"It just came to me as I was falling asleep one night," said Colin Pate of the name of his Philadelphia-based band, Remote Islands. It's this abstract sense of fate that brands the music of Remote Islands--a hazy puzzle of interconnected tones and rhythms that just seem to fall into place. Colin Pate, the founder and only permanent member of the band, took some time from the East coast tour to talk to the News-Letter.
"At first it was just me making recordings. But then when this guy told me he wanted to put them out on an album I found some guys in town to play the songs live."
Although their MySpace page lists Dan Olson, Matt Santillo and Michael Bernardo, Remote Islands is, in essence, a one-man show. Pate arranges all the music, writes all the lyrics, plays many of the instruments himself, including the synthesizers, and then finds friends to play the rest.
Critics argue that perhaps Remote Islands' first album, Smother Party which came out in 2005, would have benefited from having a few more band members playing live on the album. Pate, however, defends his decisions.
"Maybe that's true but there's no way to know. Though I should say that a good 75 percent of the instruments are played by human hands. 'Luxury Liner,' 'Constantly Changing' and 'Me and My Knife' are completely real instruments." Needless to say, these tracks are some of the best on the album, perhaps due to the intstrumentation or the simplicity (relatively speaking) of the pieces.
For Pate, it seems that the instrumental loneliness plays thematically into the rest of the album, which reflects a feeling of isolation that Pate felt as a southern boy living up north.This feeling of being overwhelmed can perhaps account for the "busyness" of Remote Islands' many layered songs. Smother Party has the air of a studied, personal endeavor. At first listen, the album is fuzzy, intricate and difficult to navigate. Certain songs require numerous hits of the repeat button in order to fully comprehend their meanings.
"I'm still surprised that people think it is that busy ... With Smother Party I was really trying to give people a new surprise at every turn while still having an album of definite songs. I think the melodic approach followed the standard sort of thing, but it was combining standards. Oftentimes when I try to record something based on an idea or quality or emotion I'm trying to get across I'm not really able to do it completely."
Unfortuantely, sometimes Pate's intentions get lost in the songs. However, the dream-like quality of Remote Islands' pieces and their seemingly well-thought arrangements keep the listener interested. But Pate insists that although the basics are planned ahead of time, most of the finishing touches are really just trial and error.
"Whatever I think that song needs it gets ... But luckily I have very little [resources] at my disposal most of the time so my choices are limited. I have no idea how someone with a battalion of instruments, recording people, money and musical knowledge knows when to say when."
But it looks like Pate might be having that difficulty in the near future. The band received quite a bit of press over their cover of Neil Young's "Philadelphia," a song that became popular as the Oscar-nominated, tear-jerking soundtrack to Jonathan Demme's 1993 film of the same name. Pate's decision to cover the song mostly had a lot to do with his connection to the city and not a desire to follow in Young's footsteps.
"Living in Philadelphia certainly had something to do with it. I love the song but hate the schmaltzy early-'90s production. It sounds like R. Kelly produced it. That's not a knock to R. Kelly or anything, but don't think that cavernous grand piano, drum machine and canned strings played to the best interest of that song. I thought it would've been perfect with just Neil and his pump organ so that's what I tried to go for. But I guess a version like that wouldn't have gotten an Oscar nod." Bitter much?
But regardless of how Pate feels about the music business, and he certainly has strong opinions, Remote Islands are planning to come out with a second album that is expected sometime in the next few months. Pate admits that the Smother Party was an amateur endeavor.
"Maybe I was a little na've when I was making the first album. There are a lot of songs that I recorded that didn't make it. Like a whole other album's worth. At the time I wanted to have a large pool of songs to pick from because I wasn't confident in working with just 12 to 14 songs. Smother Party could've been called Contingency. About 25 songs were mixed, and it was a very long, insane process. I should've just decided which were the 12 to 14 best songs and went with it. That's what I'm doing this time. We only finished what could possibly fit in a 40-minute album."
Baltimore, however, will get the chance to be the beneficiaries of Remote Islands' excess songs this Friday night at the Lo-Fi Social Club. Live, Pate describes their sound as an "intertwining, fingerpicking thing," something quite different from their recorded music, but this seems characteristic of Pate's sound. Even Smother Party doesn't seem to have a unifying factor, which in some ways, makes Remote Islands so different and fascinating to listen to. So what exactly defines the music of Remote Islands?
"When you're younger it's exciting to define yourself through what you like ... [but] I don't want people to have too many opinions about the music I make before they even hear it."
But Pate reveals that simpler things have influenced his music, such as, "growing up in a medium-sized southern city, Philadelphia and American history, my neuroses. My musical limitations both technical and financial are pretty influential."
While the influences might be simple, Remote Islands' intelligent sound is not.
Remote Islands will perform with A Sunny Day in Glasgow, Avec and Karmella's Game on Friday, Feb. 1 at the Lo-Fi Social Club at 8:45 p.m.
