I’m going to make you a bet. Ask any indie musician from the West Coast of Canada who their biggest influence is, and 90 per cent will tell you the same person: Dan Boeckner. The island man with the midas touch.
All journalistic cliches aside, there is valid reason for this proclamation. Since the late ‘90s, Boeckner has been partly responsible for some of North America’s most important bands: Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits (with Spoon’s Britt Daniel) and now Operators, his most recent project that will be descending upon Vancouver this weekend at the Fox Cabaret.
The story of Operators begins after the demise of Handsome Furs in 2012, when Boeckner split with his former bandmate and now ex-wife Alexei Perry. I reached Dan on the phone somewhere in the Silicon Valley, his current home, while he is packing for tour and sounding deeply relaxed.
“I had a lot of stuff I had been writing for the prospective [Handsome Furs album]. And I shit-canned all of it. I deleted it,” he says.
“I felt like those songs were written specifically for that band. Our relationship disintegrated, the band disintegrated and I just felt like they didn’t belong anywhere else.”
And so the songs were consigned to the trash bin of history.
With Operators, Boeckner says the idea was to create an expanded version of what the Furs were doing.
“I took that platform and some of the equipment that I was gonna use and it really evolved into its own thing,” he explains. “I brought [Macedonian electronic artist] Devojka and [Divine Fits drummer Sam Brown] in to work on it, and as soon as we had our first rehearsal, it was good. Immediately. The first rehearsals were fucking great.”
With a clean slate and a fresh band, Boeckner began recording with his new bandmates as well as an arsenal of analogue synthesizers. EP1, Operators’ debut, dances between electronica, disco and house, united by a frantic, unsettling energy and tenebrous lyricism that can be attributed to Boecker’s Pacific Northwest roots. Growing up in the “oppressive, cloudy nature” of Lake Cowichan, there is a shadowy undercurrent in his songwriting. I ask him about this Pacific mysticism in his music.
“There’s a real Twin Peaks undercurrent of darkness in those areas. There’s this cosmic horror that humanity is small and insignificant and at the mercy of forces they can’t possibly understand – that are not evil, but completely indifferent to them. Which is even more terrifying.
“This is a very depressing teenage way to look at a beautiful part of the world,” he laughs. “But I don’t think it’s inaccurate. That really informed my songwriting, I think.”
Anyone can write about teen angst, but to channel it into intelligent, escapist dance music is what Operators do best. Guided by Brown’s rhythmic backbone and electronic sorceress Devojka on a “frankenstein table of sequencers and synthesizers”, to see Operators live is a sight to be hold. A holy union of art, intellect and divine channeling, something one cannot fake, only inherit. Perhaps that is why Boeckner’s influence is so great. It is part of an ancient channel of worlds colliding in crusty dive bars scattered along the coast.
“I was inspired by people in Victoria and Vancouver, like Steve McBean for instance in Jerk With A Bomb,” says Boeckner. “When I was in high school, I’d go see Gus play, and those were lightbulb moments for me too. It was like, ‘Oh this is it, I need to do this.’”
And so he has. Immediately after wrapping up their headlining shows in Vancouver, Operators will embark on a fresh tour with New Pornographers, ending in the studio where they will finish another EP and a full length, both due out this year. From guitar-band genius to electronic wizard, the midas touch prevails.
“The more instruments I have, the more writing tools I have at my disposal…the more I can hone those techniques, the better I can make my music.”
• Operators play at Fox Cabaret Jan. 30 (with Gang Signs and Black Magique) and Jan. 31 (with Sur Un Plage and Moths & Locusts). Doors at 9pm. Tickets $15 in advance.
