MY PEOPLE SLEEPING
In my people sleeping we're all old, old friends or lovers. We have all loved and hated each other like siblings.
In the winter of 2007 we recorded our first EP. During that time we fell into that way of mythologizing everything—we were heavy on symbols. Things like blue dust, time machines, seahorses, and this yellow lamp that we carried around took on more meaning than usual. We'd sing facing each other, trying to match the other exactly. It took restraint, and ritual.
To release the EP we needed a name. The idea that our people were hard to reach—not present, not dead, but sleeping seemed to work for us. The name reinforced what we were doing. It slowed us down and spaced us out.
By the time it came around time to making our first full length album two years later the collaboration had all but broken down. Being down in the Pines with David Bryant (recording studio…recording engineer), in the crumbling neighbourhood of Griffintown, in winter again, recording to very expensive, very beautiful tape, in emotional confusion, we made feye, an album that sounds like a true document of all those things. It's most eerie element may actually be it's optimism.
The word feye means several things, but the meanings we like are "destined to die" and "possessing elfin like power". We like that idea—that there was something supernatural going on, but that it can't be the same anymore. And it's not. In a lot of ways the band that made it broke up. Now with it done and about to be released, we're reinventing ourselves again.
We wrote feye in our moldy basement apartment, in our comfort zone, where we had our fights, and our meetings and our practices, and froze all winter. We love our neighbours here and our cave-like rooms, and our courtyard that smells like sausage.
We want to trance out when we play. We're usually filtering something big and messy through a minimal, repetitious music. Our songs are about the sea and guilt, explorers and shame, having children, going back—all things we can space out to.
