LUCIDMEDIA

NXNE Interview: Apostle of Hustle eats the darkness and goes extreme

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Monday, 15 June 2009 09:43

Andrew Whiteman is taking his inspiration from Easy-E these days.

The Apostle of Hustle frontman calls the deceased N.W.A. rapper “a symbol of not turning the other cheek. Sometimes it’s necessary to stand up for yourself. On a personal level, I was thinking that’s one extreme. And sometimes we need those extremes.”

“Extreme” is a word that might get used to the band’s latest album, Eats Darkness (Arts and Crafts), released this past May. Formed in 2001 and made up of Whiteman on guitar and vocals, Dean Stone on drums and Julian Brown on bass, the group has never shied away from experimental territory.

Their previous work, 2004’s Folkloric Feel and 2006’s National Anthem of Nowhere were influenced by Whiteman’s time spent in Cuba as well as by his songwriting and guitar-playing duties with Broken Social Scene. But unlike the rambling, collective nature of BSS, Apostle of Hustle has remained a trio, fierce in their unique sound and eclectic influences. They are masters of creating unique sonic landscapes that, while not melodically catchy upon first listen, have a creeping urgency to them that demands repeat listening and careful attention.

With Eats Darkness, Whiteman blows apart any sonic expectations fans of Broken Social Scene may bring to his work, and defies any simple categorization. The concept album explores ideas around transformation and alienation leading to connection, all whilst skipping between the sounds of ska, pop, electronica, and alt-rock. The title, in itself, is unusual, functioning as a kind of symbol of what the band’s job is.

“(Eats Darkness) was hanging around for a long time,” Whiteman explains from his Montreal base, “but we wanted to call it something else, actually.”

Whiteman explains how the band had wanted to reference the work of author Carlos Casteneda and his writings of Don Juan, not as “the super-lover, the Casanova… [but] an old Mexican-Indian magician who tells Casteneda the world is filled, not happy-go-lucky people, but with shape-shifters, witches, enemies… people who might have it out for you … like I said, it didn’t work out, but we turned it into the idea of transformation and alchemy.”

The pieces themselves conjure a kind of sonic alchemy, from the poppy “Eazy Speaks” in which Whiteman references the rapper, to the quietly disturbing, electronic minimalism of “Perfect Mind” and the breezy-meets-raucous melodic riffs of “Soul Unwind.”

The album makes a perfect whole, however, not despite, but perhaps because of its wide-ranging sounds and poetic, stream-of-consciousness style lyrics. As a whole, they bring to mind the shape-shifting figure of Castaneda’s medicine man, who enters into altered states through the embrace of evils the rest of the tribe would prefer to avoid. Whiteman says this is precisely the theme he was hoping to convey.

“Somehow, when the songs were beginning to come together, it appeared as a concept album, but it didn’t start that way,” says Whiteman about the album’s inception. “It was both personal, and looking out into the world. I’d like to think the songs are like Ezra Pound’s quote, that ‘poetry is news that stays news.’” In other words, the themes explored via poetry, and by extension, all good art, are things Whiteman feels “remain in the news.”

As if to drive home the theme of transformation and alchemy, the cover of Eats Darkness features an inky loon swimming along a thickly blue, crayon-like stream, with menacing blocks of black and sticky-looking greys in the background. At the loon’s beak is blackness and stark imagery of a man tied to a rock, at its tail, bright, vivid, rainbow streaks of light. Whiteman says the choice of loon was conscious and can represent many things, particularly within the context of the music. Mark Goldstein, a friend of the band’s and former drummer with By Divine Right, is the artist behind the work.

“He’s a poet and book designer, just a old friend of mine. We had a rough idea what we wanted, and he put it together,” Whiteman explains. “The loon is meant to be a piece of Canadiana –but also, when we think of the loon, one of our images is the loon in an oil slick. There’s a sinister, Exxon Valdez-like connection –that’s the flip side of the pristine loon.”
Suggestion of opposites revealing a divine order is something that is thoroughly explored on Eats Darkness. The album’s thirteen tracks are partly comprised of short, sonic collages with a variety of mixed sounds, portions of which indeed bearing resemblance to six o’clock news reports. Gunshots, screams, philosophizing teens, and discordant drones are mixed in with various musical effects, setting definite moods (dread, curiosity, lightness) and laying the groundwork for the full song that follows. Whiteman says the idea for doing the collages actually came from hip-hop culture, where having themed albums and short, sonically-evocative introductions to songs is the norm.

“I wanted to do a kind of homage to hip-hop and little tiny things with gunshots and sirens and stuff,” he says. “So I sat down and started doing them, adding sound effects and a lot of poetry I listen to. I would plot out what I wanted to go in front of what song. (The sound collages) are little clues before the song. It was fun!”

The band’s spirit of experimentation embraces a broad spectrum of cultural influences, and poets Kenneth Patchen, Diane Di Prima, and author William Burroughs are credited on the album’s liner notes; all can be heard reading work on various sound collages peppering Eats Darkness.

“With those names specifically,” he says, “that was conscious –I listen to (their work) on my I-pod all the time, and I am a champion for poetry –especially that type of poetry. It was absolutely conscious to include them.”

As well as touring the album, Whiteman and his band are hoping to do more artistic collaborations in other mediums, including theatre. Apostle of Hustle were one of the features bands at last year’s inaugural Canwest Cabaret Festival at Toronto’s Young Centre for the Performing Arts, where they participated in a Leonard Cohen tribute and also held their own cabaret night.

“That was a fantastic experience,” Whiteman recalls, “because I definitely need to go a little further into that realm. I got a chance to try out a bunch of stuff –it was really messy, but I figured out, ‘I need this.’ Doing that will be much better prep for the next theatre thing I come up with.”

Whiteman hopes to continue bridging his various creative endeavors this summer; he just bought a video camera, and he’s excited to start using it. He says he has ideas on how he wants to cut and combined footage for a possible future DVD, and he wants to start attending more theatre and dance work too. He recently saw the singer Lhasa perform as part of a dance work in Montreal, and “it was amazing –mind-blowing, actually. It took my breath away, hearing her sing like that, with this amazing band. It totally reignited me, and I thought, ‘Yes, this is what I want to do.’”

Apostle of Hustle
The Courthouse
Wednesday June 17th at midnight