INTERVIEW: Austra

Opera is a fairly underrated genre as Katie Stelmanis, lead singer of electronic group AUSTRA, proves. Her voice is radiant as it echoes out from each track, each note hit perfectly with those trained vocal chords.

AUSTRA are about to release their second album 'Olympia' in June, and if you haven't already heard their first single taken from the album 'Home', please listen and if you're wondering why, hopefully Katie will persuade you as we talk about her influences, and working collaboratively with her bandmates.

Listening to the new album I heard how wonderful your voice is, the choral training really shines through and it’s lovely, has that background played a big part in your musical direction?

I think it’s just kind of engraved in my brain, I grew up basically on choral music it was kind of how I was introduced to music in general, through choral music and opera and piano, so I guess it plays a huge role in how I write music. 

I read that your first brush with pop was listening to Radiohead, is Thom Yorke someone who inspires you?

Yeah he was, Radiohead was basically the only good band I was exposed to in high school at all, I don’t know exactly why that was but all of my peers were listening to music that I wasn’t really interested in and I was just pretty much into classical music but Radiohead was really the band that kind of made this bridge. They were mainstream enough that I knew about them and I thought that they were awesome. And I guess I’ve always loved Thom Yorke, he’s an ex-choir boy as well so we’ve got that choir background happening.

Was there anything in particular about Radiohead’s music that drew you to them?

They are just such a huge part of my teenage years basically, I listened to them all the time in high school and I just thought it was beautiful. I remember recording Ok Computer off the radio and that one song ‘Paranoid Android’ I just thought that whole choir bit at the end was so beautiful, and I just though that whole album was just great I was in love with it.

And then eventually with the following records like Amnesiac and Kid A that were more kind of electronic and exploration, I love those ones too. I remember it was all the nerdy music kids in my high school that were into those records and we would totally bond and talk about how much we love all those Radiohead albums [laughs]. It was cool.

Nine Inch Nails and Bjork are both from different sides of the musical spectrum, what is it that you like about these artists?

Different things I guess, I kind of got into them both later, Radiohead was the only band I actually listened to in high school and then when I left high school and moved out of my parents house I lived with a friend of mine who was really into rock and roll music and industrial and alternative, grunge and everything from the eighties and nineties, and she loved Nine Inch Nails.

She was trying to get me to listen to Nine Inch Nails for months and months and months, she would play it and say “oh you’re gonna love this, you’re gonna love this, he totally plays piano you’ll love this,” and for the longest time when I listened to it it was just like noise to me, and then one day for some reason I was listening to it and something just clicked., I just suddenly understood it and I was like “ god this is the best music I’ve ever heard in my life,” and I became obsessed with them and industrial music, like the volume and intensity behind it, and then when I started making electronic music all the middy sounds would trigger, I would yack up the distortion on them because I wanted everything to sound like Nine Inch Nails [laughs].

This being your most collaborative effort, were you worried about how the overall sound would be, like perhaps Austra going in a totally different direction 

No I collaborated mostly with Maya and Dorian and we’re just totally on the same page so the collaboration was just really natural, especially with Maya and I because we’ve been playing together for years and years and years, we have a relatively similar aesthetic I think, and we play off each other really well.

I found collaborating actually the most artistically liberating thing because I would start a song and think it was crap and I would give it to Maya and she would add all these parts and make it something totally different and I would go somewhere I would never imagined it could go, and just the idea of working off each other and bouncing ideas off each other ended up yielding I think some of the best stuff I’ve ever made.

So that was really the basis for Olympia, just bouncing around ideas to see if they could improve?

Yeah and then we also just wanted to make a studio record, I didn’t want to make a bedroom project and so we were able to spend a month in a studio in the middle of nowhere in Michigan, and it was a studio we were actually able to live at because there was lodging there. So we would wake up and we would be in the studio and we were able to experiment.

Any idea we had we could lay it down, just try lots and lots of tings that didn’t work, kind of jam out parts [laughs] in like an old school way, which you would think that’s how most people make a record, but my normal studio experience is like “okay I have two days to record fifteen songs!” and its really a stressful experience, but this time I think being in the studio, being able to jam and experiment really shapes this record.

I read that you worked with That Go on your music video for your new single ‘Home’, how did you decide on the video’s overall concept?

Basically my idea for the whole video was that I wanted it to be a really simple but powerful concept, and that’s all I told them [laughs] I wanted the intensity, sadness and anger in the song to come through in a very real and direct way.

It was actually influenced by Marina Abromavic at the time, I watched a Marina Abromavic documentary where she had a project called ‘The Artist Is Present’, where she would just sit in a chair for like, three months and people would sit across from her in a chair for fifteen minutes and she would just stare at them, and it was just the most intense experience, people would cry, people would freak out and it was this massive thing and all she was doing was sitting in a chair staring at people, and I was influenced by that concept and just wanted to create a video with that same intensity. And That Go created the concept and treatment and it just fit together perfectly. 

And I have to ask, how did everyone feel about putting on all the make-up, I saw one of the boys do it and was wondering if that was intentional..

Well we wanted to create an authentic backstage experience for our band so we did it by doing things that kind of represent our personalities. Ryan always likes to put on make-up before our shows, Maya likes to drink whiskey so she takes a bottle of whiskey, Dorian is kind of the nerd who stares at his computer so he sits on a computer in the video, we just wanted to keep it as true to ourselves as possible.

So it’s like introducing the band to the new listeners..

Yeah exactly! 

So once Olympia is released in June, what will be next on your agenda?

Just touring pretty much, our touring schedule is pretty much all booked up until 2014 so we’re practicing and rehearsing all the new song so it feels very busy and very stressful right now, but I know that once we start touring then everything is set in place and we just move, we just go and I’m just excited to do it all again, to just travel to the same places again.

Words by Lauren Payne

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