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Ky Brooks is a shining beacon in Montréal’s experimental music playground. Playing in past bands like Shining Wizard, Femmaggots, Lungbutter, and Nag, Ky also serves as the live sound person for Big|Brave, and house tech at mainstay Montréal indie venue La Sala Rossa. Ky was also a central co-conspirator at the pivotal and fertile DIY loft space La Plante throughout the 2010s, giving birth to much of Montreal’s newer burgeoning experimental artists.
During the pandemic, Ky had time to reflect on their own solo journey as an artist and then made the collaborative album, Power Is The Pharmacy—out now via the mighty, Constellation Records, along with 11 other musicians such as; Mat Ball, synth maven Nick Schofield, saxophonist James Goddard (Egyptian Cotton Arkestra), bassist Joshua Frank (Gong Gong Gong), drummer Farley Miller (Shining Wizard), and Andrés Salas (Bosque Rojo). Many of those musicians became part of Ky’s live band, and are giving a proper live debut with a mini three-date tour, including one date for Montreal’s experimental music festival, Suoni Per Il Popolo. We spoke with Ky, and saxophonist, James Goddard, ahead of the Suoni show.
PAN M 360: Hey Ky, so you must be in rehearsals for the Suoni show?
Ky Brooks: Yeah it’s actually me and the band on the line; James, Mathieu, Farley, and Rob. We’re playing in Toronto tomorrow. So we’re getting ready for that and then Ottawa the day after.
PAN M 360: Is it going to be mostly the new album, Power Is The Pharmacy?
Ky Brooks: It will be for those two dates, just all the new album. There are excluded, two of the more melodic songs. It’s a slightly different interpretation of it, I guess. Because there’s only one synth on stage. And there’s a ton of synths on the recordings.
PAN M 360: And I feel for this kind of music. There’s a huge amount of room for live improv?
Ky Brooks: Yeah for sure. And you know, the songs are so weirdly structured on the recordings so we’ve like found ways to structure them and maybe making sense for playing might feel a little bit more concise. But it’s still weird.
PAN M 360: Is it kind of like constant music too, with songs bleeding into each other?
James Goddard: We’ve only done the set once in December and I think we kind of designed it to be like a freight train.
PAN M 360: And Ky, how did you go about making this solo project, deviating from making music with full bands in the past?
Ky Brooks: It’s kind of funny, because the actual album has, so many people playing on it—like 11 different musicians play on it. And the folks here, with the exception of Rob, played on the record. I think it’s sort of this thing where like it would be amazing to have everybody in that whole group of people play, but it’s just too much to wrangle 11 people. I was just sort of thinking about how to put the music together live in such a way that we can cover all the bases, basically. And this is a group that ended up being chosen. And I’m sure there will be other configurations down the road. Honestly what happened is I did The Artist’s Way, which is this 12-step book course about reclaiming your creativity. It’s based on AA. So I did that deep into the pandemic and this album is kind of what came out. So I wasn’t really like, ‘I want to have a solo project thing’ at all. I prefer playing in groups and I like to improvise with people and you know, like pals and noise, that’s what I like. So doing this sort of like a self-directed thing, being isolated in the pandemic, I needed to be making something.
Ky by Stacy Lee
PAN M 360: And recording it, was it you bringing these skeletal structures of songs and having the musicians do what they do?
Ky Brooks: That’s definitely part of what happened. It’s kind of like a collage
James Goddard: Those initial recording sessions with Andrés and Nick, You’re like, ‘I have a page of words. And I have no idea what the music should be around the words.’ And we’re just like, OK ‘Let’s do a music’ and some of that stuff ended up on the album. And then others got erased and replaced by different stuff. You would send it to Farley and he would come with a drum beat. And then you would take out the saxophone or whatever and then put on a synth and then like the song. There was almost no scaffolding and it was really your process of assembling.
Ky Brooks: It’s interesting, I and Joni Void interviewed each other on CKUT last week and bonded over that very similar process of making music. Basically a collage from sound, right? So, I didn’t write some music. And then my friends played on it. It was more like, it just was assembled from the things that people were doing. And like what people sent to me or like, did in the moment, and there was a lot of taking things from one place and putting them somewhere else. And there’s field recordings and stuff like that on there, too, which I think is sort of, like an odd again, to that process of like assemblage.
PAN M 360: And now translating these songs live is another form of assemblage.
Ky Brooks: Yeah, I feel like we’re like a Nu Metal band live (laughs). For this live show, for example, Rob is playing the guitar on this and they didn’t play on the album. And they’re playing a bunch of parts that were originally synth parts, actually. So there’s the sort of reinterpretation that we’re doing of like, figuring out like, how to translate it live.
PAN M 360: I wanted to ask you about the lyrical verse, this almost fragmented poeticism. Do you write down your own interpretations in a journal daily?
Ky Brooks: Yeah, I mean, I do journal every day. But the material on Power Is The Pharmacy is mostly somewhat structured poems, which don’t have the form of what is on the album but are poems that I had sat on for a really long time. Like “Elven Silverware,” for example, is a poem that I think I have been performing live for, like, six years, at least in different configurations. You know, some and then some of them were just improvised during the recording, like “Dragons.” Like “The Dancer,” that’s definitely like, I wrote it as a song rather than as a poem. So there’s a lot of skipping around at this point. I’ve been working on this stupid thing for like, so fucking long that I just know it all pretty well. But I think you have kind of different vibes and different emotions with each song.
PAN M 360: Would you say that there’s a theme that holds the whole album together, or like maybe a few?
Ky Brooks: I can tell you the embarrassing truth about this album, which is that the original name of it was ‘Capitalism Dreams, and the Fear of Loss,’ which, of course, I could not keep as the name of the album. But those are the three themes of the album, and there’s actually sort of three different sets of—you could break it down into three different groups of songs, which are about these three different aspects. Sort of the underlying theme of the album, for me, is related to getting older and related to how ephemeral life is and how incredibly scary it is to exist, knowing that. And then sort of drawing a parallel between, the changing city, and how infrastructure and you know, like zoning laws, change how we experience our daily life, and the places that we live in and are in.
James Goddard: There’s also the quote that inspired the title. Should I read the quote? I’m going to read it. ‘Power Is the Pharmacy, thanks to its capacity to transform the sources of death into a seeding strength, or to convert the resources of death into the capacity for healing. And it is because of its dual ability to be the force of life and the principle of death that power is at once revered and feared…’
Ky Brooks: I mean, I feel like that’s that book, A Critique Of Black Reason by Achille Mbembe. And maybe more specifically, there’s another book by the same author called Necropolitics, which is how in capitalism, death becomes a source of power. Who is allowed to die and who’s forced to die becomes a tool for reinforcing or recreating capitalism, basically. Yeah. And that’s, I think, also one of the deep themes of the album. And, you know, sort of reading this author all scripts, and taking that quote at face value.
James Goddard: We like nerd shit in this band.
PAN M 360: Finally what do you think we can expect from the upcoming Suoni performance?
Ky Brooks: I mean my hope is that it’s just gonna be really fun, weird, stupid, Sotterranea vibes. We’re playing with their friends, HRT and Genital Shame, who are coming in from the States. And they’re an experimental queer black metal project.
PAN M 360: Experimental queer black metal? Man, only at Suoni.
KY + GENITAL SHAME + HRT @ LA SOTTERENEA, June 1st, 9 pm.
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