From Halifax to Paris, Boston to Benton Harbour, Hey Mother Death absorb the “music of life” that surrounds them, and thrive on encapsulating their adventures through sonic interpretation. Lost in the aesthetics of travel and theatrical sounds, Denma Peisinger and Laurence Strelka blend the two in harmonious matrimony, with their fair share of ups-and-downs, as heard both in this first self-titled EP and their newest LP Highway. Almost as if you’re witnessing the most abstract, non-visual LIVE stage production, creativity flows while listening to Hey Mother Death, and temperaments are akin to a choose-your-own-adventure book circa 1969. Most of all, there is no escape.
Once listeners are grasped by HMD’s new album Highway, a flood of emotions taint what was once your being, and sacredly fill the darkest crevasses of your mentality with a bubble of refreshment. It’s not a morbid trip through the banal, but a freeing journey of human exasperation. Tiny Mix Tapes gripped them during a heavy move from outside Halifax to Cape Breton Island, and they laid out insight into their wonderful world of explorative sounds.
Where’d this white suit come from in your promotional photo? What diner is this at?
Peisinger: Some days you walk into the Salvation Army and are lucky. On that day I was very lucky. Not only was it hanging there gleaming, there was a one-day-only men’s outfit sale. It fit me perfectly.
The diner is John’s Lunch. It’s this little diner in Dartmouth, next to an oil refinery; it’s been under the same family ownership since 1969, and reportedly they have the best fish and chips in Canada. It’s kind of a legend. Nova Scotia is unofficially very racially segregated, but every time we have been in, it has seemed like a interesting intersection point of everybody. It has an amazing vibe in there.
Our friend Harald Hutter came from Paris to NS to shoot the Hills and also photos for our cover. He and I love greasy spoons (Laurence not so much), so we had been telling Harald about it, and every day we would dream of eating fish and chips. We didn’t make it over there until the end of the last day of shooting. Harald had already used all his film, so we were just in there eating, totally tired, and Harald shot that photo with his cell phone, it caught the spirit of how we were feeling the Highway album.
Did y’all grow up in Nova Scotia?
Strelka: I grew up in the South of France, and then moved to Paris when I was 17.
P: I was born in Boston, but my parents moved up to Canada in the 90s.
What kind of car do you drive? What’s your typical source of transportation?
S: A white 1997 Lexus ES 300 that used to belong to Denma’s 96-year-old Nana. She lives in New York, and as you can see from the pics, the car is super bad-ass. But if this album does well we will definitely be driving a non-fossil fuel, non-carbon emitting TESLA, or something like that (all their plans are open source, so hopefully more companies will get with the program). We really feel strongly about climate change, that’s why half of the digital proceeds for the Highway go to 350.org. Until we started country living, we biked everywhere.
How rural is the area in which you live, compared to a more robust urban-centric type of area?
S: Right now, we are driving through Cape Breton Island, moving to our new place, and I don’t think you get more rural than that. It’s not even rural, its wild: there’s nobody except for coyotes, foxes, bears, and moose… Oh, and some lost Scots!
P: We discovered rural living by chance. We had both been based in Paris and Halifax, but after our first EP was released, we somehow ended up in the country to work on Highway, and rehearse and it felt very interesting and extremely productive. When we went back to Paris, and tried to work on Highway, there was so much stress, lack of space, and the feeling that there were so many opportunities and contacts to chase after.
S: When we finally ended up in the French countryside again after those months in Paris we realized, “But we are musicians! Artists!” I mean what matters is the music we play or compose and the way we can live our life, as oppose to hustling around, you know… And it was suddenly so much more inspiring as opposed to the sort of greedy vibe you can get in the city.
P: Our last place — before this one we are moving to — was just 25 minutes from Halifax, but now we are far out there.
What’s the typical HIGHWAY route OUT of where you live?
