FEATURED INTERVIEWS 07                       

Whiteroom

WhiteRoom is the result of a collective filtering process. Their sound is best described as transcending, innovative and fresh. With ever-changing styles and never ending musical explorations, Whiteroom has crafted and is steadily carving a sound all their own. Let's get to know Whiteroom.

By: Gian Erguiza

Gian: Alright guys,please enlighten our readers....Who is Whiteroom?

Whiteroom: WhiteRoom is a collection of filters.

Mrmmm???

Let me explain what we mean: I’m going to quote from our website.
" Sunlight is made up of a full spectrum of colors. As it reflects off an object, certain shades of light are absorbed and others are reflected. These reflected colors form the images that reach our eyes. Unfiltererd White Light contains every image you have seen and will ever see.

The Static you hear from a dead radio contains a full spectrum of sound all at equal volumes. It is said that within that invisible unfiltered noise, hidden in plain site, is every piece of music that will be, and ever has been written."

Basically the way we see it, music is a sort of morphogenetic learning experience. As we grow up, we grab bits and pieces of information from our lives and file them away for permanent safe keeping. A huge chunk of your brain’s power doesn’t go into observing the world around you – but filtering out the useless information and deciding what is important and what is irrelevant. It’s said that of all the information hitting your senses, more than 99.9% of it is carefully ignored, or else you would go into some kind of crazy catatonic over-stimulated shock. If you really paid attention to everything around you, it would be overwhelmingly chaotic.

Filter theory says that you can make any sound by cutting away useless info from the chaos (what we like to call the Great Universal Static).

WhiteRoom is the result of our collective filtering process. After more than twenty years of absorbing and absorbing and absorbing ideas, images sounds, experiences and music – we’ve cut away from the pile in huge swaths; cherry picking bits and pieces, fragments and half-notions and woven them into our own personal interpretation of everything we’ve ever observed.

Gian: Quite the explanation! Your Debut LP is fresh, transcending, and different. What went into making this album as far as what direction and what you guys’ wanted to come across in the music?

Whiteroom: After careful musicological study, we have identified our genre as NeoRomantic Indie. That is to say – we like the notion that there is a larger scale concept that we’re trying to tap into while writing: emotional, intellectual, thought-provoking or whatever. But musically, we try and let our instincts guide us. I.e. if its sounds good, it is good. Regardless of the complexity of the harmonies, the intricacy of the creative process or how advanced the theory.

For that reason- we find it very difficult to stay within one style, or one framework. Ender and Papillons feature extensive sampling, processing and programming. But something like Ordinary Day is of a very simple acoustic style – almost like a folk song.

We try to draw musical ideas from not only the actual music we listen to, but also films we've watched, places we've been, lovers we've lost, random thoughts at 4am after way too much coffee and cigarettes. In the end music is about story-telling. If you have no story to tell, your music may be pretty or catchy, but it will be also be hollow and empty. We went around telling everyone that we sounded like Radiohead for a while, since they have been such a huge influence on us – but many people found the comparison simplistic. At the end of the day, we enjoy saying people can expect NeoRomantic Indie Rock and letting them (and the music) decide what that means.

We really wanted to develop the sampling side of the record – to make it obvious to people where we pick and place our influences. Over the process of creating the record, we gradually developed a much broader sense of the word ‘sampling’ – one which drifted far from the idea of taking a 4 second Motown funk loop and laying a drum beat and bassline over the top.

For instance on Ender – Shen Qi was invited to improvise on Er-Hu (a two-stringed Chinese ‘violin’, heard at the beginning of the song). We were left with about an hour of material from which we created a 1 minute solo. The solo itself contains over 100 different samples from the original improvisation, edited together to make a fluid musical line. We like to think that this is not sampling in the normal use of the term. From Shen-Qi’s playing, we extracted our own melodies – twisting and turning her music until it became partly our own reinvention.

The more engrossed in the project we became, the more we realized that sampling is more a definition of how we create music in general. We are bombarded by musical sounds on an almost endless basis from the moment we’re born. If you pack all that together and launch it at our senses, you get an incomprehensible mass of unintelligible information. The primary function of the brain is to filter out what is important from what is meaningless: to pay attention to (or sample) a tiny fraction of the message – then rearrange it to form personal, unique ideas.

With that in mind, we see picking or discovering a particular sample as no different from choosing a particular note to play in a scored out melody for a traditional instrument. Our musical sensibilities and preferences are reorganized versions of the masses of information we have grown up absorbing and discarding while discovering patterns within.

Back to Ender - you can hear a young girl accompanying eddy as he sings the first chorus. This sample needed no editing, processing or pitch correction at all, and the moment of clarity when we realized how beautifully her singing lined up with the main vocals was an incredible feeling of connecting to this abstract figure from an old forgotten Chinese film. After the fact – we had a friend translate her lyrics – as it turns our, she is singing about the same thing as Eddy.

Gian: That is awesome. Who do you guys consider to be a primary influence in the sound of your music?

Whiteroom: We were definitely all children of the 90s alternative rock golden age: radiohead, smashing pumkpins, blur, portishead all featured heavily in our crappy $20 tape players. But the more different music we listened to, the more we began to hear our heroes' influences as well. For instance, Radiohead draws a lot of their energy from the Beatles, while a lot of their harmonies go back to the Classical Romantic composers....so we spent a lot of time listening to that stuff. But of course by this time we had started absorbing so many genres: Hip-Hop, Columbian Latin-Jazz, UK break-beats; the beginning of jazz and be-bop in Duke Ellington and Miles Davis (to name just a few).

