing to everyone, so I went and worked on it. We always liked it, the song had a great riff, but it seemed like a jam that just sort of… wore its welcome out. I did a vocoder version of it with my solo project Sinoia Caves… I knew all my bandmates would be there, so that was sort of a trick.”
“They all inform each other in different ways,” adds McBean. “You Can Dream was a Pink Mountaintops song that I was playing live, and I was kind of like, well, if there’s more keyboards in Black Mountain it would make more sense.”
In review, the band are often described as drawing heavily on classic ’70s music, but they “don’t live in a vacuum,” as Schmidt puts it. “People always say that old music was way better,” says McBean, “but it’s just ‘cause you don’t hear all the garbage. There’s definitely a certain thing that was happening then because it was the first time it was happening. You can never return to that, unless the world explodes and we start again.”
This talk of time differences leads me to inquire about a hot topic in the music industry: How they feel about streaming. “Since forever you’re trying to get your music out there, whether people are dubbing it on cassette tapes and stuff, and it’s always been the record labels that are complaining about that killing music.” says McBean.
“It kinda sucks that now it’s… gotten to a point where it creates music as a… can of pop, or whatever. If you spend ten bucks on a record when you’re thirteen, that could be the only record you’re gonna have for that month and you’re gonna damn try your hardest to like that record ‘cause it’s yours, whereas [now] you’re like, “err, I don’t really care for the first 30 seconds, this record sounds like an ambient record,” and go seek something else.”
“Bands I think are fine, because more people come to your shows when you tour and people buy merch and stuff, but sometimes it’s a bit of a shame that, well it’s the same with film, that the people behind the scenes are getting slowly pushed out of the financial equation, whether it be the producers or the arrangers… The Beatles were obviously amazing but without George Martin it would have been a bit of a different game.” From: https://tearaway.co.nz/interview-black-mountain-aotearoa/
The three of us are talking a day before the Canadian prog-rock five piece’s first ever New Zealand show at the Great South Pacific Tuning Fork, sitting on an outdoors bench on a sunny Auckland afternoon. The two band members are only too happy to discuss a range of topics, from side-projects to streaming.
The band have come to New Zealand for the first time on the wings of their fourth album, IV, an ambitious offering packed with classic rock references, both sonically and in its straightforward title. When I ask whether they were wary of choosing a title with connections to what many people see as untouchable rock albums, Schmidt instead confirms their ambitions.
“That’s exactly why we chose it. It’s a lineage that we like. And it was sort of brought up as a bit of a lark, like ‘Oh, well it’s the fourth record, we should call it IV, probably not gonna have a chance to do that again’.”
As a worthy side note, “toying with all that stuff” apparently briefly involved, among other things, the working title OS4. “Yeah that was a stupid one,” laughs McBean, while Schmidt clarifies, “The variations seemed amusing to us for like, about a day or two…”
While this is Black Mountain’s first time in Aotearoa, McBean’s other outfit, Pink Mountaintops visited in 2012. They are just one of many side projects linked to one or more of the prolific band members.
“Pink Mountaintops and Black Mountain, at the beginning, were kind of essentially born out of the same band, and those first two records, some of that stuff could have been on either record, it was just kind of what we recorded,” says McBean, who devoted a lot of time to Pink Mountaintops in the six-year gap between IV and Black Mountain’s previous album, 2010’s Wilderness Heart.
In this time, keyboardist Schmidt was also working on his own solo project, Sinoia Caves, with which he debuted IV track Mothers Of The Sun. “That was like an old song that we had worked on years ago and really didn’t want so see it fall by the wayside, and I knew that just suggesting we go back and work on something old was not going to be terribly appealing to everyone, so I went and worked on it. We always liked it, the song had a great riff, but it seemed like a jam that just sort of… wore its welcome out. I did a vocoder version of it with my solo project Sinoia Caves… I knew all my bandmates would be there, so that was sort of a trick.”
“They all inform each other in different ways,” adds McBean. “You Can Dream was a Pink Mountaintops song that I was playing live, and I was kind of like, well, if there’s more keyboards in Black Mountain it would make more sense.”
In review, the band are often described as drawing heavily on classic ’70s music, but they “don’t live in a vacuum,” as Schmidt puts it. “People always say that old music was way better,” says McBean, “but it’s just ‘cause you don’t hear all the garbage. There’s definitely a certain thing that was happening then because it was the first time it was happening. You can never return to that, unless the world explodes and we start again.”
This talk of time differences leads me to inquire about a hot topic in the music industry: How they feel about streaming. “Since forever you’re trying to get your music out there, whether people are dubbing it on cassette tapes and stuff, and it’s always been the record labels that are complaining about that killing music.” says McBean.
“It kinda sucks that now it’s… gotten to a point where it creates music as a… can of pop, or whatever. If you spend ten bucks on a record when you’re thirteen, that could be the only record you’re gonna have for that month and you’re gonna damn try your hardest to like that record ‘cause it’s yours, whereas [now] you’re like, “err, I don’t really care for the first 30 seconds, this record sounds like an ambient record,” and go seek something else.”
“Bands I think are fine, because more people come to your shows when you tour and people buy merch and stuff, but sometimes it’s a bit of a shame that, well it’s the same with film, that the people behind the scenes are getting slowly pushed out of the financial equation, whether it be the producers or the arrangers… The Beatles were obviously amazing but without George Martin it would have been a bit of a different game.” From: https://tearaway.co.nz/interview-black-mountain-aotearoa/
