With the constant pressure to tour and increasing expectations for a quick turnaround of output by the record industry, it’s rare that a musician gets a chance to revisit their rough drafts, those scraps of melody, orphaned lyrics, and incomplete themes.
According to Ohad Benchetrit, that’s what his new project Years is all about.
Benchetrit, who is also an occasional Broken Social Scenester and one of the founding members of Toronto post-rock outfit Do Make Say Think, admits that the project found its genesis partly in boredom.
“Basically, the record is a result of an excess of time,” says Benchetrit, noting that an extended layoff from other projects led to him revisiting previously discarded bits and pieces. “This is me pushing forward the seeds of my old ideas.”
While many artists loathe the idea of reworking the ghosts of unrealized ambitions, Benchetrit relished the task. “I wouldn’t say it was disconcerting. You could see a chronological history [as an artist]. You don’t change over night, and this record is the process of me slowly changing—it’s not the change in and of itself, but this chronicles the process of making a change from the past to [my] future in terms of the kind of music I would like to make.”
Years is something of a kindred spirit with Do Make Say Think, but does not rigidly adhere to the post-rock conventions that group has become known for. “Are You Unloved?,” with its wheezing horns and slow-building crescendo, certainly bring Do Make and Godspeed You! Black Emperor to mind. Yet on other tracks, like the woozy, ambling “A Thousand Times a Day (Someone is Flying),” and the nimble, rootsy “Assassination of Dow Jones,” Benchetrit shows a previously unheard range and an untapped virtuosity with acoustic guitar. The record is certainly one of the most interesting to emerge from the Broken Social Scene alums this year—an eclectic instrumental collection that moves from intricate to epic to abstract.
But why not bring these new ideas to Do Make or Broken Social Scene? Benchetrit worries that his groups may be too set in their ways.
“The thing about Do Make is that there are five solid minds that need to be satisfied—it’s their child as much as mine. What ends up happening, the more that time passes, you can’t help it, you come up with a style. It becomes an intrinsic part of who you are, as a person or as a band,” Benchetrit says, though this is not necessarily meant as a bad thing.
“It’s like a boulder. The smaller the rock, the easier you can push it around, but you add this history, you add these personalities, the rock gets bigger and bigger. It gets heavier. What you find is that it becomes so big you can’t push it in any direction. I just needed a different vehicle for some ideas. That’s what Years is.”
Like many great instrumental rock records, Benchetrit endows the ambience with a greater sense of meaning with his song titles, which often subvert the otherwise sombre mood of the record. It’s hard not to see the dark humour in track titles like “Hey Cancer, Fuck You!” and “Dow Jones,” even though the music is played straight to the point of gloominess.
“The balancing act is trying to do something serious, but not taking yourself too seriously. It’s a way of alleviating the pressure and not being too heavy-handed—song titles for an instrumental band are a way around that,” Benchetrit notes.
Despite his effort to assuage the darkness of his music—for now anyway—his mind is going to have to return to the macabre. At the time of our interview, Do Make Say Think was just starting work on a score for Tales of the Uncanny—a 1919 German film noted by many historians as being the first proper horror movie—along with Toronto’s Final Fantasy and German artist Robert Lippok. The film is being rescored as part of the Luminato festival, and they will perform the whole thing one time only, for free, in Yonge-Dundas Square.
“It’s almost like a Twilight Zone episode—it’s in five segments, and there are five different stories. Basically, they recreate a novel or short story in each segment. It’s amazing how many places took that. It’s scary [to try scoring a movie], but I’m looking forward to how it turns out.”
Between providing music for a film that many cinema historians consider sacrosanct, to having the audacity to work with his ghosts of projects past and introducing humour to gloomy musical landscapes, Benchetrit seems, to say the least, game for a challenge. It’ssomething that’s sorely missing from music today.
Tales of the Uncanny, as scored by Do Make Say Think, Final Fantasy, and Robert Lippok, screens for free in Yonge-Dundas Square June 11 as part of the Luminato festival. Years appears in the Arts & Crafts Showcase at North by Northeast on June 17 at The Courthouse (57 Adelaide E.).
