After three years together, Sweet Mother Logic is poised to release their first full-length album. The self-titled album follows their 2008 release, The Ascension Island EP.
Sweet Mother Logic is an instrumental melange with a classical core. Combining pop influences with classical instrumentation and occasionally noisy electronic touches; the album can be heavy, dramatic and brooding, or float freely with light flourishes.
All five members, Justin Wright, Jean-Pascal Saint-Cyr, Eric Kaplin, Jack Kelly, and Adrian Aitken, are studying at Concordia.
Saint-Cyr, Kaplin, and Kelly talked about Sweet Mother Logic, the creation of songs, and the path yet to be taken.
Q: How did Sweet Mother Logic come together?
J.P.: Me and Justin, the other cellist, had the same teacher and that’s kind of how we met. We would play music together, busk in the metro and play private events. From there we decided we wanted to take it one step further.
Eric: I actually knew Justin from elementary school, but he moved to Virginia and I hadn’t talked to him in six or seven years. Then I met J.P. while we were both at Dawson. We hung out one day and played some music. J.P. mentioned that that he was trying to put a band together with Justin.
Jack: I met J.P. from drunken nights out at the age of 15.
J.P.: [laughs] shooting the shit.
Jack: [laughs] and he propositioned me one day. We went to this practice studio with Justin. I was originally supposed to be drumming for the project, but we quickly realized I was an incompetent drummer. [group laughs] Luckily I brought my acoustic guitar. We wrote a song we ended up playing and Eric came by.
Q: How was recording the album different from your EP, Ascension Island?
Eric: Totally different.
J.P.: Just the fact that we were making an LP instead of an EP means we had much greater expectations, much bigger projects, and much more experience.
Jack: This time we decided to go digital and spent a good two months, three months if you count all the composting and arranging.
Q: What is the process of building a Sweet Mother Logic song?
J.P..: There is no formula.
Eric: It’s a lot of throwing it up against the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s very committee-based. We’ll jam and record, then pick out parts we like. We stick them together and see.
J.P.: If there’s an eight bar part we really like we’ll deconstruct it. We like the cello line, the piano line, and we’ll take that riff and work with it. From there we have other ideas from the same process and try to fuse it together in the most cohesive or intentionally uncohesive way.
Q: How long would that normally take?
Eric: Well songs are always changing even after we recorded them. I would say the process takes about two sessions.
Jack: There’s so much more to it. We jam constantly and always recorded our jams so we have this library of our improvisation. We’ll be working on something now and jump back to a year ago and remember how cool something was. Then we’ll put it together.
Eric: We also change songs every show.
J.P.: We have to rehearse them to make sure we’ll all on the same page and which version. Sometimes we’ll have one, two or three versions.
Q: Why did you choose to play instrumental arrangements?
Eric: None of us are poets. I don’t want to know what our lyrics would sound like [laughs]. We always thought about vocals as an instrument, but never a conveyor of words.
J.P.: We played one show at a poetry event. One of Justin’s friends, Matthew, wrote this fantastic poem. He read it over our introduction and that was pretty good. I’d be interested in exploring that part of lyrics.
Q: Is Sweet Mother Logic searching for a new direction?
Eric: I wouldn’t say searching, I think were always heading in a new direction.
Jack: I think we’re always moving forward but taking different avenues to get to the final goal. We always know where we’re going; we just take different ways to get there.
Sweet Mother Logic will be at Sala Rossa on Oct. 15 to launch Sweet Mother Logic.
