On “We Don’t Belong,” a barely minute-long track on Siskiyou’s self-titled debut album, Colin Huebert sings “We don’t go outside anymore”—but that’s not entirely true. He delivers the line over a hushed piano and the sound of the ocean, which he recorded on a beach in British Columbia; the band, a collaboration between Huebert and Erik Arensen, is named after the Northern California mountain range, and their album—recorded on rooftops, beaches and in stairwells—perfectly captures the lush, often-chilly landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Huebuert used to drum for Great Lake Swimmers (and now works on an organic farm) and Arnesen still plays with the band, but they found time to make the album (perfect for folk fans who think The Shins are just a little too wild) without any label support or studio time; after sitting unreleased for quite some time, the LP will finally be released by Constellation Records on Sept. 7. Earlier this year, Huebert talked with Paste about the upcoming release (and Siskiyou’s in-the-works second album), ending his run with Great Lake Swimmers and the benefits of growing his own cilantro.
Paste: How’s it going today??
Colin Huebert: Good. I’m in Grinrod, outside of British Columbia. It’s a little town.
Paste: How little are we talking??
Huebert: I would say the town is just a post office and a bar. A couple hundred people. It’s a good bar, though. Used to be a rock ‘em, sock ‘em place, but that burnt down. I’ve only been here for about a year. Before that I was in Vancouver for a time, for about 5 years. And I was born and raised in Ontario, so the significant start of my life was there.
Paste: What made you want to move to someplace so much more remote??
Huebert: My girlfriend wanted to try her hand at farming, and I came along. I’m from a small town but have been living in large cities for most of my life. I wanted to try that experiment—try living in a rural setting as an adult, without my family nearby. A lot of people don’t try that once they’re adults.
Paste: How does it compare with childhood memories??
Huebert: It’s quite different, being an adult in a small town. When I first moved here it seemed a lot like my childhood—biking around town. But as an adult, adult things creep in. It wasn’t as if I was trying to recapture my childhood, but more of an experiment in living. Ultimately my conclusions are that the human being is an incredibly adaptable creature. If you give them six months in any location, it’ll become normal and that will become home.
Paste: Do you feel like Grinrod is home now?
Huebert: Yeah, I do. We won’t stay forever. The job was a job, and it’s coming to an end in the next three or four months. I’m recording another record with Erik, my partner and whatnot, in a community hall in a neighboring town. I just rented a bunch of recording equipment form Vancouver, and I’m going to get started as soon as we’re done [talking]. But we’re not sure which way to go after this, West or East. I’ve a lot more musical and family connections in the East, in Ontario, but I’m still drawn to the landscape of the West. So when the time comes to play this music live, I’ll need to think about that.
Paste: The landscape probably can’t help you play shows.
Huebert: No, I don’t think I can enlist the trees to play the drums.
Paste: What have you learned or gained from farming this year??
Huebert: In terms of food production, I find that my diet is very different. We were growing about 60 different kinds of vegetables and herbs. My diet is much more locally-based. Before the winter—there’s about a foot of snow on the ground here—I could just go grab some cilantro if I wanted cilantro. We’ve been working on someone’s farm simply to learn the craft and the trade. It’s an organic farm.
Paste: You write that the album was recorded stairwells, bathrooms, hotel rooms, and on beaches and rooftops. The album does have a really organic feel to it. How important was it to you to avoid any sense of studio overproduction on the record?
Huebert: Very important. Making this record was a reaction to a more traditional approach to recording, where you go in the studio with set parameters of time and budget. Then whatever you come out with, that’s what you’ve got. Avoiding that mode of recording was important to me, and it was actually quite freeing. You could take your time and experiment more.
Paste: How did you pick which areas to record in??
Huebert: It was just experience—I’d walk through a stairwell that I knew I’d have access to and realize it had an interesting acoustic quality. Like, if it was dead silent. Most industrial spaces have some amount of noise, something that would limit you from recording. But the one we found was dead silent—we’d go into the stairwell at night and prop a sign against the door that said “Acoustics Testing in Progress.” And it worked—if anyone walked in, they were so shocked that at four in the morning there were two guys sitting in a stairwell surrounded by electronic equipment that they’d immediately leave. It went off without a hitch.
Paste: At what point did you record on a beach??
Huebert: The beach, to be honest, we just recorded the sound of the water. We were on the beach with recording equipment, but it was field recordings. We didn’t go down there with our instruments and do a little jam-along around the fire. It was a little more calculated.
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