The Indie sat down with the three members of Montreal’s Afternoon Bike Ride – Lia Kurihara, Éloi Le Blanc-Ringuette and David Tanton – before their set at the Montreal Jazz Fest in July. The band’s latest album, “Running With Scissors,” showcases the folk and pop elements of their eclectic sound.
Afternoon Bike Ride concludes its current tour with a show at The Lilypad on Saturday. Kafari, of Portland, Maine, opens a conversation that has been edited for publication.
So you’re not all born and raised in Montreal, but you all find yourself here living these days. Did you guys just roll out of bed and you come from like the next neighborhood over? Where are you coming from?
Kurihara I’m from Washington, D.C., originally.
Very cool, so you found your way to Montreal.
Kurihara Yeah, through McGill University.
Tanton Very long story that ended with me at the University of Toronto about like seven, eight years ago. And then I decided to move to Montreal – almost specifically for the music scene.
Le Blanc-Ringuette I was just born here, so …
Born and raised.
Le Blanc-Ringuette Excited to stay!
Quick shout out, what’s the best neighborhood in Montreal if you’re going to come and hang out?
Kurihara La Petite-Patrie!
Le Blanc-Ringuette Plateau’s pretty good.
Tanton I like the Plateau.
Kurihara La Petite-Patrie has my heart.
Le Blanc-Ringuette Verdun is really cool as well.
Tanton Verdun’s really nice.
Within the folk and pop and approach of Afternoon Bike Ride, you’re weaving in ambient sounds and field recordings. I was thinking about one example, “Interconnected,” from the “Stepping Stones” EP . It used to be, “Oh, field recording, that’s difficult.” Now it’s getting pulled more into pop music more. What do you make of that trend? And what do you think it says about listening habits?
Le Blanc-Ringuette I’ve seen the AI slop, like Spotify, promoting on their own playlists a bunch of fake artists that do that kind of music, like the easy listening version. And I’ve seen the lo-fi labels start to get into it because they think there’s money there. But there’s so much good ambient. You just have to dig a bit deeper now because it’s more prevalent.
Tanton There’s this big thing with artists like Phineas and Billie Eilish sampling things to put in their record as much as they have. They’ve done like the sounds of crosswalks and all that kind of jazz and that’s been super pop. As well as the fact that Aphex Twin has been beating Ariana Grande for like three years in a row on YouTube Music. Aphex Twin is very ambient-sound recording-y and it’s just crushing one of the arguably biggest pop stars in the world.
It’s just the way that people want to listen in some ways, not necessarily in a passive way all the time, but it is really cool to see all sorts of ways of making music be accepted by such a wide audience.
Kurihara I also wonder if there’s an element of technology just having higher-fidelity listening abilities – on the go, even. Consider the old iPhone headphones versus AirPods with sound isolation. Now you can hear all those details. If someone’s adding in like a grasshopper in a field with wind blowing, like you’re gonna catch that.
Tanton It feels like you’re there. You don’t have to be in a really nice studio to hear that as a casual listener.
Le Blanc-Ringuette You’re stressed, you just want to put something on that’s like a sound bath. Some of the older stuff we liked – Aphex Twin, Alessandro Cortini, so many artists where it’s so emotional depending on how the ambient track builds. Or Bibio. Incredible ambient albums.
You’ve cultivated an eclectic sound throughout your body of work. Is there a new direction, or an existing direction you dig in deeper on, that you were really excited to develop on “Running With Scissors”?
Tanton The way you put it was actually really good: Folk pop, specifically. We are very folky; we are now quite poppy in how we produce a lot of our songs and the structure of our songs. I feel like we are always just pushing for whatever catches our ear. We have a lot of really interesting electronic elements, a lot of interesting live instrumentation.
We really wanted every song to be loved by all three of us. So we wrote a lot for this record and ended up scrapping a lot of it.
Yeah, so there were songs that, two out of three of you were like, “Yes!” and the third was like, “No.”
Le Blanc-Ringuette A lot of them. Because we’re all from different backgrounds, so we’re all pulling from different directions. But we also have a lot of taste in common. We love working together, but sometimes we’ll have an idea that’s so … we need to compromise and figure out what we all can get behind.
What happens to the songs that get scrapped?
Tanton They live on Dropbox, or sometimes they get a second life.
Le Blanc-Ringuette We’re working on some right now that we’re trying to revitalize.
Tanton Less so in this way, but the demo for “Otherworld,” I think, was written before “Glossover” came out. We had that beginning. We didn’t actually make it into something that all three of us loved for a long time.
You’re touring a lot throughout the Midwest, but ending up at Lilypad. Do you have any connection to the area, or is the tour just ending in Cambridge by chance?
Kurihara Originally just by chance, but now my cousin and her husband and their baby just moved there. So we’ll get to hang out with them. It’s still going to be lovely. I’ve never been. I’m excited to go.
You get huge bonus points by announcing yourself as “in Cambridge” versus Boston. Bands always say they’re coming to or from Boston when they’re really playing in Cambridge or Somerville.
Le Blanc-Ringuette That’s amazing. We’re taking notes.
Afternoon Bike Ride, The Lilypad, 1353 Cambridge St., Inman Square, Cambridge.
