Hylozoists Like Reading Books

03/26/09 2:02pm

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

Toronto-based instrumental collective The Hylozoists have always been an especially literary bunch. According to the band's principal songwriter, Paul Aucoin, a good half of the song titles on their first two albums were purposefully plucked from books.

The Hylozoists' latest disc, L'ile De Sept Villes, is no exception. Its lead track, "The Possibility Of An Island," takes its name from a novel by Michel Houellebecq. The album itself is named after The Island Of Seven Cities, a book by Paul Chiasson that supposes Nova Scotia was first settled by the Chinese. It was there that Aucoin found his inspiration.

CHARTattack sat down with Aucoin to discuss literature and his ever-evolving band.

CHARTattack: Were you responsible for bringing most of the material for the new album, or was it more of a collaborative effort?
Paul Aucoin: I had hoped that we'd work on stuff more collaboratively, but that takes so much time and it didn't work. There's a little bit more of it, so to a certain extent there's the most collaboration, but we're still not a band that jams. I'd really like to do that some day, but it really is hard... I should add that this is the first Hylozoists record that somebody wrote a whole song for that wasn't me. We've had everybody writing. It's just, at the end of the day, the responsibility for getting it done falls back to me.

Going into the studio, were there things that you wanted to do differently than you did on 2006's La Fin Du Monde?
I think the addition of [producer] Jeff McMurrich pretty much took care of that... I think that was the biggest plain difference between the three records, and I think that you can hear that in the engineering — that I didn't have to wear multiple hats. And it was just nice to have a spiritual consultant. Jeff's good at what he does, so that's going to be there, period. But having a buddy... that was pretty much the biggest thing I found as far as huge positives.

Is the content of the album somehow related to The Island Of Seven Cities?
To a certain extent, yes. Since it's instrumental music, you're given a lot of leeway... I just look for blanket inspiration. The book is really fun. It's a book about whether the Chinese settled in Cape Breton before the English, Portugese, French, et cetera. So, I think what I liked about the book was just the imagination that ensued from that thought.

The book is in no way supported scientifically. Paul Chaisson, the author, is an architect from Toronto. He isn't an archaeologist or somebody doing major scientific thought into whether or not that was true. It was mostly hypothetical, research-based assumptions. I think the best way to put it is I just like the possibility of that.

I think, of the three records, it has the most inspiration drawn from something. "The French Settle In," one of the songs, is one of the chapter names. "Acadia Acadia" is a reference to the place where Chaisson had found this settlement that he thought had been settled by the Chinese.

So, I guess there's as much of a concept as I've had, but I'm more concerned with it being a good record.

So it's not very important to you that listeners get the big picture?
No, I'm an avid reader, I guess. To a certain extent, I've never expected somebody to know that "Straight Is The Gait" is a book. But if they read that book, that would make me really happy because it's one of my favourite books... That's what I like about it. It's referential to my tastes, I guess.