AUSTRA with TRUST, ARMY GIRLS and DJ LE FREEK C’EST KEEK at Lee’s Palace (529 Bloor), tonight (Thursday, May 19), 9 pm. $10.50. RT, SS, TW. See listing.
Katie Stelmanis has a spine-tingling voice, a musical tendency toward moody melancholia, an abrasive theatrical flair and early training in opera.
You read that right – opera training. Doesn’t sound much like the frontwoman for one of the biggest buzz bands to come out of Toronto this year.
But the talented and intense performer, who came of age in T.O.’s punk rock and alternative queer scenes, leads Austra, the wildly hyped industrial dance-pop group signed to prestigious international indie Domino Records.
Their debut album, Feel It Break (Paperbag), laden with gliding pop melodies and deep, dark dance beats, is out this week. A tour is booked until November, including opening dates with of-the-moment synth-pop band Cold Cave, and the band recently received a gushingly poetic fan letter from heavy metal group Slipknot.
Weirdly, given that she was once an awkward, esoteric indie artist, the sometimes stridently idealistic Stelmanis always thought she’d find fame.
“I remember releasing my first music ever as a solo artist and just expecting to be famous,” she says, sipping a glass of red wine at the Crooked Star on Ossington. “I was like, ‘I’m just, like, so good! I’m going to be famous instantly!’
“It didn’t happen. All I had to do was go on one tour and play to nobody in all these different cities and be like, ‘Ohhhh! It’s a lot harder than you think.'”
Nowadays she’s more pragmatic. Dressed in a blue poncho and purple lipstick after a daylong band photo shoot, she says being open to refocusing the sound she developed as a solo artist and deeply trusting Austra drummer Maya Postepski and bassist Dorian Wolf were key to her transition from indie curiosity to leader of a band on the brink of stardom.
Last summer, she and Postepski scrapped live band recordings of songs she’d written as a solo artist and rearranged them for the dance floor with electronic instrumentation and samples. They christened the band Austra (after her middle name) to reflect Postepski and Wolf’s important roles in the new sound.
Stelmanis and Postepski are the true core, and they connect in interesting ways. They both have a classical background: Stelmanis studied opera and sang in the Canadian Opera Company’s children’s choir Postepski went to the University of Toronto for classical percussion. They share an all-or-nothing attitude, too.
But what keeps them together and sometimes drives them apart – they’ve had ups and downs and at least one major blowout – is a profound sense of sadness.
“Katie and I are both melancholic people,” says Postepski. “We were born under that star. We revel in sadness. I feel good when I get my heart broken and I write good songs.
“It’s fucked up, maybe?” she adds, grinning. “It’s not so healthy, but it’s the truth.”
Stelmanis wrote many of the songs on Feel It Break three years ago, so the band’s primary challenge was giving the album continuity. Older songs like The Villain and Lose It became weightier as Stelmanis and Postepski (who is also one-half of synth-pop duo Trust) programmed darker-sounding drums and synth lines to match newer material like demented disco number Spellwork and the visceral, throbbing lead single, Beat And The Pulse.
“We write music now with the intention of playing it live,” says Stelmanis. “In the past, I didn’t really think about that at all. It felt like the music I was writing was very cerebral, the kind of thing you’d just want to listen to in your headphones. Now I have much more focus on drum and bass and things you can feel physically.”
Once the songs were rearranged, the next challenge was finding someone in Canada who understood how to mix electronic music. Though Toronto’s electronic scene has grown in recent years thanks to artists like Egyptrixx and Crystal Castles, engineers with expertise in bizarre, throbbing noises are hard to come by.
Fortunately for Austra, Canadian-born studio engineer Damian Taylor, who spent a decade in London working with Björk, UNKLE and the Prodigy, returned to Canada last year and set up a studio in Montreal (see sidebar).
Taylor first heard Stelmanis’s music when his friend Morgan Lebus, the Domino A&R rep who signed Austra, played it for him a year ago. He thought it had potential but was missing something.
But when he heard the rearranged versions months later, he became obsessed. Austra now had that ineffable “x factor,” which he suggests might have to do with Stelmanis maturing as a musician and as a woman. “It felt like the material had more drive and urgency,” he says. “It felt like something was at stake.”
Taylor was not only an invaluable resource, but also the first mixer to encourage the trio to be as opinionated as possible. After working in London for a decade, he was more attuned to caustic British studio banter than to Canadian politeness.
“I’d be mixing away and I’d turn around to Katie and go, ‘Is that okay? Is that working for you? Do you like it?’ And she’d be like, ‘Oh yeah. Yeah. Umm hmm. That sounds nice.’
“I literally wound up yelling at her. I was going like, ‘Katie, for fuck sake. I don’t want ‘It sounds nice.’ I want ‘I fucking love it!’ Or, ‘No, I hate it! You’re fucking ruining my career!'”
Austra’s origins – and a key moment in Stelmanis’s career – can be traced back to a Second Cup in North York. In 2004, she and Emma McKenna were looking for a female drummer for a riot grrrl punk band and rang up a then-17-year-old Postepski after hearing about her from a mutual friend.
When Postepski showed up at the coffee shop for their first meeting, she seemed like a huge nerd. At the time, she shopped at Club Monaco and mainly listened to classical music and Tiesto. The girls waiting for her had bleached-blond hair, dressed in tattered jean skirts and black tank tops and name-checked Sleater Kinney.
“I was very intimidated by them and thought they were kind of rude, actually. But then I got to know them,” Postepski remembers. “If you’d told me seven years ago that Katie and I would still be in a band, I would have laughed.”
They formed the punk group Galaxy, but after two years, the stress of DIY touring wore on the trio and they split. Stelmanis wanted to pursue a solo career, released her debut, Join Us, on Blocks Recording Club in 2008 and recruited Postepski to drum.
When the third member of Austra’s studio band, ex-Spiral Beach bassist Dorian Wolf, joined in December 2009, he grounded Stelmanis’s lofty vocals and icy synths with a thumping, vintage bass sound.
Postepski and Stelmanis say Wolf’s cheerful demeanour nicely balances their intense female energy, but he considers himself the “left-field” member on account of his rock ‘n’ roll background. He writes his own bass parts and is teaching himself the software program Logic to experiment with weird sounds.
“Talking and emailing with [Katie], you get the impression that she’s such a businesswoman,” he says. “She’s very clear, very concise and direct. I think that’s why she’s really taken to writing pop music so well.”
Taylor agrees that Stelmanis’s business smarts are an essential element of Autra’s success.
“Katie works incredibly hard on every aspect of the band, not just the music,” he says. “She’s always on the hustle, figuring out what the band’s next step is.”
Austra will spend the rest of 2011 on tour with keyboardist Ryan Wonsiak and twin sister backup singers Sari and Romy Lightman, who bring a party vibe to the stage with their high-energy dance moves.
The idea is to make Austra tighter, poppier and even more exciting to watch live.
But the darkness will remain, and not because Stelmanis is perpetually bummed.
“I’m a pretty easygoing person,” she insists, “but everyone has a darkness. I never listen to sad music and intense music to get sad or to get to a place like that. It actually makes me happy. It makes me feel good. It’s like a warm blanket. It’s more positive or optimistic than anything else.”
See an interview with Austra’s and Björk’s go-to tech wizard, here.
music@nowtoronto.com
