Arcade Fire reflects on Reflektor

CBC News Posted: Oct 26, 2013 11:49 AM ET Last Updated: Oct 26, 2013 10:13 PM ET

Arcade Fire's fourth studio album, Reflektor, is now out. CBC arts reporter Pierre Landry sat down with band members Richard Parry and Tim Kingsbury to discuss the ideas and influences behind the new release. 

Here's an excerpt from that interview:

Pierre Landry: Tell me about the influences that are seeping into Reflektor.

Richard Parry: We spent time in both Haiti and Jamaica, and we recorded in this super weird old castle in Jamaica on a bay. You’d get these beautiful waves of bass coming over the bay from clubs, which found their way into the music.

PL: Did you know that you wanted to incorporate new sounds and different sounds into the album, or did it just happen organically?

Arcade Fire performs during a benefit concert last October in memory of Denis Blanchette, the lighting technician who was killed at the Parti Québécois' election-night victory rally. (Paul Chiasson / Canadian Press)

Tim Kingsbury: We’re all fans of a lot of Jamaican music, and we decided this time to embrace it a little more. We became more comfortable expanding our horizons a little bit.

RP: There’s definitely an organic thing, that you don’t want to sound like you’ve already sounded… We were chasing those things that are new and exciting to our ears, even if they were super old or from a different culture. We were chasing those things that bring magic to recordings in old music and over a wide landscape, from different musics and different times and places.

TK: There was a lot more trying different things on this album.

PL: The songs are written in a way that they’re not very direct, they’re not black or white, they’re open to interpretation.

RP: This album is about the flip-side or alternate dimension or reverse reality idea. It’s not a concept of the album but it is an idea that re-occurs.

RP: It's so amazing to be in this position where people pay so much attention to what we're doing, and I think all of us feel that it's important to use that position to make art and not just make it some hollow celebrity or hollow fame or empty hype thing that's not interesting and makes one bored of music. 

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