Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Liner Notes: Searching for Celia
Posted By Austen Diamond on February 6, 2013, 9:00 AM
“A lot of our music means different things to different people in the band, and some of it is meaning from imagery it has conjured up after its completion,” continues Jarstad.
Searching for Celia is a six-piece Provo-based instrumental rock band. This is how they describe their music (without sounding like an English major): “Cinematic dynamic rock with violin and cello -- but without vocals. Sometimes it sounds like post rock, sometimes it sounds like alternative rock, sometimes it sounds really French.”
The album was self-produced to conjure up the energy of the live-show experience -- mostly epic. Most of the song names come from inside jokes, which Jarstad shares. The band also shares a bit extra with fans who buy the album, giving bonus content in the physical copies like “sheet music of all the string parts and audio files to remix one of our songs.”
Searching for Celia’s album-release show will be on Saturday, Feb. 9 at Velour (135 N. University Ave., Provo) with support provided by I Hear Sirens and Paul Muusse of Grey Fiction. The album will be available in fairly limited quantities. Keep tabs on the band on Facebook, here.
Searching for Celia is:
Sebastien Gallego- guitar, melodica
Robby Jarstad - bass, samples
Al Deans - guitar, keys, glockenspiel
Dallin Davis - drums, SPDS
Mindy Burton - cello, keys
Denise Holbrook - violin, glockenspiel
Jarstad talks about two songs off of the forthcoming debut:
“White Flag”
“This song started as a deliberate idea for an intro and this is probably why we tend to play it first at shows. The writing process was interesting and fun. Diana, our violinist at the time of writing the song, came up with the main violin line, after she bought a Line 6 DL-4 with a looping function, when we were just jamming one day. She ended up looping that part and layering a bunch of cool stuff on top. The first cello arpeggio came from something Steve played to start a full-band jam one day. Robby wrote a couple of string parts in the middle on a computer and played around with arrangements. Getting the whole band together, we all collaborated on ideas for the progression of the strings and drums, and over the course of a couple of practices the song sort of came together. The name comes from Sebastien joking that he wanted to wave a huge white flag while playing the keyboard part.”
“Sfantul Andrei”
“This one stemmed from someone joking that Sebastien couldn't write a happy song. I think he came back, and we had this spontaneous jam on the riff that you hear at the beginning. We used to call the song “Scouts,” because when we finished jamming the first time, we looked up and saw a room full of Boy Scouts who the guy who owned the place we practice brought in as part of a tour of the building. The name Sfantul Andrei (s-fun-tool on-dray) means Saint Andrew in Romanian, and it is the name of an orphanage for children with special needs in Iasi, Romania, that I worked at. The song always reminded me of the whimsical struggles and triumphs of children playing, so that's where that came from.”
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