I Heart the Music: Your Online Source for Live Music Reviews and Interviews in Toronto!

Bell Orchestre’s six members came together through various musical backgrounds – including via Arcade Fire, The Luyas and Snailhouse (to name a few) – but first and foremost through their love of music. Roughly translated to “beautiful orchestra,” Bell Orchestre are an instrumental band hailing from Montreal who are creating beautiful music. They’re known to retreat to the woods to make and write music together and to take their influences from not only different musical genres but everyday sights and sounds; these elements culminated in March with the proud release of their sophomore album, As Seen Through Windows. Their live show is both soothing and inspirational, allowing the music to speak for itself. iheartthemusic sat down and spoke with Sarah Neufeld (violin) and Mike Feuerstack (lap steel guitar) as they explained their origins, musical influences and how they are making a name for themselves without any words.

iheartthemusic: You’ve all come from such different backgrounds musically, how did this unit get together?

Sarah: It sort of slowly but surely all came together. It started off a little bit smaller with Richie [bass/keyboard/percussion], Stef [drums/percussion] and I doing some stuff for dance. 

Mike: Very gradually.

Sarah: Very gradually! It was just kind of object-based at first and then about five years ago we started playing shows and having a record as a band. That’s also when Mike got on board, who is a friend of Richie’s.

iheartthemusic: How do you approach composing music with six members?

Sarah: It is really collaborative.

Mike: It truly is. It’s hard for a lot of people to understand that.

Sarah: It’s very natural to us.

Mike: It’s very long though, but very natural. The biggest hurdle for us with writing is making time when we can all come together and work on stuff.

Sarah: It comes out of this organic process of living together and seeing what works and then crafting it from there.

iheartthemusic: Well you all must really get along then!

Mike: We do! We also know how to fight too. We are good that way.

iheartthemusic: I read in a previous interview that you are really inspired by your surroundings.

Sarah: Because we don’t write lyrics, the music tends to observe a little bit more from the physical space. However, it’s not like this song is really inspired by mountains so we think about mountains, it’s more like happenstance. We are drawn to writing in natural settings. Like Kav’s [trumpet/medodica] family has this beautiful place in Vermont and we spent a lot of the first album there and then we wrote a bit of this second record there as well. Friends of the family of Richie’s have this incredible house in the country as well, so we’ve spent a lot of time in the country doing “record retreats” and it’s also an effective way of getting manageable hours.

Mike: We can get together without distractions for days in a row and it’s really productive.

Sarah: And then it ends up evoking the surroundings, but maybe you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t there.

Mike: One of the fun things about it is watching the music respond differently when you listen to it in different surroundings. Even though our environment may have inspired us when we wrote the music, I think we would all hope that the environment of listening to the music would inspire the listener as well.

Sarah: Basically it is a sponge.

iheartthemusic: I love that!  You guys recently released an album. Prior to that one it had been a couple of years since you released anything, do you notice any difference in sound or mood from the last album to this one?

Sarah: The sound and the mood. [laughs] We recorded it mostly in one location in this studio in Chicago with John McEntire. His stuff has a trademark sound and that kind of combined with our aesthetic and also helped us push it further as well.

Mike: The combination of us doing what we wanted to do along with his common technique is what makes it fun for us. He does really clean stuff, but also really dry, precise detailed stuff.

Sarah: He just makes things sound really artful and he really did that for us. We wanted to experiment with a lot of percussion and he made all that come alive.

Mike: There is a lot of ambience in the recording, which again is not something that he usually works with.

iheartthemusic: You guys probably fed of each other.

Mike: That’s what was neat about the combination.

Sarah: We had this one time where Richie and I recorded in the hallway, not in the studio, with mics and were listening to all the traffic going by. We were able to work differently within that space.

Mike: That is a literal example of the environment affecting the music!

Sarah: Exactly.

iheartthemusic: Being an instrumental band, what is the crowd like at your shows?

Sarah: It really depends on the situation. When we are playing at a more artsy centre then it’s more of a classical crowd, but a lot of the times it is a combination of indie rock kids that have really open ears.

Mike: One of the exciting things about it is that it totally appeals to lots of different people. A wide variety of different musical backgrounds are attracted to it. Same with other languages, we can travel to other places and our lyrics aren’t an impediment because we don’t have any.

iheartthemusic: Yeah, I was watching your video blogs from your trip to the Baltics. It looked incredible!

Sarah: The response we got over there was amazing. People were really appreciative and really wanting to discuss a lot after; people really wanted to share what they had just experienced and tell their stories as well.

iheartthemusic: How did you end up there?

Sarah: This journalist, who actually does more political stuff, invited us there. She found us on the Internet through Arcade Fire. So she actually came to us for Arcade Fire and then spoke to Richie about Bell Orchestre and made some jab about us never coming to the Baltics and he was like, “well invite us, we’ll come”. She did and she made the whole thing happen on her own.

Mike: She isn’t even a promoter or booking agent.

Sarah: She works in radio so she knows a lot of people and the whole tour was set up more DIY then you can imagine. People just taking a week off work to make it happen. It was really beautiful.

iheartthemusic: From a performance perspective, what do you hope that people take away from your shows?

Mike: A CD! [laughs]

Sarah: I would say getting fueled by a show. Coming away feeling energized and just inspired. I think any artist hopes for that.

Mike: Some affect beyond just aesthetically pleasing; something deeper and harder to describe.

Sarah: A lot of people don’t know what to expect when they come to our shows, so if they are new listeners, a lot of the times if they like it, they come away feeling really surprised and then inspired. They think this is not what you hear everyday and then there is a door that opens for them.

Mike: If we can open that door and they walk away and we can leave the door open for a little while, then we’ve done our job!

iheartthemusic: I have yet to see you guys play live, but am anxious to be able to see how it all comes together without vocals. Has it been tough to market yourself due to the fact that you are strictly instrumental?

Mike: We don’t really market it. You use the same tools, but it’s an art project and we are fond of it. If it finds an audience then we will be really happy. We use the tools that pop acts do, but we are also exploring the tools that the jazz and classical world implement. All styles of music have their avenues and we have some sort of legitimacy on all of them. So what we lack in one area we can make up for in another.

iheartthemusic: Was it a conscious choice to not have a vocalist?

Sarah: Yeah, I mean it just kind of organically came together that way. We got together and started to play music for theatre and dance and when we came together to chat about what kind of music we wanted to make, we spoke about how we were inspired by classical music, as much as electronic music. It definitely wasn’t supposed to be a rock band with a singer and it still isn’t!

photography provided by Kristin M.