Elf Pity Interview
Discordant panic chords and prolonged backdrop of a tender pastel-excessive genre. Vancouver, BC band Elf Pity are releasing Unplant the Garden through Kingfisher Bluez so I interviewed Sam Herle who plays guitar and sings in Elf Pity. Interview by Jesse Dekel, photo by Yannick Tango.
The video for Fisher rocks. You made it yourself right?
Thank you! I made it with the help of my roommate Brodie, but I did do the editing. I’ve been really into gif-heavy older website and message-board aesthetics recently like those on geocities and neocities, partially because me and that same roommate have been working on a sort of online 3D exhibition space (cyb3rwarehouse.com), so I really wanted to utilize that in the creation of this video. We also made this while in quarantine, so we were trying to make the most of the resources available to us — I had a lot of footage that I had filmed a couple of winters ago which worked well for layering, so I just sort of built off of that collage feeling and matched it to the music as best as I could.
Tell me about the cover art. Is that your pet rabbit? And snake? Do they fight?
In the background is a photograph by Alistair Henning (www.alistairhenning.com) that he took a year or two ago when we first started recording the album, and thought that it would be out a lot sooner haha. And that is a drawing of my pet rabbit! Her name is Dusky, and she’s pretty much the sweetest bunny on the planet. I don’t have a pet snake but I do like drawing them, and the flowers are to draw back to the title of the album, ‘Unplant the Garden’, although this artwork is mostly just for the single release. I haven’t considered the snake/rabbit relationship in the artwork though, so I guess it can be up to you… are they friends or foes?
How does your visual art fit into your music?
It’s nice to be able to control the lense in which the music is heard through the visual art I associate it with and surround it with. I really enjoyed working on the ‘Fisher’ music video and bouncing ideas back and forth with other people to see what would resonate with them best, as well as provide an adequate background for the song. I think visual art and music are a really powerful combination… there are at least a few albums where I remember what the cover looks like as much or more potently than I remember some of the songs, and it’s impossible to tell whether the album would have had the same effect on me if it had been different. There’s a lot of power in images, and I think whenever I’m involved in a musical project that I’m also creating visual art for, it comes as an inseparable package to me, and I don’t think either medium would really stand the same without the other.
Let’s talk about your new record. What’s the deal here?
Our [Elf Pity’s] new album ‘Unplant the Garden’ is coming out in November 2020 on Kingfisher Bluez, a local record label I have known for some time now. I’m really excited about it and it has taken a while to get to this point — it was originally recorded by Gal Av-Gay and mixed and mastered soon afterwards, but it didn’t really feel like a finished product at that time. We sat on it for a while, and there were times when I definitely just wanted to release it and have it be done with, but I’m glad we didn’t because it has become something I think we’re all really proud of. When I was in Montreal this past fall I met producer Devon Bate completely by chance (I was subletting his room while he was on tour with Montreal-based band Common Holly) and we ended up working on it together quite a bit while I was there. We experimented with adding on other instruments and vocal parts as well as re-mixing what was previously recorded, and really built something new out of that. I think it was a really special chance to collaborate and have room to grow creatively, and I’m excited to see how it’s received next fall!
I also checked out your label, Kingfisher Bluez catalogue, and saw this other Vancouver band called ‘Flat Earth’. What do you think about the flat earth theory? Are you a believer? What about hollow Earth?
I don’t believe in Flat Earth Theory, but I do believe in the Flat Earth Band. However, I think if I were to get into a conspiracy theory it seems like a pretty harmless one. I’m a little more partial to aliens and the paranormal though. I don’t have any official opinions about hollow Earth, but I will say that I’ve dug a lot of holes in my life and so far none of them have fallen through.
Tell me about ‘Some People’
‘Some People’ is a film I was working on over the past few years, which takes place in Vancouver, Montreal, and Seattle. It mostly consists of interviews I’ve done of my friends at different points in their lives, and filming little snippets of everyday activity. I really admire a lot of the people I have surrounding me, and this movie was meant to be a sort of tribute to them as well as a snapshot of a certain time in my and their lives. It was privately shown at Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver once, and then I sat on it for quite some time before submitting it elsewhere, this time as a smaller 15 minute episode to be streamed on 8ball.tv. The 8-Ball Community is a collective whose activity I’ve followed for a while, so I was really excited for this to be the place where the film (or series, now) is being streamed. So far only that one episode has been shown, but I’ll definitely turn the rest of the film into more episodes when I have the chance. And I’m continuing to film now and again, so with this format I’ll hopefully create some more episodes out of material from the present and future to be shown and keep it going for as long as I’m interested.
Thanks for the interview and best wishes!
XOXO
SAM ROSE HERLE
