by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I’ve just got so much Final Fantasy recording to finish up,” says virtuoso violinist Owen Pallett, when asked for news of his other projects. “I wanna ride this gravy train as long as it goes.”

He would be well advised to do so, having garnered tons of attention on the strength of his debut LP, Has a Good Home, and his intense, almost confrontational live shows. It doesn’t hurt that the musician-about-town (Toronto, mostly) has played with and/or arranged strings for such renowned Canadian bands as Arcade Fire, the Hidden Cameras, Gentleman Reg, Jim Guthrie, Picastro and Royal City.

Pallett’s side projects include the schizo blues/Broadway/noise band les Mouches, currently on hiatus but due for a comeback next year, and, coming soon, Fat Canada, a “spazzy synthpop” band whose shows will be conducted like aerobics classes (“Everybody has to come in sweats,” he says), and Tenderizer, his bid for indie-flick-soundtrack stardom, fashioned after Damien Rice, Iron & Wine and the Shins.

Pallett has practically built Final Fantasy on openly paying homage to influential art and artists. Not only is the project named after a world-famous Japanese video game, but his first solo gig was a benefit for Portland singer Bobby Birdman. He also plays covers of pop/rock grand dames such as Whitney Houston and Jann Arden, he’s written songs in tribute to Arcade Fire and Xiu Xiu, and his next LP, He Poos Clouds (expected early next year), is inspired by Dungeons & Dragons lore.

The Mirror caught up with Pallett to discuss the Final Fantasy puzzle, game music and the live solo experience, which the adept musician surprisingly says still feels “like a bad dream.”

Mirror: On stage, do you try to compensate for the more extensive arrangements on your records?

Owen Pallett: It’s a totally different experience. I’ve never made the association between what a band sounds like live and on record. If the two are the same, to me, that’s boring. My view is that the dirtier it is, the better it is on record, and the cleaner it is, the better it is live.

M: I’ve heard that you don’t have the patience to play Final Fantasy, but what’s the association between the game and your music?

OP: Final Fantasy is an ambiguous title. It applies to computer games, books, movies, soundtracks. It’s a brand, just like Dungeons & Dragons. When you hear “D&D,” you don’t specifically think of the movie or the multitude of books, let alone people sitting in a circle, drinking beer and slaying dragons on paper, so I like that. The link to Final Fantasy is a sense of nerdiness, melodrama and gigantic emotions of the self-indulgent writing that I’m engaging in. Also, naming it after a large corporate entity is the opposite of naming it after yourself.

The rules of the game

[A conversation about post-war Japanese culture, as approached by writers Kenzaburo Oe vs. Yukio Mishima, ensues.]

OP: Basically, Final Fantasy is Mishima, the game. I have a love for Mishima’s craft but a hate of what he stands for because he was essentially a fascist and a self-hating homo. Mishima is the gayest writer ever, and I mean that literally. He is actually the most homosexual writer who’s ever existed. Even his books about straight romance are filled with tropes of current homosexual thinking and the things you see in homosexual art. I didn’t want to name my band Mishima because that would be the worst band name ever, whereas Final Fantasy is much more recognizable so it doesn’t sound quite so pretentious.

M: A lot of music has been compared to game soundtracks lately.

OP: Early computer games were just people turning Vivaldi and Scott Joplin into bleeps and bloops. When people talk about DAT Politics and Max Tundra as being like video-game music, it might be what a video game sounds like, but it’s certainly not what the music sounds like. Video game music has forever, especially in the RPG genre, tried to mimic these gigantic Hollywood scores with MIDI instruments. Destroyer’s Yer Blues is actually the closest record to video-game music I’ve ever heard. It’s also, consequently, my favourite Canadian record of all time. What I do in writing is troll over Scriabin and Chopin scores forever and ever and ever and then listen to a lot of Scott Walker and try to communicate that kind of melodrama. I’m basically trying to copy what video game composers are doing now.

With Gentleman Reg and Dandi Wind at la Sala Rossa on Friday, July 8, 9 p.m., $12

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