This interview was conducted by Philip A. Wickstrand with drummer Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy, guitarists Arran McInnis and Daniel La Rochelle, and bassist/vocalist Dorando Hodous at Plan B in Portland, OR on May 7, 2011.

The Pacific Northwest is full of unique and talented bands. Some are very well known, such as AGALLOCH and NEVERMORE, while others are not much known outside of the local area. One of those bands is LESBIAN and hopefully that will change soon. With a name that one will not soon forget, their sonic wall leaves an impression on anyone who hears it and with the right amount of publicity, they will garner greater renown and bring forth their psychedoomic sound to greater numbers of music fans.

Phil: First of all, tell us a bit about your newest album, Stratospheria Cubensis.

Arran: It's basically a reference on a strain of mushroom, Stropharia cubensis, and it's basically all about taking mushrooms and tripping out. When you listen to it if you're in a heightened state of awareness, you'll hear some things that you never heard when you're sober, so that's kind of the intention there - space, mushrooms.

Dorando: Time travel. Teleportation. All that stuff.

Phil: What was it like putting together the songs for the album?

Dorando: Our writing process is fairly guided by this thing we like… we have our own personal kind of deity, kind of space warrior. We write riffs ourselves but she kind of like, once we have the riffs the songs are constructed unbeknownst to us; we don't know how it really happens, it just kind of… I think she has a hand in shaping them.

Ben: It's very calculated but not necessarily something we ourselves put a lot of thought into how it's going to turn out.

Phil: What was the time in the studio like for this particular album?

Dorando: It was fun. We recorded with Randall Dunn, who's a producer we like to work with and we always have a good time with Randall. He has this thing called TFA, stands for Total Fucking Ambience, and it's a special tool that only he knows about and only he can use and it sounds great; makes our music sound awesome.

Phil: So tonight's performance is going to be with members of THE PORTLAND CELLO PROJECT - tell us about how you set that up.

Dorando: We played with them in Seattle about a month ago, something like that, less than three weeks ago? It was in a fancy hotel, the Sorrento Hotel and they felt bad that we had to have our amps on one because they were playing acoustic or whatever, so it was like microphonic distortion for us. But we said "Yeah, it would be fun to do it loud sometime" and then we said "Hey, we're coming down to Portland in a few weeks" and their main guy, Doug, said "Okay, maybe I'll see if I can get some people with electric cellos to come down and plug in and play with you guys."

Ben: He scored it; they're going to be using sheet music and it's actually really cool to see our music written out in music notation. So that was really cool that he did that 'cause it's really impressive looking.

Dorando: Yeah, we didn't know we had so many time signatures. We just… there were weird times, I think it was like six to eight or something like that?

Ben: Yeah. A lot of crazy stuff.

Phil: What's the breadth of touring you're planning on doing in the next few months?

Dorando: This is it.

Ben: Yeah. We're headed into the studio in June, so we're really focused on making our third album right now, so this'll be it for shows for most of the summer.

Dorando: Our new album's called Forestelevision and it's going to be one song and hopefully the vinyl version should be around forty minutes 'cause that's all you can fit on a vinyl. But the CD version should end up closer to fifty with an extended intro and outro and all that. So it's kind of like one mammoth LESBIAN song.

Phil: Is it going to be along the same musical lines as what you've been doing prior or just more expansive?

Arran: It's like everything we've and some new directions all mixed together in a crazy weaving journey.

Dorando: I think it's a step up for us, for sure. We're always trying to push the boundaries of what we're capable of and prior to that our longest song was twenty-five minutes, so it's a physical challenge as well as a mental challenge to get through that much song, but it's a big journey. And it's also about psychedelic drugs and cosmic expansion of your own mind and awareness of your surroundings - all that stuff.

Phil: Is this something that you're going to be playing often live in entirety or just bits and pieces of?

Ben: We only play it in its entirety. We played it, actually, last night in Seattle and the night before in Bellingham.

Dorando: We just started playing it live.

Ben: Last night was technically our third public presentation of the piece but I don't think we'll be splitting it up ever live - we'll just be doing it that way.

Dorando: We wanted to make one record that's like… part of the mission of doing long songs is to make people sit down and listen to music, you know? For us personally, we don't think that we can go anywhere in a five minute song. We like to transport ourselves to other dimensions and sort of lose ourselves in music and make people sit down and really listen to a full album. There are no songs, it's not going to be chopped up - if you want to listen to us, you gotta take all of us.

Ben: We're trying to combat the death of the album. The album is kind of dead because you can put it in your computer and you don't have to listen to the album, but our record, even if you put it in your iTunes, you gotta listen to the whole record. So it's a way of sort of forcing people to get back to when you used to put on a record and strap in.

Phil: Yeah; even with multiple songs, the band put those songs in a certain order for a reason.

Ben: Right. So we're not going to let the listeners cut 'em up anymore on this one.

Phil: Tell our listeners about how LESBIAN tries to stand out in the crowded field of Doom Metal.

Arran: I just think our unique perspective on… I think our musical upbringings and all of our eclectic tastes just come through and it's not traditional at all. And it's not trying to be. So we're just trying to push the envelope as to what is acceptable in Metal music in general. I have a lot of influences from various things, not just Metal, from walking down the street and seeing a beautiful girl in the sunshine, you know? Something like that or watching a killer fuckin' movie, so it's hard to pinpoint what the fuck we sound like because of that. A lot of people have hang-ups with that, which is fine.

