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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Chinese frescos painted over in botched restoration

Chinese authorities are coming under fire and two municipal officials have reportedly lost their jobs over a controversial, cartoon-like restoration that has covered ancient Buddhist frescos.

The botched effort occurred at the nearly 300-year-old Yunjie Temple in the city of Chaoyang in Liaoning province, located in the northeastern part of the country, bordering North Korea.

The temple's abbot had requested restoration of its delicate and crumbling painted frescos, which date back to the early Qing Dynasty era. The ancient relics were subsequently painted over completely with bright, simplistic, cartoon-like figures, depicting different scenes and Taoist characters.

An official in charge of temple affairs as well as city's head of cultural heritage monitoring have been dismissed over the incident, according to Chinese media.

A blogger first posted photos of the completed "restoration" effort, which sparked widespread public condemnation via Chinese social media. After seeing the images on the internet, Chaoyang officials launched an investigation.

Restoration work on the temple had been approved at the city level, but cultural heritage experts were not consulted to ensure proper adherence to standards, city official Li Haifeng told The Global Times.

A local firm that was not qualified to conduct such cultural repairs was hired to do the work, he said.

Officials continue to investigate the incident and further reprimands could be forthcoming.

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Stephen King and son Owen discuss family and fiction

Stephen King's Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, but the new novel isn't simply an attempt to reclaim the classic story — now often remembered for Stanley Kubrick's subsequent film adaptation.

"People made too much of the way that I feel about the Kubrick film [The Shining]. I've had a lot of books that have been turned into films. I like some of the adaptations — in fact, I like a lot of the adaptations — and there are a few that I don't like. The Shining is one of the few I don't care for, but I don't take it personally and I don't take it to heart," the bestselling novelist told Jian Ghomeshi on CBC's cultural affairs show Q on Thursday.

"Movies and books are apples and oranges... [When] a book gets sold to the movies, it's like sending a kid off to college. You hope they're going to do well and everything. Most of them do. Every now and then, somebody falls by the wayside."

After writing more than 50 novels (which have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide), King says he was inspired to return to The Shining's child protagonist Danny Torrance by those who regularly asked him what happened to the character after the tale ended. He was also inspired by the story of a therapy cat reportedly able to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients.

Owen King, seen with Stephen King in the CBC Q studio in Toronto on Thursday, helped offer a fresh-eyed perspective on his father's latest novel Doctor Sleep. (Mitch Pollack/CBC)

Published earlier this fall, Doctor Sleep came to life, in part, thanks to fresh-eyed feedback from King's youngest son, Owen. A screenwriter and author who has just published his comic novel debut, entitled Double Feature, Owen King was born in 1977, the same year The Shining hit bookstores.

The pair arrived in Toronto to speak at writers' rights group PEN Canada's annual benefit, the opening event of the 2013 International Festival of Authors.

In the attached audio, Stephen and Owen King talk to Q about picking up the thread of The Shining in Doctor Sleep, their father-son relationship, the challenges facing King's adult children (now writing novels as well) and whether they might one day collaborate.

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