P: We are on an island, so from our place, it’s about four hours north of Halifax, but for some reason the only way out of here is to drive west. From the Margaree, you can head inland and take the Trans Canada Highway West, or go west down the coast along the Trunk 19, then cross to the Mainland on the Canso Causeway, and keep going West on the Transcanda 104 for two hours until you get to Truro. From Truro you have got an hour going South to on the 102 to Halifax, or keep going West and you have 13 hours until NYC, or 11 hours to Montreal. Wherever you go, there you are.
There are actual lines of Chögyam Trungpa in our songs. “Highway” isn’t a nihilistic song, it’s the opposite: There is no escape from where you are, and that’s good news.
Are y’all friendly with other Halifax musicians?
S: For me, being French and from Paris, Halifax is musically a very effervescent and inspiring place. Same goes for Canada: great stuff is happening with great freedom, as opposed to Paris. There are so many really great Canadian musicians right now, who really allow themselves to be free and don’t worry about trying to fit in a style, or have too many ideas about what’s cool. I really enjoy this freedom, and they are some of the coolest bands around currently; it’s really inspiring. Although there is an amazing Malian community in Paris, with amazing Malian musicians who I got to spend time around, which was so cool, there is so much power and soul in that music, it’s where the blues is coming from.
P: There are some really inspiring musicians and artists here who are also really good people, who have been generous to us. We have been supported from the very beginning here, and although Halifax is relatively small and I have had to leave and live elsewhere from time to time, we just can’t help [but] keep coming back.
S: We have been collaborating with a couple of cool people here on different things and intend to collaborate more in the future.
Has there been formal musical training, or are you self-taught?
P: In the community I grew up in, there was this incredible free jazz drummer, Jerry Granelli. He is from San Francisco, was one of the founders of psychedelic music in the 60s, and along with his career as a solo artist, he played with everybody from Ornette Coleman to Sly Stone to Vince Gauraldi (Charlie Brown Christmas album); he was a family friend. When I was a teenager, I played guitar and was into blues, Hendrix, and African music, but the freedom with which Granelli played music, and the way he worked with form blew my mind. I knew I needed to study with him and be around him. I did his summer workshops, and was considering going to music school, but when I asked to him write me a referral, he said, “I am sorry to say this to you man, but music school will just fuck you up.” He gave me a job building his studio, and I ended up spending a couple of years as his apprentice.
S: I don’t have any formal music training, but I was always a music freak. When I was a kid, I would always listen to tons of music. I had this little ghetto blaster I got when I was 4 years old. I would carry it around everywhere with tapes; all sorts of music that my parents had; cool music. I always felt I had this total connection with music, but never trained. I was a dancer and actress and studied both, but I never pursued music until I started playing with Denma.
Yo, the name of your project: Hey Mother Death. Where does it come from?
S: It is inspired from an Allen Ginsberg poem-song called “Father Death Blues.” At the time we were looking for a band name, we experienced death very closely: a friend and some young people we knew died. It was an interesting moment because for the first time, maybe, we felt the closeness of death, and how it can happen at any moment. We were both reading — me in Paris and Denma in Halifax — the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Allen Ginsberg came up for some reason.
P: He was Buddhist and the poem has a very Buddhist relationship with death.
S: Yeah, and we wanted to use Mother as a homage to the feminine principle.
D: For us, the name is not meant to be dark, it’s actually the opposite: it’s how real life is, and when we play, that’s what it feels like; playing music feels like life and death. That’s what our teachers have told us: from Laurence’s theatre tradition and Jerry Granelli; when you play there is no such thing as rehearsal, because there is no other moment other than what is happening, so you play for real.
What other literature are you both interested in?
S: As we are doing this interview we are on the road, driving to move into our new house, and one of the reasons we decided to live there is because it is filled with amazing books, which I find inspiring… My apartment in Paris was also filled with books; a whole wall was just books. It’s like music, really. I can appreciate anything relevant, it doesn’t have to be a certain kind of literature; lately we have really been into this American, James Baldwin, who is an incredible writer who I would recommend. He has a great take on the world and humanity.
