by Daniel Colussi | From their humble beginnings as a certifiable garage band from the deepest corner of Port Moody to their current status as one of the city’s most dynamic live bands, Student Teacher strike the perfect balance between melody and anarchy. It’s in the primordial zone where Bo Diddley’s shuffling blues-mantras and Lamonte Young’s fierce minimalist repetitions intersect that they call home. Recent sets at the Electric Owl, The Biltmore and the sadly now defunct Kaleidoscope saw the band’s swirling sound take over the room and induce a kind of hazy panacea over all those in attendance. Throughout this interview you’ll notice that the lads and lady prove themselves to be true to their chosen name; they are well versed students of rock ‘n roll heritage just as much as they are teachers of rock ‘n roll’s transportive potential. I give you Student Teacher…

Tell me about writing music. Rock ‘n roll is about 60 odd years old now; is it possible for a band to make “new” music, or is everything necessarily some sort of re-hash of what came before? Does being in a band amount to some sort of curatorial practice of picking a set of influences and combining them into a vaguely new combination?

Culture has always recycled itself. Using rock ‘n roll conventions doesn’t mean the product isn’t original – think of the variety of interesting expression that has come from nothing but canvas, pigment and a brush, or an orchestra, or any set of tools. Rock ‘n roll is another standard – another set of tools – but within that there’s an almost infinite potential for creativity. We’re all prisoners of our cultural context and our own subjectivity so the potential for innovation is always limited. I think the conventions of rock ‘n roll are pretty diverse so there’s a lot you can do within those boundaries. The ideology or attitude behind the genre is probably becoming more significant as the actual aesthetic that it’s attached to becomes more diluted and mixes with other musical tropes and new technologies but this can lend itself to a kind of cynical method of music making which is more about collecting different influences or cultural references for their perceived “cool” value. That’s a little bit too calculated for us and kind of antithetical to the whole idea of rock and roll as we understand it but, realistically, we practice a similar method of musical synthesis, only with less conscious thought and self-awareness going into it.

Has your tape come out on Geographing yet? What else is in the works for Student Teacher, release-wise or show-wise?

The tape is out, we just keep forgetting to advertise it at shows so that people will buy it. We’ve gotten much better at playing music since it was recorded so we kind of see it as the “humble beginnings” of Student Teacher, not really an accurate representation of our current sound. We’re trying to record a few more songs before Daniel leaves for Montreal for the rest of the summer but we don’t have any other shows planned right now. We’ve gotten pretty lucky recently, opening for Crystal Stilts and Lumerians, both of whom were really great live and nice people as well.

How important are guitar pedals to Student Teacher? What are your favourite guitar pedals to use? What pedal could you not do without?

Actually, pedals aren’t particularly important to our sound. We have a pretty minimal setup, like 3 pedals or less per guitarist. Liam’s new bass fuzz just broke after less than a month of use. We started off essentially as a garage band without much money for extra equipment so we would usually just plug in and play without worrying too much about the sound. As we started moving more towards a shoegaze/heavy psych kind of vibe we ended up investing in some cheap reverb and delay units. I guess we view them more as a sonic luxury and not something that should be that integral to our music or used to cover up or make a banal sounding song more interesting. That said, we’ve become pretty attached to our delay and distortion pedals and we probably wouldn’t want to play a show without them at this point. We like all kinds of high-tech and highly effected music, electronic or otherwise, but our approach is pretty basic.

How important is the music of Spacemen 3 to Student Teacher?

The simplicity and hypnotic nature of their songs has definitely been a big influence on our music; in our eyes, they are the purveyors of perfect rock and roll mantras. We all love the records and appreciate their uncompromising outlook but a lot of the similarities come from just having a lot of the same influences. Most of us grew up listening to that kind of ’60s psych, kraut and blues stuff that they took their basic aesthetic from. Spacemen 3 are definitely a great example of a band that used pre-existing musical blueprints and modified them to create something that sounded fairly unique to them at that time.

How are Student Teacher songs composed? Is it a collaborative practice or are songs brought into the band mostly fully formed? What is a typical Student Teacher jam sesh like?

Every time we get together we have a discursive, anarchic jam with no cohesion or structure whatsoever. This leads to us being, like, ‘fuck that was cool’ and hanging onto it, giving it some loose structure and trying to elaborate on the original idea. Other songs stem from a bass riff or chord progression introduced by one of us, then we build off it. Recently we’ve started to introduce more fully formed songs written by individual members, but the vast majority of our stuff is based in some improvisation that we had one day. On our myspace page when we first started, our genre was listed as “jam band” and that’s still pretty much accurate.

Tell me about your epic 10 minute space-blues track Left For Dead. Was that a pre-formulated performance or a happy accident that happened to be caught on tape? It’s a killer track.

Thanks for the compliment. That recording was one of those jams we just referred to. We just happened to have a tape recorder that time. We’d never played the song before, just recorded a jam and took the most solid 10 minutes out and that’s the recording.

Where do you most like to play in Vancouver? What makes a good venue? What makes a good show for Student Teacher?

More informal, low pressure scenarios at DIY venues or house parties are preferable to the bread-and-butter shows at bars, mainly because of the less restrictive atmosphere and the fact that much of the crowd is usually on drugs. Places like the zoo shop, goody (R.I.P), the alf house (R.I.P.), the enchanted forest (R.I.P.) and Kaleidoscope (again, R.I.P.) have treated us well and we usually play a lot better in those kind of situations because the expectations are a bit lower. Also, anywhere with good sound and free beer that will have us is good, like the Biltmore.

Has Student Teacher toured outside of Vancouver at all? Any interesting tour stories/nightmares?

We once played in Daniel’s parents garage in Port Moody but that was way before Student Teacher existed, as such. I think we were calling ourselves “Pools of Vomit” on that occasion.

Tell me about discovering a particular album that’s had a heavy influence on your life?

We all have had different musical experiences that have influenced us but, collectively, records like BJM’s Methodrone, Spacemen 3’s Perfect Prescription, Sonic Youth’s self titled 1st LP, Strange Boys and Girls Club, Psychocandy – all of which were on heavy rotation at Bryan’s house/our old jamspace – have influenced our music simply because that was generally what we would be listening to in between practicing when we started playing together a couple years ago.

What albums have been getting play recently on your stereo? What records have you been psyched about lately?

We’ve all been listening to Les Razilles Denude “Heavier Than a Death in the Family”, Sun Araw “Heavy Deeds”, Moon Duo “Mazes” The forever TRINITY of Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus & Mary Chain. Both Women records are great, as are the works of Swell Maps and Josef K. More recent favourites would include most woodsist/captured tracks/notnotfun records as well as some new slumberland stuff. Daniel’s been listening to a lot of Felt recently and a lot of C86/Creation/Sarah records shit for his twee as fuck DJ night at the Waldorf.

What’s your favourite double album?

Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation is not only one of our favorites but also the record that introduced us to our drummer, Bryan. We were all at a party once and we hijacked the party tunes by putting ‘Teenage Riot” on. Nobody dug it all that much except for Bryan, who came up to us with a grin on his face saying “You guys like Sonic Youth?! I don’t know anyone who likes Sonic Youth!”(Bryan had recently moved to Vancouver from the Okanagan then…not really known for being a hotbed of noise rock enthusiasts).

Listen to Student Teacher here.

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Zulu Records veteran and tunage aficionado Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine.