Sticks and stones and microphones

>> Montrealers the National Parcs break new ground with Timbervision, an audio-visual album of hinterland harmonies and beats from the bush

IT’S ONLY NATURAL: The National Parcs

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Roughly four hours northwest of Montreal is a ZEC—a zone d’exploitation contrôlée, or controlled harvesting zone—called Bras-Coupé Désert. The function of such a vast tract of wilderness, overseen by non-profit administration, is the wisely managed cultivation of the area’s resources, balanced with the careful preservation of its flora and fauna, and availability for recreational fishing, hunting, camping and canoeing.

Nowhere in the provincial government’s list of objectives for such spaces is there any mention of recording pop-music albums, but that didn’t stop Vincent Letellier, Chimwemwe Miller and Ian Cameron—known collectively as the National Parcs—from doing just that.

“It’s Crown land, so there’s no one there except loggers,” says Letellier, the electronic musician still technically known as Freeworm. “Even on the dirt roads, there’s barely any traffic. There can be some planes, but they’re so far away that even if you’re whispering, you can’t hear it. There was no human interference whatsoever.”

The three weren’t seeking peace and quiet for its own sake. Quite the opposite. They’d hauled a van of instruments and audio-visual gear all that way for the purpose of making a racket.

“It’s the perfect studio,” says Letellier, “because when you’re close-miking, you don’t get any room texture, which is really cool because the sound is just there, raw and really dry. Then, as soon as you turn the mic away, you get the echo from the forest—even a $10,000 reverb unit can’t reproduce that sound. So if the conditions were good, meaning wind or insects or whatever, man, it’s paradise for any studio geek.”

Seeing and hearing are believing

In late spring of this year, the National Parcs released Timbervision, an album that’s possibly a first in several respects. It’s a CD-DVD release with visual documentation of its own creation (and a fair bit of unavoidable hijinx and antics), the core of which occurred over the two previous summers up in the ZEC Bras-Coupé Désert.

The trio had already been working together under the banner of Letellier’s Freeworm persona, on and following his 2003 Solar Power album. He was of course the director of the project, with Miller stepping in as an MC/vocalist, replacing a female predecessor (“Although with a very different octave range than she had,” he says) and Cameron handling VJ duties at live shows.

Letellier hasn’t entirely shelved the moniker, which he still attaches to soundtrack and remix work. “Even as we were working on Timbervision,” he notes, “I would still sign stuff under the name Freeworm, but always as a studio rat on my own.”

Following Solar Power, the trio’s dynamic slowly began to shift. “In the past,” recalls Cameron, “it was Vincent’s direction, and then Chimwemwe and I imposed our vision on top of what was already established.”

That morphed into an “ultra-democratic” arrangement, as Letellier puts it. “Any idea, if it’s not approved by all three of us, it doesn’t fly.”

The audio-visual album was an idea that had been bubbling for some time. “I’d pitched the idea to Vince years back,” says Cameron, who directed the video component of Timbervision. “Solar Power, at one point, was going to be that, but it didn’t end up working out that way. We wanted to do something where the whole process was shot during the studio session. So it was going to be inside the studio. We were just going to set up a camera and then, more scratch-video style, have all the little samples—without a look or aesthetic, just documenting.”

Letellier had a history of using field recordings and found sounds, from both the city and the wilderness, in his electronic music, going back already to his first release, 2000’s Vegetation=Fuel. “I’m not sure exactly how the idea came together,” says Cameron, “but it was eventually to marry the two. We thought, wouldn’t it be interesting—we don’t think anyone else has made an album outdoors, and with video as well—an audio-visual album outdoors.”

Outward sounds

Initial attempts to gather raw material on Mount Royal and Mount Ste-Anne proved fruitless, due to the proximity of air and land traffic. “You can EQ out the stuff you don’t want to hear,” Letellier notes glumly, “but eventually you kill the sound.”

Way up north, things were quite different, and the real creation began—without much of a battle plan, other than shoot first and ask questions later. “Before we even had the song structures,” says Cameron, “we started shooting the video and improvising in the woods. We had video first, then we would take the audio attached to it and build songs out of that. And then we went back the following summer and shot the elements we were missing, and left a few days to play around.”

“At that point,” adds Letellier, “we started transposing classical studio work to smack in the middle of the woods. We brought studio mics, studio amps, old, vintage gear, all of that.”

As Timbervision’s DVD so delightfully illustrates, the rhythms and textures onto which the lads would lay their funky Rhodes riffs, acoustic guitar licks, raps and rich vocal harmonies were generated from splashing water, crackling fire, rolling rocks and splitting wood. If a tree fell in the forest and the National Parcs were nearby with a recording device, it might well be somewhere in the mix.

Now, don’t go thinking this was some kind of holiday. Given that every sound required a video take, uncontrollable circumstances dictated their schedule. “Even though we left it open, at least in the beginning, as to what it was exactly we were going to get,” says Miller, “we did have the objective of getting as much out of it as possible.”

“Even the night I had pneumonia—I wasn’t on medication yet, I went to the hospital the next day—I was jumping up and down in the water at four in the morning,” says Letellier. “That shit’s stupid! No one in their right mind would do that, but time was such a precious item that we had to work with that, and go all the way.”

Fun comes first

The final results, it’s important to note, are about good times, first and foremost. The aim was an accessible, memorable pop album. Timbervision is just that, a stew of folk, funk, blues-hop and doo-wop with a strong basis in African music. Miller, with his Malawian background, youthful jazz and gospel-singing training, and skills as a percussionist, rapper and beatboxer, is at least ostensibly in charge in that respect.

“It comes back to that democracy thing,” he says. “My area, objectively, is the vocals and the texts, but as far as who wrote what, it’s really hard to determine because we work together. But as far as influences, I’ll try to speak for all of us—African music is there, for sure, the blues and the spirituals too. All along, we would make compilations and exchange music, and doo-wop was right up there at the top of the list.

“We stopped going for a particular style. At one point, we tried doing hip hop tracks, and it just didn’t work, because we were trying to do hip hop tracks. As soon as we took the preconceived notions away and said, let’s just create—what do we feel? We feel bumping beats, we feel these types of melodies—sure enough, it came down to the lowest common denominator, the grandmother and grandfather of all music that we appreciate. That’s what came to the forefront.”

The environmentalist angle the effort offered was one that the National Parcs felt was best left unsaid. “I could come to the interview with a big beard and my Greenpeace badge,” says Letellier, “but that kind of puts you into a category, and you’re tagged as an activist. It can be scary, like a religion for some people.”

“Our main thing is doing good art and making people dance, makin’ ’em shake their thing on the dancefloor,” says Miller. “What our personal feelings are, politically, there’s tons of stuff going on, but I don’t think we necessarily want our band to be a flag-bearer for any particular cause other than enjoying yourself and having fun.

“When you boil it all down, we love nature, we have a fun time there—and if you want to have fun with nature, then you should know how to treat it.”

At the Musée d’art contemporain
(185 Ste-Catherine W.)
on Friday, Nov. 2, 7 p.m., $8