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High atop the mountains of Pennsylvania, Lewis & Clarke ' Lou Rogai and collaborators ' have been planning their new live set for May 1's show with Bat for Lashes (First Unitarian) and producing the follow-up to their epic mess Blasts of Holy Birth. While he's recording that, though, they dropped the lite bite that is the Light Time 12' EP with a special pressing of 500 on colored vinyl. The La Soci't' Exp'ditionnaire label entity doesn't just have three noir naturalistic Rogai-penned tracks to worship and adore ' he and his crew cover the Leonard Cohen masterpiece 'Chelsea Hotel # 2.' After I got the record (with an old Polaroid of a grandfather fishing in a lake) we spoke while he was on route from Toronto.
City Paper: I don't think for one minute that you stuffed my record alone with a picture of an old man. What's up with that?
Lou Rogai: Okay, the photos? We put one in every package we send out from the label. Orders, promos, everything. It's sort of an ongoing Accidental Documentary project. The photos are from a collection of found photographs from an estate clean-out job I did. The family took any 'valuables' and left boxes of amazing photos, which I procured. The main subject of the photographs is a woman, her travels, and her family. She can be seen on skis in the swiss alps, and in a bikini on a tropical beach. They seem to span a 40 year period, and we've been able to identify some children in early photos and pinpoint them as adults in others. The band ' Okay Paddy' used one for an album cover, and people constantly write us asking who and what they are. Some people have gone so far as to scan and post images, and add their own captions. Soon, we'll print stickers and apply them to the photos which explain this, and have a URL to upload photos and captions... in essence, it's an interesting way to send this woman out into the world again, to travel once again, and who knows, it may connect some dots along the way.
CP: You told me in an email that 'Petrified Forest' and 'Light Time' are reminders of what Blasts of Holy Birth still means to you, during a period of upheaval. What's the story there?
LR: Take it as a metaphor, the industrial and emotional decay, abandonment, neglect, fear....and then hope sprouts up like weeds through the rubble and grows in to a garden. Blasts is now a rebirth, the energy of the light provides clarity, growth. The heart-muscle is torn and rebuilds itself, and increased its strength and mass. I don't intend any of this to be too heavy, or obtuse, this music is all just my thoughts and experiences, the people I play with are all part of this. It's our world, and if people relate, that's wonderful. 'Light Time' refers to not only speed of light, but weight, and illumination. And the Unbearable nature of it's Lightness or heaviness.
CP: Of all the Leonard Cohen songs you could've embraced, why this one?
LR: 'Chelsea Hotel #2' hit home this year as a recollection of Cohen's romance with a prominent female singer, who rose to fame ' pun intended ' and left our earth too early, some say. He apologized later for naming names, so out of respect for the both of them, I won't either. The paradoxical reason I felt most compelled to cover this tune for the Light Time EP is contained between these quotation marks: 'I need you, I don't need you.'
Lewis & Clarke play the Church tonight with Bat For Lashes.
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