By Adrienne Yeung
This may be their first full-length album, but Flying Fox and the Hunter Gatherers are no newcomers to music in any sense. The classically trained sextet combines elements of jazz, pop, and gypsy folk to create an old-world influenced, complex, and orchestral sound that’s incredibly rich and gorgeous. They released their self-titled EP in August 2008, and performed hit show The Wild Things at the Fringe Festival last summer. Stylus joined lead vocalist Jesse Krause and keyboardist Darren Grunau for breakfast at the Ellice Café to chat about their new album Hans My Lion, which was released March 15.
Stylus: How would you guys describe your sound?
Darren Grunau: Big band burlesque?
Jesse Krause: BOLD big-band burlesque.
DG: Yeah, get some more ‘b’s in there!
Stylus: Hans My Lion, the character, was born from a human mother, and is very isolated and angry at the world. How did you think him up?
JK: Hans My Lion is based on Hans My Hedgehog, a German folk tale that was collected by the Brothers Grimm. Yeah, it’s a very similar story but with a hedgehog instead of a lion. He’s not ostracized for anything that he’s actually done, but Hans My Lion does something bad in the middle of the album that forces him to leave.
DG: Hans My Hedgehog rode a giant rooster! You know, just a point of interest. Which Jesse neglected to include in the album!!Stylus: Why a lion instead of a hedgehog?
JK: Lions are more charismatic…I mean, with a hedgehog, you could relate to it as feeling really strange, and not meant to fit into a human world because you’re prickly, and people will avoid you. Whereas with a lion, you’re not meant to fit into a human world because you’re bigger and more violent than people around you. Which is something that I relate to, because, well, I’m a big guy, and I’m physically rough, you know, but more in a playful way more than an angry way.
Stylus: What are your favourite songs on this album?
JK: Some of them we’ve played longer than others, so some of them have more novelty value. I’d say everyone’s still enjoying playing “Starling.”
DG: Not to say that we do a bad job of playing “Nurse” (which was on the EP). But both “Winter” and “Autumn” developed orchestral lines a lot better. “Autumn” is one of my favourites because at the end there’s these cascading strings and this buildup – the horns are going, and it’s just a lot more epic.
Stylus: Yeah, I was noticing, in the instrument list, there’s an abrasophone, a concertina, flugelhorn. Are you guys classically trained in these more unconventional instruments as well?
JK: Hahaha, not the abrasophone, which is a little box with some tines off a leaf rake on it. You play it with a bow, and it sounds very abrasive.
DG: Yeah, it sounds very bad!
JK: It’s the soundscape between “Hans My Lion I” and “Hammer.” And if you listen closely you can hear the… dulcet grating tones of the abrasophone. [Both are delighted at this sound byte.]
DG: But Steve is most definitely trained in the flugelhorn! Yeah, everyone can definitely read notes and understand complex harmonic tunes.
Stylus: What was it about the two songs from your EP and rock opera The Wild Things that made it onto this record?
DG: “Nurse” starts strong. It sounds great right off the hop. We thought not many people would have listened to our EP, so we wanted to give it another change to make it into public consciousness. And we wanted to expand on “Loneliness.”
JK: We spent one day tracking the whole of The Wild Things album. So that’s, well, that’s pretty quick.
Stylus: In comparison, how long did it take you to put this record together?
JK: This was 14 days of tracking, total?
DG: Yeah, and a week of mixing. So we had a lot of extra time to layer, to add on extra harmonies. Whereas The Wild Things was all about doing everything live on the floor and just getting it right, you know?
JK: Some of that’s related to our musical style, the way that we go about making music. More straight ahead pop music relies on a lot of instruments filling the same musical role. With Flying Fox, every niche is filled by usually just one instrument.
DG: Yeah, I think we spent more time strategizing than another rock band does. Because when a pop band writes a song they traditionally sort of lay down the base tracks and then they layer extra stuff on top, like “we might want to put more glockenspiel here.” But if I were to improvise my piano part at a certain part, I’m occupying a space that Steve had wanted to fill, already planned to fill and had already written music to fill and then suddenly bam! I just throw up this huge fucking block.
Stylus: What kind of non-music influences do you guys carry? Ideas, places… things…
DG: I’ve always really loved folk tales. I also think, we’re both Mennonites. There is a small amount of repression that goes on [in the culture]. So I think for that reason, the darkness of folk tales is appealing.
JK: There’s been a lot of darkness in Mennonite-Anabaptist history. Also, it was only two generations away that lots of our relatives had the shit kicked out of them [in WWII]. And that’s sort of our interest in folk tales, in stories, and the important narratives; they give you some sense of where you are in the world. A folk tale is interesting because it gives you a sense of where you should exist in the world as far as your imagination is concerned, if you allow yourself to kind of be enveloped in it and believe that it is your story.
Flying Fox and the Hunter gatherers are holding their CD release party at the WECC on April 19 before embarking on a six-week tour across Canada.