Oregon Music News

Thee Silver Mt. Zion Bundle up for winter

Thee Silver Mt. Zion is the natural offshoot of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Efrim Menuck is one of the masterminds of both groups, whose post-rock, indie-rock, punk-driven style baffles fans and critics alike. The band is headlining at Mississippi Studios on Saturday night (sold out, and no door tickets available). OMN was able to speak with him on Friday, January 13, a very lucky day for us.

Thank you for bringing Silver Mt. Zion back to Portland in the next few weeks. What’s the current state of the group?

It’s not that different than the last state of the group. There are still just five of us. We just did a bunch of recording on our own, and recorded three new tunes, and we’ll have a double seven-inch on tour with us. So we’ve been busy.

Tell me about the new pieces. What are they like as compared to the last record, Kollaps Tradixionales?

Of course I am going to say this – I think they are better. It’s the first set of tunes we have written together as a band since JR (David Payant), our new drummer, joined. So they sound more like us, I think.

How do you go about preparing mentally to go on the road with the group?

Oh, that’s a good question. I don’t know. Rehearse a lot, I guess. Jessica Moss, the violin player in the band, and I have a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, so we tour with our son. A lot of the mental preparation is just trying to wrap our heads around that reality. But other than that, it’s just a lot of rehearsing.

Are you going into the studio after this tour to record the new pieces?

No. We already recorded the new pieces, and we’ll probably record some more new stuff in a couple months or something.

And that will be part of a new potential release later on this year?

Yeah. Right now, we are liking the idea of putting out seven-inchers for a while, without having the pressure of putting a full-length together. The fact is that people don’t buy records anymore. So we might as well just focus on recording seven-inchers for now. We’re taking it day by day.

Is your approach to writing new pieces organic, or do you have basic ideas that you take to the band to flesh out?

It’s a little bit of both. It’s hard to centralize, but it’s a little bit of both.

I’ve read some interviews stating that the group is very political, and other comments from you saying that it’s not so political. The group identity appears to be shifting.

I guess it’s normal in any group. It’s hard, because this band came out of the shadow of the bigger band, the Godspeed band. So right out of the gate, we were carrying the Godspeed baggage for years. And whatever people’s assumptions were about what Godspeed’s politics were, or Godspeed’s stance in the world in general, got applied to this other band. I feel like through the whole history of the band, it’s been a process of trying to demystify what we do, because part of the weight that Godspeed carried and continues to carry… Godspeed doesn’t really do interviews. There are no vocals. There is no stage banter.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor, live in 2010:

Last year I tried to track you down to see if I could speak with you, but we were unable to connect.

We don’t do press with that band, so there is a vacuum there that gets filled with people’s preconceptions and misconceptions. And in the Mt. Zion band, I feel it’s a healthy exercise, humanizing the whole thing a little bit. At the end of the day, our politics aren’t that different from most other people in the world. We all know that things are wrong in this world. We all feel the lash of that whip to different degrees, to different points in our life. But we all know that stuff is wrong. It’s been an interesting process, you know?

Are you happy how Kollaps Tradixionales turned out? It’s been a couple of years since that came out, and you did a brief tour, but here on the West Coast, we didn’t see the band. What feelings do you have about the last album now that it’s been sitting a while? Can you reflect on the process and the result?

I still I think it’s a solid record and we still play those tunes live. I think it’s a good record.

Where do you think the band gets its raw live power on stage? How difficult is it to harness?

It can be hard on certain evenings to push it as hard as it needs to go. I mean, a lot of what we do is built around the idea of playing things that are just a little out of our reach, and singing in vocal registers that are a little bit out of our reach. Since that’s such a big part of the songs we write, there aren’t too many tunes on which we can just lay back. It’s like wrestling a mule every night. I think most nights it floats, some nights it sinks. Hopefully it won’t sink when we come to your town.

How important is it for you to express your spirituality in the context of the band, and also with your solo record? Your solo record actually is a very strong personal statement.

The word “spirituality” makes me a bit uncomfortable. But definitely, with getting older and having a kid, you start thinking about bigger things. When I made the solo record, there was this backlog of stuff I just wanted to try to think about. It’s kind of as boring as that. It’s hard to talk about. I think, like anyone else who is ambivalent about the idea of God, it’s a little challenging living in the world without any faith, you know? We have to make our own stubborn faith somehow. I think that’s the important thing, you know.

Vic Chestnut made a big impression on you, and the rest of the band. Sadly, he’s been deceased for some time now. Do you have any comments that you would like to make on your work with him on his solo records, as well as the influence he has had?

The biggest influence he had on us was the nature of the tunes he was bringing to the table. We all loved music like that, but I don’t think any of us had any idea that we could pull it off. He widened our palette, I guess. We were limiting ourselves to a certain approach prior to that. For example, any time anything started to feel like an old country tune, we’d sort of back away a little. You know what I mean? Like wow, we can’t touch that – that’s out of our skill set. But now we’re more comfortable with those sounds.

Tell me about the recording of your solo album, and what you wanted to say with it as opposed to the band’s records.

It wasn’t really a matter of wanting something to say. There was a heavy year and a half there – more like two years – leading up to the birth of my son and Vic dying. And the Godspeed ship was starting to sail again, and I felt like I needed to sort of carve out some time in the middle of all that and just sort of work some shit out, which is not an approach that I feel so comfortable with. I feel like I’ve never really had the luxury in my life to do that before, so I was sort of trying to exert that luxury, even though it was a super-busy time. Both the bands I am in were in full-time rehearsal mode, so it’s like the record was recorded between midnight and 8am in fits and starts. I had a rough idea that I was trying to wrap my head around, like, losing friends, and also having my son born, which is a super-heavy thing, especially when you don’t feel so great about the world we live in. I knew it was going to be roughly about that, and the rest of it I tried to put together one brick at a time.

It’s a great record, very atmospheric.

It’s because there were no bed tracks that went down with the band in the room. At a certain point, when I finally admitted to myself that I was making a solo record, I sat down and listened to all of these little pieces, and the tools I had at my disposal to flesh out the arrangements were more atmospheric than the Mt. Zion stuff or the Godspeed stuff.

Are you planning to do any solo gigs, just to air it out on the live stage?

Yeah. I would like to. It’s hard to find the time, you know. It seems like whenever it seems like it can happen, something else fills that month up. I think I would like to do more recording by myself to see how that goes, and then try to figure out a way to bring it on the road.

Are you guys planning to do any video releases?

On this tour, we are traveling with a Canadian documentary film crew that approached us. They are more interested in the reality of the band being on tour with a kid, and sort of bigger stuff than that. So they are going to be filming a couple of live shows but the focus is… To be honest, I don’t know what the focus is. They’re just really nice people. Other than that, I don’t know. There are definitely live concert movies that I love, but I can’t think of one that has come out since 1979 or so.

So much of the Mt. Zion band is about being in a hot little room, pressed up against everybody. But I think it would be a little hard translating that into a DVD.

Thee Silver Mt. Zion, live in 2006:

Transcription and editorial assistance from Scott Steele.