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The universe is too vast for there not to be alternate universes and perhaps, one of the journeys through the human condition is finding the doors into these abstract universes or leaving little drips of what it might sound like. This is where the Canadian psychedelic indie synth rock group, Loon Town, takes their name and inspiration. Made up of members living in Montreal, Whitehorse, and Kitchener, Loon Town took the nostalgia and feelings from their collective hometown and created the album, Slow Space, which loosely takes place in this fictionalized alternate reality dubbed Loon Town.
Don’t let the intense-sounding concept dissuade you. The music on Slow Space is meant to be enjoyed while dancing on wine-soaked nights, under the night sky, or at a funk-themed after-party. We spoke with Loon Town a bit about their creative process, Loons, and a playful return home, before their show in Montreal on November 13.
PAN M 360: What’s it like to be in a band with members scattered throughout Canada?
Loon Town: It’s odd! It makes us be very intentional about our time. We have weekly meetings and different strategies to stay connected to the material and to each other. We toss sound materials at each other in folders and flesh out demos via songwriting from our home studios. Then we take a month or two and come together and finish them, arrange them, etc.
PAN M 360: Were you all in Future States? How does the creative process differ between the projects?
Loon Town: Three of the four of us were in Future States. Our process in this project shares the songwriting process in a much more collaborative way. We are all passionate about writing, and this has been a chance to co-write in a very significant way. It is really interesting to write a harmonic structure and then pass it on to someone and let them write lyrics or melody, or vice versa. It forces each of us to let go, to move with the material as it develops instead of getting too stuck on any one idea. It’s really a new way of working for us, and we definitely recommend it, so long as you have built trust with your collaborators because it can also be really vulnerable!
PAN M 360: Can you tell me the reasoning behind the name Loon Town, it’s a fictionalized town for the band?
Loon Town: Dave and Dani were on a weeklong canoe trip a few years ago in Algonquin park, in a part of the park where there were more Loons than people. They both have a fascination with the sound of the loon, almost as if they are able to speak across from one world to the next. To this end, we have imagined the town as a literal place, perhaps in some alternate dimension, or the sum total of all our hometowns in this world. It’s like an imaginary ‘everyperson’s” hometown, which reaches across the space of imagination and speaks to our world. From there, we imagined each song is a place, a person, or a thing in the town, and can be placed on a map. The farther we go into this world, the more universalized but also strange it gets. It has become a landing pad for everything that happens in one’s life. The leaving, the coming, the death, the existential crises, etc.
PAN M 360: The theme is a return home on the debut LP, Slow Space. A return home from what? The pandemic? Grief?
Loon Town: Yeah, there is this meandering relationship you can have with your hometown. The town you left because your imagination pulled you onward to other things. Or because you couldn’t stand it. Or because opportunity knocked. Then it becomes the town you came back to, maybe to take care of a relative, or tie up loose ends, or because of a death, or you were in some state of limbo. Then it’s all the complicated feelings that spring from that return. It’s not a straightforward relationship, but it’s an important one. And yes, as the creation of this album happened during the pandemic, it certainly factors in, haha.
PAN M 360: Who are some bands you maybe draw inspiration for Loon Town’s lush instrumentation?
Loon Town: We love old music with rich string and brass sections, everything from Duke Ellington’s orchestra, to all the Motown harmonies, and the janky rich sounds of Neutral Milk hotel. We’ve also been obsessed with the textures that Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld create with their instruments.
PAN M 360: I really love the vibe of “Party at the Ice Cream Shoppe,” the lyricism is very tongue-in-cheek. What was the inspiration behind that one?
Loon Town: This one was a lyrical co-write between Nic and Dani. For some reason, during the making of this album, there were various half-songs with the theme of ice cream, ice cream shoppes, and the ice cream man. One of them was perhaps even cheekier, and may be released someday too. This one was born for Nic from the idea of going out on the town during a visit home, in a place where there is a rich yet varied history (and baggage). It was an imagination of a night where they could totally let go, connect with and rediscover old friends and loves while presenting as they are – without yielding to real or imagined social pressures.
Specifically for Nic, this turns around notions of gender expression and presentation. This also plays out through a sort of surreal painting of a scene through the symbol of “flavours” of ice-cream, which can be stand-ins or metaphors – for Nic this ties into expressions of identity, but for Dani it’s something else entirely! Either way, it’s meant to be playful, and we’re glad it comes across that way. Our friends have been debating the meaning of the track, with one of them saying that they see it as an analogy for going ‘downtown’.
PAN M 360: The brass really adds to the atmosphere on a song like “Doesn’t Matter,” “Party at the Ice Cream Shoppe,” “Silver Flowers,” etc. Did you have the idea for brass from the beginning?
Loon Town: We did. Dave plays some brass, and so we included some on our previous EP. We all love brass, and we knew our recording engineer Andy Magoffin played various brass instruments and was willing to work with us, so we seized the opportunity. We were super jazzed by how invested Andy became in the process, and ended up with even more densely layered arrangements than we’d initially anticipated. We feel very lucky!
PAN M 360: There’s a multimedia aspect to the LP with the interactive map for Slow Space. Where did that idea come from?
Loon Town: It’s linked to this idea of Loon Town as an actual town, and each song, in our imaginations, became a place on the map. During our writing residency for the record, we actually created a rough sketch of the town with markers and paper, and it influenced the final song selection on the album. As we continue to write songs, the town becomes richer, denser, and more full of life. We worked with Davide Di Saro to create the album art, and he imagined this town in space, as a person, whose hair flowed as rivers through the town. It is a beautiful imagining of our original ideas for the map, and one that we never would’ve come up with on our own! Then the website became 3d and interactive thanks to further collaboration with Davide, Andrea Cossu, and Liam Brown.
PAN M 360: What do you think about the streaming singles age? I ask because, Slow Space is definitely meant to be listened to in full for the theme to really ring true, but lots of I guess ordinary music listeners go single by single.
Loon Town: Our band members have varying degrees of modernity in their hearts, haha. Some of us are basically neo-luddites, and do most of our listening in public parks (to birds), or on wax cylinders. Joking. But some of us (not to single anyone out) actively play music on their CD, tape, and record players, while others stream more often. Of course, things are best when you slow down, savour, and get the whole experience, even if that experience is streaming online, but we realize this isn’t possible or desirable in all situations, and we embrace the plurality while keeping a soft spot for all things slow.
There are certainly advantages to both approaches. In some ways, the streaming singles era is actually more amenable to a record like Slow Space, or perhaps the other way around. It’s an album with some sonic coherence but it’s certainly not 12 songs where everything stays the same except the chords and lyrics. We dabble in a lot of different genres, which in the full-length age might be less acceptable. Also, with the interactive website, we hope to bridge the gap between single and album and offer the audience the opportunity to slow down, meander through the “town” in digital space, and experience the record in both a slow, daydreaming and immediate gratification kind of way, if that makes sense.
Loon Town Plays at Casa Del Popolo on November 13 w/ High Five and Slight