P: His essays and novels are mind-blowing, so touching and… relevant. I think he is simply one of the greatest writers I have ever read. F. Scot Fitzergerald was painful and almost unreadable after reading Baldwin. Baldwin is not known enough, probably because he was black and gay. We love reading so much that sometimes we cut books apart so we both can read different parts at the same time, we recently did that with our poor copy of Miles Davis’s amazing autobiography. Krazy Kat…
S: The lyrics for Highway were written in France and they are the result of the books I was reading at the time. For the song “Highway,” the poetry of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche was very influential. For the “Hills,” it is an old text of mine: Jodorowsky, Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Lydia lunch, Nick Cave, Castaneda, and so many more inspired it…
P: There are actual lines of Chögyam Trungpa in our songs. “Highway” isn’t a nihilistic song, it’s the opposite: There is no escape from where you are, and that’s good news. Another writer Laurence didn’t mention is Jaime de Angulo, whose poem-songs in his book Indian Tales really influenced “Snake Power.”
Is this Denma on the tail-end of “SNAKE POWER?”
P: Yess zat is my voicsss. Mais oui!
With the song “Highway,” or throughout most of your lyrics on the HIGHWAY LP, do you intend on people hearing audible entendres via vocals? Example: Highway can sound like “I wait.”
S: No.
P: Although in the first takes, we joked a lot that it was sounding like Ai Weiwei. So at one point, when he was in prison, we considered dedicating the song to him.
Who’s your biggest French-speaking inspiration?
For us, the name is not meant to be dark, it’s actually the opposite: it’s how real life is, and when we play, that’s what it feels like; playing music feels like life and death. That’s what our teachers have told us: from Laurence’s theatre tradition and Jerry Granelli; when you play there is no such thing as rehearsal, because there is no other moment other than what is happening, so you play for real.
S: I had all this the vinyl when I first arrived in Paris when I was 17. There was all this blues, psychedelic, folk, rock, tons of jazz, but in this pile of vinyl, the first French I can think of was Serge Gainsbourg. First records that I had of his were Histoire de Melodie Nelson and L’homme a la tete de choux… I find the instrumentation of Gainsbourg’s work on Melodie Nelson mind blowing: from the bass to the drum, the guitars; it is so good and beautiful.
Do people frequently tell you Hey Mother Death is reminiscent of Serge Gainsbourg?
P: No, but the coolest music writers do. Not enough people know who he is, and I guess he has influenced us unconsciously.
S: I guess… Although I wouldn’t mind having his drummer, bass player, and guitar player. Denma is on that level.
P: We like Serge Gainsbourg a lot, but we definitely don’t set out to sound like him, though some artists we love have recently definitely done that. Highway turned out to be the exact same length, almost to the second, as Histoire de Melodie Nelson.
What albums do you relate to in an audio-distortion kind of way?
P: If we had to name one, as far as qualities of sound and noise and distortion, I think one thing we were into is the way Jamaican engineers like King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry, etc. would totally fuck up the sound in a compositional way. That’s such a cool example, using all that delay and reverb and noise. That’s so beautiful, we love that and use that a lot.
As I’m familiar with the self-titled EP being three tracks originally released as singles into a collection, thus the EP is a collection of tracks. However, I listen to HIGHWAY as something more fluid. Was this planned or just a happy accident?
P: When we did the EP, we were not planning on making an album, or even having a music project. We sat down and played for the first time together and that was the instrumental recording of “Black Monday,” and that same night, directly after we recorded the vocals for that, our project was suddenly born. We recorded the three songs and they found their own order.
Highway took a lot longer than the EP; we had committed to explore the project, and basically the honeymoon was over.
S: All of a sudden we had to figure out how to live and work together, and also travel to perform at the same time as recording. It was really challenging, we were fighting a lot.
P: As well, the songs on Highway all began spontaneously, but the nature of the songs demanded more work and experimentation: technically, musically. We had to learn a lot, and find a bunch of different gear to get the sounds we wanted…
OMG — the end of [this track two] on Highway is incredible. Where did this sort of noise inspire you?
S: What is noise?
P: It’s all music, man.
