Band: Sister Suvi
From: “Montoronto,” Canada
Sound: Plucked, strummed and assaulted strings, Medieval vocal rounds stamped with barbershop harmonies and the sludge of 70s glam howls, all cauterized into beautifully meandering sonic roadmaps.
Similar Artists: Oneida, Deerhoof, Bombadil, Pixies, Can
Listen Now: “Lightning Train”

Suggestion for an interactive exercise: go ahead and google “Montoronto” and tell us what bountiful treasures the search spiders dig up. It’s pretty much Sister Suvi, Sister Suvi, and…Sister Suvi if we’re not mistaken? Look, this isn’t some weirdo Esperanto scavenger hunt we’re sending you on; trust us, it’s all going somewhere. These words mean something. Because in the end, all you really want is music that reassures you. So long as such music exists and keeps getting made, the concept of contemporary music ever running out of ideas thus becomes a comfortable impossibility.

And in the end, that’s all we really want to introduce you to; so say hello to Sister Suvi. Close your eyes and inhabit Montoronto. Sit back and stay awhile, we’ve even got a helpful glossary for the uninitiated with the help of Suvi’s own Patrick Gregoire.

Sister Suvi - A three-piece Montorontian (see following entry for Montoronto details) band, a tribute to a Finnish friend.

Sister Suvi is Patrick Gregoire (vocals, guitar, bass), Merrill Garbus (ukulele, vocals, bass), and Nico Dann (vocals, drums). Gregoire and Garbus met while working at a summer camp in New Jersey and started writing songs together along with their Finnish friend Suvi. They initially called themselves The LMNOP’s (as in consecutive letters of the alphabet).

“We had a song in which the chorus was just listing the vowels,” Gregoire explains. “I guess we had some sort of letter fixation.”

Suvi soon returned to Finland at the end of the summer but Gregoire and Garbus would keep the collaboration going, in time changing their name to Sister Suvi to commemorate the trio’s friendship. Though they lived in separate places – Gregoire in Montreal and Garbus in Massachusetts – the songwriting sessions would continue, and eventually (roughly two years ago) Gregoire enlisted longtime friend and ace drummer Dann into the fold.

Montoronto – A conflation of Montreal and Toronto, a magical place, a state of mind.

Say it out loud and notice how nicely it just rolls off the tongue. Try doing it with Brooklynhattan – or perhaps even more accurately, Philadooklyn – and it doesn’t really work so well. And as we are still inclined to look longingly upon the ever-blossoming arts scene in the Great White North (and of course seek the etymology of “Montoronto”), we asked Gregoire about Montreal and Toronto circa 2008.

Sister Suvi On Montreal….

“It’s a small town, so people know each other. There are only a few haunts so you end up seeing the same faces around at shows and bars which makes for a pretty tight-knit music scene. I think collaboration is a nice offshoot of that; I guess it’s pretty common for people to play in each other’s bands, so a lot of people have their hands in three or four different pies at the same time (editor’s note: to wit, Gregoire also plays guitar and bass clarinet in Islands).”

“I don’t think the scene is so different from what it was a few years back. Maybe it’s settled down a little because we don’t have New York Times reporters snooping around at our shows so much anymore, but this will always be an artsy city. The rent is cheap and the prospects for real careers are slim, so everyone lives in this Neverneverland where they get to work only 20 hours a week at an internet job or relaying calls for deaf people, and then they play in bands and do theatre and art a lot because they have so much free time and no job grinding them down.”

….and Sister Suvi on Toronto

“I think Toronto is freaking awesome. I love that city. I grew up there but have been in Montreal for about six years now. Since I left it has changed so much, and that’s part of why I love it. It’s dynamic and moving and healthy and alive. There are downsides to that; my friend just got evicted from her space to make way for condos. They were the last loft building in the neighborhood of Parkdale. But there’s an upshot to that bustle: people support the local community, they go out, there are great parties and loft shows there, and there is also some really amazing music that’s coming out of there. Bruce Peninsula is great. Nif-D is way ahead. Nico (Suvi’s drummer) lives in Toronto so we do consider that one of our bases, and we’re glad for it.”

