by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy and transmutation. These are the eight schools of magic in Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, lore.

For those of you still reading, here’s where Toronto violinist and string arranger Owen Pallet comes in: each of these ideas is brought to life in eight of the 10 tracks on his upcoming album He Poos Clouds, out May 15 on Blocks and Tomlab Records.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise from someone who named his band after the world’s largest video-game franchise. (By the way, don’t look for Pallet’s Final Fantasy online—his Web site is temporarily down and he’s been kicked off MySpace for copping a registered trademark.)

Between games (he’s partial to Grand Theft Auto), Pallet gained fame as a peripheral member of bands like Arcade Fire and the Hidden Cameras, then as the leader (and lone performer) of Final Fantasy, whose debut album, Has a Good Home, was rush-recorded last year.

The last time the Mirror spoke to Pallet, he was in the middle of composing an LP for a string quartet, and constructing what he calls a “very rigid, formally executed concept album.” Despite lurking “swords, dark elves and an Irish devil,” He Poos Clouds deals primarily in the mundane, namely “cooking, plastic surgery and video games.”

The Mirror redialed Pallet’s number for a conversation about nerds vs. jocks, role-playing vs. religion and skill vs. sucking.

Mirror: You’ve said that you have a tendency towards self-sabotage. How does that manifest itself?

Owen Pallet: Well, I like a lot of bands who sound like they don’t know how to play their instruments, but I know how to play, so I have to make deliberate mistakes and allow things to kind of suck. He Poos Clouds was written for a string quartet, which is really a hard thing to do. The [St. Kitts] quartet usually plays Bartók and Beethoven, so you can’t serve them a plate of shit, right? But in a way, it’s a defence mechanism ’cause then if it does suck, I can say, “Well, all I had to work with was a string quartet.”

And the whole format of the performance is ridiculous, that I get up on stage and play violin and loop it instead of assembling a band or playing an instrument that’s more conducive to singing while playing. It’s totally a collection of bad ideas.

The resurrection of the nerd

M: What’s the attraction to D&D?

OP: Basically, D&D magic is belief for non-believers, it’s a codification of the supernatural that can be applied to real life. There’s a lot of parallels between D&D magic and Catholicism, and to me that’s entirely interesting.

M: Are you Catholic?

OP: No, no, no, I’m totally, totally, totally, totally atheist. Role-playing games are fascinating for people who don’t believe in any religion but still feel drawn to it. It exercises the same part of your brain. My album attempts to take all these occurrences that seem commonplace to us and attribute them to this religion that everyone knows is fake. I hope that people kinda get the joke that the album straddles that fine line between truth and lie.

M: I understand you don’t actually play the game.

OP: The couple of times that I have played it, it’s been with vindictive family members, like an older brother who wanted to assert himself over me. A Zen Buddhist uncle has also been involved, and he just couldn’t deal with having to don a new morality and behave the way a character would. So it’s pretty tricky. But me and Matt Collins from Ninja High School are gonna try. Apparently, he knows some skilled, professional dungeon masters. Otherwise, I could try and make friends with really sweaty, nerdy guys, but I think those are a dying breed.

M: But you’ve talked about the stigma around D&D, and you’re often described as a nerd yourself. You don’t think nerds get a bad rap?

OP: No, not anymore. I actually don’t know a lot of people who aren’t nerds, to some degree. I’m pretty upfront about video games—I play an hour a day. Frankly, I feel more awkward talking about going to the gym.

M: It’s a nerd’s world.

OP: It’s called the information age for a reason. In the end, the people who get respect are the people who are smart, and the people who are smart are the people who are nerds.

With Grizzly Bear and Wyrd Visions at Lambi on Sunday and Monday, April 16–17, 9 p.m., $8

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