Influences are a tricky thing to list. On demand, most bands can name the two or three guiding forces in their artistic lives, but we try to draw musical ideas from more than just the actual music we listen to: films we've watched, places we've been, lovers we've lost, random thoughts at 4am after way too much coffee and cigarettes. In the end music is about story-telling. If you have no story to tell, your music may be pretty or catchy, but it will be also be hollow and empty.

Gian: How long did it take you guys to craft this intricate and different sound that you guys have created?

Whiteroom: WhiteRoom itself had a very organic birth – and by that we mean gradual and difficult to actually nail down. Eddy, Alex and Paco have been playing together in one form or another in several different groups since early high school. We drifted from a young alternative rock band through reggae/hip-hop and ended up in an experimental improvisational jazz/electronica ensemble. At this point we were already playing with Matt Wiviott (who plays upright bass on the LP). After this group went its temporarily separate ways, Alex and Eddy gave up natural light and hunkered down in a claustrophobic basement bunker. To call it a studio at the time is delusional, since it was essentially a bare room with a computer running Cubase, a sound card and two pairs of $20 headphones. However – over the years –we very, very gradually added components and upgrades.

In the summer of 2002 – Alex went to Mexico and had his heart split in two by a beautiful French Canadian – upon his return Eddy and Alex cut school for two weeks and recorded ‘Puppeteering’. However, it’s been a slow process afterwards. Recording would come in the form of a couple of weeks of furious, intense activity followed by frustrating unproductive times where we had to worry about everything else in our lives: relationships, school, work, eating and so on.

So our style – and the development of collaboration between the guys in the group has been growing steadily over the last nine years. Since the first concrete song was recorded and etched in digital stone, the album itself took about three years of intense juggling to complete.

Gian: I'm glad it all came together well but with fourteen enthusiastic musicians and two captains at the helm, how did the process of songwriting go as far as conducting, composing, and arranging without overshadowing one another?

Whiteroom: Ah – yes the great collective effort. Music is a lot like traffic – it’s remarkable that so many people can be doing things all at the same time in a coordinated way, and for the most part – it works. That is to say, we definitely had our moments of hating each other and struggling for control over direction. But it’s a learning process, and over time we were able to try and shelve our egos. Lots and lots of parts were simply axed from the record during mixing and post-production because they weren’t really necessary to the song. After spending a week straight of recording a beautiful, difficult guitar line, its hard to listen to reason when your band mates are telling you it doesn’t work and needs to go.

We see music as a very social art. If music was all about one person’s experience and opinion – you might as well be shut off from the rest of the world – playing tunes to yourself. But the whole point is to make music to communicate – to reach out to the audience and speak with them. The same thing is true about the musicians you play and write with – where you’re simultaneously the performer and the audience member.

If things are going well and, everyone is synced and in tune -it’s a pretty moving feeling. And if things aren’t going well, if you’re having an off day or the music just isn’t working – it’s unimaginably frustrating. In those kind of delicate symbiotic situations, we just don’t have the tolerance or patience any more for petty ego stuff – because it kills the whole point of the process in general.

It terms of not overstepping each other – that was also a learning process. We started off by having these late night sessions. Its amazing what sounds great at 2AM for instance after a few glasses of wine, but is just embarrassingly terrible in the raw light of the next morning. You have to understand that this project wasn’t a meeting between musicians who already have established careers, works and reputations to defend or live up to. We’ve grown up together, watched each other develop and mature as musicians – and shared some of our best but also most awkward and embarrassing moments. At this point, we can take criticism pretty well and have developed a symbiotic working relationship that runs pretty smoothly (for the most part).

Gian: What are you guy’s current thoughts on the music scene as a whole?

Whiteroom: Ark! I would just recommend to anyone that they read the Lefsetz Letter. We could talk for hours about the status quo and the horrible state of affairs of the music industry – sinking like the Titanic and swallowing the poor artists as it goes down in frigid waters…buuuuuuut we’ll leave that whole beast alone for the time being, so we can all enjoy a pleasant afternoon without being forced to think too many murderous thoughts.

Gian: What does Whiteroom do to pass the time and unwind?

Whiteroom: To be honest, we relax by actually making music. Yes we know that sounds annoying and pretentious, but there's a lot of stuff surrounding the making of music that can be very stressful: recording, promoting, touring, etc. But to be in the middle of playing a song, in front of an audience on stage: you're so focused on that one moment that you sort of let go of all the other bullshit and complications in your life. It’s a pretty goddamn tranquil experience.

Gian: Good answer! Now let em ask you this...Sex, Drugs or Rock N’ Roll?

Whiteroom: Not as much as we’d like, too much of the cheap legal kinds, and you have to say Indie Rock these days.

Gian: If given the chance to share the stage with a specific artist or band, dead or alive, who would it be?

Whiteroom: Definitely Radiohead. Apart from the fact that they have been hugely influential in our creative process, their live show is also impressive, just in terms of the outstanding musicianship, attention to detail and control over the sound. When you go to see most groups, you have to just take for granted that their live show won’t be as well executed and won’t sound as great. But watching Radiohead makes you feel like they’ve brought their studio material to life.

We could easily learn a lot from them

Alex actually met Thom Yorke when Radiohead played in Montreal last year. They come across as the most amazingly down to Earth and easy going people, which we have a lot of respect for. If you can shelve you ego – you will almost undoubtedly make better music.

Gian: What can we expect from Whiteroom in 2007-2008?

Whiteroom: In this order – Our first music video, which we’re currently working on in League with Montreal Film company Baku studios; N. American tour (working hard to make that happen for September , but it’s a pretty grim process) – hitting the studio in December for the second installation of digital musical treas. Stay tuned.

Gian: Thanks Guys!

Whiteroom's LP is out now! Go pick one or two, up for yourself and experience all that is Whiteroom, you'll thank us later! For more info about Whiteroom, check on Whiteroom's Myspace