S: Have you seen this great interview of John Cage, where he is in his apartment in New York City? He’s talking about the musicality in cars passing and beeping, traffic, people, the sound of the city, and that there is no difference between that and “music.” When we play, it’s very interesting because every time there are some sounds going on, the fridge, the neighbor, car[s] passing, etc. I can’t help but to incorporate it in the music and play with it. I hear it very musically. Also, every time we see Granelli perform this is how he plays; whatever is going on is part of the music.
P: I really connect with the idea of being a sound artist. Basically, all sound/noise is available to be played with. I love playing with the space and noise and physicality of electric guitar, which is what that crazy noise is on the end of the song.
(Top Photos: Alexandre Gallani; Bottom photo: Harald Hutter)
Knowing you two are romantically involved — and understanding the awkwardness of this question — I still wanna ask: Can you give TMT readers any back story or insight on the track “Bad Sex”? Is this more the CURE for bad sex? That hip-swinging bass-line, you know!
—Take 1—
P: When we record sometimes we just fuck around and sometimes it’s really good and sometimes it’s OK.
—Take 2—
P: Basically if you aren’t making sweet love real good, the doctor’s cure is to listen to that song about five times before making sweet-sweet love.
—Take 3—
P: Just listen to that song and everything will be fine.
Who’s on the cover of the self-titled EP?
S: I found that picture when I started studying theatre, and I was completely into mime, clowns. (SIDE NOTE: You HAVE to see that movie by Fellini called “I Clowns,” if you haven’t…) Anyway that was the vibe I was into: the old theater tradition. And also Noh and Kabuki. I found that picture extremely inspiring, beautiful, and evocative. I could not find any details about it, but it made me dream of a theatre backstage, where actors prepare to go onstage. They would actually put a first layer of a sort of cream, and then literally blow powder on their face; some of my friends still do that.
P: The nonfictional story is it represents Laurence blowing powder in my eyes.
How did this improvisational exploration with a vintage tape machine and mix board begin? What was your starting point? What were the machine’s model names?
P: When we compose, we usually play spontaneously and record on our computer, but we love the feeling of analog delays and sounds. Like we said before, we both share a love of old reggae and dub reggae, and were inspired by that approach of mixing as composition. King Tubby would mix like a jazz solo. We were playing around with a lot of this stuff and teaching ourselves, and we had rigged up all sorts of ways to do it with our computer, and we were getting some really great things, but we came to a stand-still equipment-wise with the sounds we wanted, especially for the reverb. We needed the gear and somebody to mentor us technically. We started researching where some of the artists we love made records recently, and then wrote to the engineers who worked on the albums.
Some folks we wrote to were Bill Skibbe and Jessica Ruffins in Benton Harbour, Michigan. They had the coolest gear, and they dug what we were doing, so we ended up there. We kept recording to digital, but through their Daniel N. Flickinger MOD N32 Matrix Mixing Desk, (custom built for Sly Stone) as digital really served our spontaneous approach to recording and mixing. We mixed down to digital and 1/2” magnetic tape, liked the sound of the digital more and ended up using those mixes. It surprised us, but Bill predicted it.
However, we used a bunch of their tape machines for automatic double-tracking and slap-back delay. They had too many, all these Ampex machines from all the different eras, like for the delay on our voices at the end of Snake Power we had the same model, I think an Ampex 350 1/4” 2 track (same model that Sun studios was using to do Elvis’ slap back) and I think we also used an Otari MX-505, and possibly a Revox Pr-99 2 track for automatic double-tracking and delay, the mix down was done to a 1/2” ATR 102. They all had different sounds and noise.
I did his summer workshops, and was considering going to music school, but when I asked to him write me a referral, he said, “I am sorry to say this to you man, but music school will just fuck you up.” He gave me a job building his studio, and I ended up spending a couple of years as his apprentice.
What were your impressions of Michigan in the state it’s currently in?
P: We had just arrived from being in France for a year, so the first thing that struck us was how huge of a car that Bill Skibbe and Jessica Ruffins picked us up in; the cars are so huge in the U.S., and there were just so many fucking cars on the highway from Chicago to Benton Harbour; Benton Harbour was a manufacturing town, I think.