Mandela of Power - Sister Suvi’s most recent 5” CD EP (from which you can hear two selections below), DIY love, a schizophrenic warning shot in advance of their debut LP, a taste of the future.

According to Gregoire, Sister Suvi has already produced two to four EP’s (depending on how you look at it). You might suspect the band would have a firmer grasp on the exact specifics of their back catalog, but why sweat the small stuff when blessed with a never-ending stream of song ideas and zero barriers towards releasing them when and however you damn well please?

Such is the benefit of going the DIY route. From conception to dissemination, it’s all about having your own uncompromised stamp all over your art with no specific timetables or rules to play by. “It is a lot of work, but you end up so proud,” Gregoire explains. Of course, there are also the occasional drawbacks to this approach too.

“I read this blog thing reviewing a show we played a couple years back and this girl dissed us, said our merch was ghetto, and I got so offended about it,” Gregoire tells us. “I got so indignant. Really, you’re going to knock the hand-made product coming to you straight from the artist? You’d really rather have a factory-made piece of plastic? I suppose we’ve learned to make nicer stuff since.”

The “nicer stuff” is forthcoming. On the heels of Mandela of Power, the band has already tracked 16-17 songs for their first proper full-length and remains optimistic for a Winter/Spring ’09 release. They sent us three of the unmixed tracks, and like Mandela and The Color EP that preceded it, they represent three vastly different extrapolations of rock music. And also like their predecessors, they’re pretty amazing.

Where Barrington Levy Meets Dinosaur Jr. - Sort of the pH spectrum scale of Sister Suvi’s sound, which would put Gregoire somewhere around 7.0?

When asked if the three unmixed advanced tunes are indicative of the rest of the new album, Gregoire tells us:

“I must confess I’m not entirely sure what it is I’ve sent you so far, but I suspect it does. We straddle this funny line between Nico’s leanings toward Dinosaur Jr. grunge and Merrill’s leanings toward Barrington Levy. I sit on the fence, so depending on what three songs I sent you, it could paint a picture of an entirely different album… or not. I always think that our songs sound so different from each other, but it’s easy to lose sight when you’re in the middle of it all and forget that they’re all still coming out of the same three mouths and brains.”

Hey, as we said before, sometimes when doing the mad scientist DIY approach, things can get a little cloudy. But in listening to these songs (and to Sister Suvi in general), this description seems pretty spot on. They refuse to sit on one genre or mine a single idea for very long; “sonic schizophrenia” could be an apt term to describe the process but it almost seems lazy. Rather, in traipsing from bombastic Led Zeppelin shuffles (the forthcoming “Golden”) to rousing three-part harmonies, vocal rounds, and deceptive rhythms (Mandela’s “The Lot” and “Lightning Train”), Sister Suvi in effect peels back the arbitrary veneer of carving out a single niche or sound. The question becomes: why stick to levity when you can have darkness too? Why limit yourself when you can do it all in a way that somehow just works together?

“Songwriting comes from a mysterious place,” Gregoire says. “Sometimes it’s in our darkest moments that we need a release or a companion and so songs often come out of those spaces. When I’m feeling swell, I don’t sit around brooding on the guitar, I go to the park and drink ice tea with my feet in the wading pool.”

That’s certainly one way to explain it, or yet another way to account for the array of sounds/feelings/artifacts that intuitively sneak their way into Sister Suvi’s sound is that the band is – in a very abstract sense here – an attic or storage shed for all the wonderful clutter they can’t abandon.

“Your songs end up being this repository for all the things that you don’t know where to put, that have no place anywhere else in your life,” he elaborates. “I like hiding things in songs. I like the secret meanings that no one else will ever know. I like that what you are writing about is hidden and all that remains is the resonance of that hidden object in your words and music.”

Listen:
“Lightning Train”
“The Lot”

See Sister Suvi Live:
21-25 Oct – New York, NY @ CMJ

Visit Sister Suvi on MySpace.
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See the list of bands recently featured as EAR FARM’s Band of the Week HERE.