Daniel: I don't know why we get lumped in the Doom category.

Arran: It's the slow riffs, that's why.

Ben: People constantly want to pigeonhole a band 'cause it's easier to make sense of it, but we try to make that as hard as possible to categorize us. Not necessarily to be a dick…

Dorando: It's not intentional, it's just how it happens. We all love different kinds of music, like who's to say we like slow music, we like Black Metal music, we like Jazz, you know. We like all kinds of shit. '70s Psych Rock. It's just like, put it all in there, put it all on the table.

Arran: When we drive down here in the van, it's not like we're like "Let's listen to all Black Metal CD's over and over again or all Doom CD's," It's totally like "Let's listen to some Jazz, let's listen to some Psych, let's listen to fuckin' Chamber Music" or whatever, you know. That's kind of how our music ends up coming across 'cause that's how we like to listen to music.

Dorando: There are endless possibilities to music. There are twelve notes in a Western scale but the possibilities are endless and why would you limit yourself to Blues riff?

Ben: Lots of bands shoot for a specific sound and they set restrictions… well, I guess by our standards set restrictions for themselves by staying to a particular realm and as Arran said, we allow all of our influences to come in and also to come back out in the writing process.

Phil: Tell us a bit about some of your more amusing incidences with people getting hung up on your name. [laughter]

Dorando: We just delete so much spam from our Facebook every day, it's pretty amusing.

Phil: I've seen it. It's pretty ridiculous.

Ben: That in and of itself is pretty amusing. We go in there every day and try to delete what we can but people send us porn and there's a lot of broken English, "Lick my pussy" and stuff and the that stuff's totally fun to dig through.

Arran: It's not like people being like, giving us shit really for being called that, especially from the gay community.

Daniel: Yeah, the gay community's fairly supportive.

Arran: We've had a couple instances with straight people, like "Oh, I'm not going to book you guys because of your name and you guys don't have a Metal sounding name, so you're not going to be playing."

Daniel: Yeah, they don't want the word LESBIAN to appear on a flyer with a bunch of other Metal bands; it's like this offensive thing. It's like this travesty to the Metal community or something. We lost our Metal points years ago by having the name we have. [laughter]

Arran: We stuck to our guns and we're not going to change our name ever. We're stuck with it.

Ben: It kind of helps to see who has an open mind and who's not willing to think outside the box 'cause someone who won't even give us a chance 'cause of our name probably isn't going to like all the crazy directions that we go with our music.

Dorando: And it works that way.

Ben: Yeah.

Phil: Recommend a book for our readers and then explain why you recommend that particular work.

Dorando: I was going to say Cosmic Serpent. This guy, Jeremy Narby… it's kind of about… he was an anthropologist and he went into South American jungles and did ayahuasca with these people and had cosmic revelations. He really ties in the origins of human knowledge and this psychedelic drug that only specific tribes really know how to access because you have to combine different plants and their knowledge of plants in the forest is immense, how they know what plants are safe and what aren't and what ones to combine to create this revelatory sort of experience that connects them to the Earth. And he started out as an anthropologist and he sees big pharmacies, this is something they want to tap into and stuff like that, but it's more about the cosmic journey of it all. I highly recommend it.

Daniel: I don't remember the author's name, but the book is called This is Your Brain on Music. The guy who wrote it, he started out as a studio musician in the '70s, like a total ripper, like a steady musician. And then well into his career as a studio musician he decided he wanted to become a neuroscientist, so he went to school and got his PhD. You know the movie Awakenings with Robin Williams? He's this psychologist who works with incredibly troubled individuals… he studied under the guy that that movie is based on, so basically this book is about combining his experience in music and also his scientific knowledge. He sort of drew some conclusions about how profound just sound in general is and, you know, a more scientific way like the way wave forms actually hit your ear drum and the way they're processed inside your brain and the either exciting or calming effects that they can have on you. Fascinating book.

Dorando: I like the part in that book where he talks about how loud actually releases pleasure endorphins and opens up your pleasure receptors in your brain, so to actually make yourself go deaf, so to speak. And for me, that's happening. Like what we do is loud tube amplifiers and you get lost in this vortex of sound when we're in our practice space or any time and it really is… it's a good feeling, it's a totally different vibe. Like, we smoke a lot of weed before we play, but music itself is a natural drug and I think that's kind of what this guy… part of what that guy was getting at. Just how your brain works and how music involves more faculties than anything else you could possibly do with any activity.

Arran: Just real quick, the Miles Davis autobiography by Miles Davis because A, it's Miles Davis and B, he was a pimp and he was fucked up on drugs and he changed the face of music completely with everything he did. And he was really racist. [laughter] But it's a good book, a good read.

Lesbian

Interviewer: Philip A. Wickstrand

June 12, 2011

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TO THE TOP

(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

Formed: 2004
    Seattle, Washington  USA
Label: Holy Mountain Records
Genre:  Prog. Doom/Stoner Metal

CURRENT LINE-UP:

Dorando Hodous:  Bass & Vocals
Arran McInnis:  Lead Guitars
Daniel La Rochelle:  Rhythm Guitars
Benjamin Thomas-Kennedy:  Drums
                                          & Percussion

DISCOGRAPHY:

Power Hor (2007)
Tour '07 EP (2007)
Stratospheria Cubensis (2010)

PHOTOS BY PHIL A. WICKSTRAND

(Click on Photos to Enlarge)

Lesbian with
The Portland Cello Project