S: It’s now an incredible, deserted, almost abandoned place.
P: Yeah, the main drag feels almost like a ghost town
S: Apparently, a lot of those towns around that region were slaughterhouse towns back in the 50s. Nobody wanted to work in the slaughterhouses. So right now it’s very ghostly, there are all these brick buildings falling apart, which were all factories. And after coming back from a village in France, it was very shocking; the whole town is crossed by this big road in the middle of it so you can’t even walk around the city. Also, forget about any cafés. The core of the town is somehow so antisocial. It’s like it was made for driving through and but not socializing.
P: In France, all the streets and towns are done on human scale. Although, right next to the studio there was a place for getting barbecue ribs that was good.
S: Yeah, in France there’s such a culture of creating walkable, non-driving space where you can stroll around and every street is filled with cafés, restaurants, fromagerie, boulangerie, épicerie, boucherie, flower shops; it creates all these areas of gathering and socializing. This city, Benton Harbor seemed like it was just designed for cars and driving.
P: In the morning, I would bike around before we would work and happened to go past the school, which was rallying and holding [its] re-election. Apparently, there had been so much corruption that the school was in disrepair and earlier had run out of money to buy the bread, peanut butter, and jelly to make school lunches. Then on the other side the river, was a predominantly white town, and it felt completely rich, with beautiful houses, a house by Frank Lloyd Wright, huge houses, and their school has so much money they have a multimillion dollar football stadium for the high school!!! The gap was so visually intense… It was totally wild to see the difference.
Where did you find the hookup to finish recording the HIGHWAY LP at a 13th century house in Limousin?
P: We were living in Laurence’s studio apartment in Paris (which is tiny), going crazy and finding it hard to work there. The chance came to move to the countryside; it just presented itself to us; it was a friend’s place, and we ended up there. It took us a while to figure out it was haunted, but that’s the subject of a whole other interview.
S: It’s very easy to end up in an old haunted house in France.
In reference to your website’s mission-statement about the new EP, how exactly do you see the medium of “conjure spells and control current” transferred between human and music?
S: Everything is connected, interconnected. So, what one is going through in one’s life is a whole experience. What we were going through at the moment was affecting the music we were playing and how it sounded. The conditions that we work in create what we are doing.
P: That was our friend’s poetic way of describing the conditions for part of the recording. We were working in and eventually with a very obstructed haunted house, and we were having all sorts of issues, including sounds and electrical problems. We were extremely skeptical at first at what was going on, but eventually we had no other choice but to start relating to the problems on many different levels. I think you get to taste a little bit of that too as a listener. All music changes your perception of reality.
I like that level A LOT. So outta curiosity, if there were a LORE on Earth, or a mystery, that’s hidden in plain site, and interacted with daily between humans and [something else], could you provide a personal definition of this?
S: I feel there is sacredness, or mystery — or call it what you like — that is part of the world, our world and beyond, and many cultures still relate to it. A friend of ours was spending quite a lot of time in China and was telling us how interesting it was because there was this very familiar prominent materialistic capitalism, but on the other hand people were still very much relating to the sacred and were very Animistic. In Japan, people bow to trees (just think about Miyazaki); there is that relationship with the environment, which we neglect or don’t have any relationship with in our Western world.
If one is tuned in with oneself and one’s environment, it’s like intuition or a gut feeling, or a sense of harmony. If you aren’t tuned in, it reminds you to come back to now.
P: I grew up in a tradition where this is considered ordinary. Laurence and I make offerings to the land, we try to take care of the natural world… which can be as simple (or as difficult) as taking care of yourself and your surroundings, putting on nice clothes and being aware of what you are currently doing. When you start to pay attention and take care of your world, it helps you be in the right place in the right time.
S: And it definitely gives you feedback too, if you’re in the wrong place.
P: Or just in your head, it tells you wake up! “Here is the moment.”
[Photo Credit (top): Harald Hutter]
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