I have known Ferdy Belland almost as long as I have been writing about music. We both contributed to Vancouver's much-missed Nerve Magazine some twenty years ago, around when I saw his band the Feminists open for Nomeansno; I've seen him play bass for Bif Naked, Chip Kinman, and Duvallstar, and I caught him in Brotherhood of Lost Souls at LanaLou's last year, a hard-rocking, tuneful set I immensely enjoyed. We listen to different things, and sometimes even disagree (Ferdy thinks the Clash are overrated, and would shudder to realize I don't own a single album by Budgie), but we both share a great love for rock music, with one key difference: Belland can actually play the stuff.
So Belland > MacInnis, there.
Belland just celebrated his 55th birthday in Cranbrook (happy b-day, man), but the cool Vancouver news is that Phaeton, an all-instrumental prog-metal project that Belland plays bass for, will be playing this Friday, April 10th, at the Hyperspace VII Pre-Party, sharing a bill with Edmonton's Vaegon and Vancouver bands No Faith in Fortune and Quasicosm. Founded in Kimberley and mostly based in Cranbrook, it will be their first gig ever, and one of their first shows since Colin Righton kicked cancer, which will be the focus of a Straight feature. Their recent album, Neurogenesis, is on as I type this, and it's great--sophisticated and heavy, but never indulgent of obnoxious; it's been my "headphones album of the week".
To mark the occasion, I put some questions to Belland, and at his request, rather than editing them into something Straight-shaped, am putting his answers verbatim here (minus a couple of quotes I'm stealing for that other article).
Ferdy Belland in the Brotherhood of Lost Souls
FB: Sometimes it feels like I'm in ALL the bands! But currently I'm in Phaeton, Garuda, and Brotherhood of Lost Souls.
Since 1990 I've played in over two dozen bands, and I've enjoyed every one of them: Ninepin, Cellar of the Sun, TalisMen, Buffalohead, the Jordan Stringer Trio, the Feminists, the Gentle Infidels, Anger Power Fury and the Filth, the Belushis, Stone Cold Crazy, Duvallstar, Parallel Lines, Sister Sabbath, the Skeleton Kings, the Bison Brothers, Anarcrist, the Mile High Club, Ethan Askey and the Elevators, Vintage Voltage, and the rest...it only makes me a more well-rounded musician to not be afraid to explore different styles of music. And I like a lot of different styles of music, so it's not as if I was ever slumming, or forcing myself to play in a band when I didn't really want to be there.
Phaeton appeared purely by chance, right out of the blue. I'd played music with Colin Righton before, and in March 2017 he brought Daniel Airth and Kevin Thiessen and myself together. Dan and Kevin and I didn't know each other before Colin rounded us up. Colin had played death metal with Dan in Chaos Logic, and he'd played atmospheric ambient instrumental prog with Kevin in Aszension, and we all hit if off personally and musically. I was beside myself with joy - I was in a band where everyone else was a true virtuoso on their instruments, and there were no obnoxious attitudes. And now here we are, nine years later. And I have to say that even though I loved all the other bands I was in, Phaeton is my personal crowning glory. This was the sort of prog-rock / heavy-metal hybrid I'd wanted to play in since I was 18 years old, and 30 years down the road the stars finally aligned. It is certainly the proggiest, most metallic band I've ever been in, and it's an ongoing challenge, both technically and imaginatively.
It's more than just the musical excellence for me. I mostly want to associate with other artistic types and of course I want to be friends with the people I'm playing music with. I can't fathom being in a band with people you can't stand. And Colin and Dan and Kevin are three of my best friends. What helps make Phaeton click is that there's casual personal connection, aside from the instruments and the crazy riffery. It's the best of both worlds for me, and I am very blessed.
Which is not to shit on what I also do with Garuda or Brotherhood of Lost Souls, by any means. In Garuda we're moving through another prog direction, with electrified sitar as the main instrument and us creating this very cool eastern-influenced psych-rock power-trio getup, which is a long conversation all unto itself. And in Brotherhood of Lost Souls, it's all hard-rocking sleaze-punk, in the Supersuckers / Nashville Pussy / Hellacopters / Turbonegro / Zeke / Motorhead / Danko Jones vein... styles I've always loved, and busted out in Vancouver with the Belushis. I have so much fun with the Brotherhood!
It's hard to choose favorites among your children, but Phaeton is very special to me.
AM: I think of you as someone who has a firm root in 70s hard rock, bands like Budgie and Uriah Heep and such. How did that start for you? What was your path into prog as a listener? (Older sibling’s or father’s record collection? I do remember growing up and hearing “In the Court of the Crimson King” on CFOX but prog wasn’t much on the radio).
FB: I grew up an artsy misfit in a blue-collar working class redneck household, but there was always music in the home. My mother was a rockabilly songwriter as a teenager back in the 1950s and she wanted to be Wanda Jackson when she grew up. She cut a 45rpm demo single as "Little Ruthie Reynolds" and was cute as a button in her crinoline skirt and cowboy boots and star-spangled Gibson acoustic, and she had an amazing collection of early rock and roll and rockabilly and country-western singles on 10-inch 78rpm shellac, which I still proudly own. My brothers were both 7, 8 years older than I was, so when I was an elementary school kid back in the 1970s they were already in senior high, and bringing home all the classic rock albums as brand-new releases: Cheap Trick, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Tom Petty, Moon Martin, Electric Light Orchestra, Doobie Brothers, AC/DC, Supertramp, you name it. So my first experiences in loving music came from growing up in an environment where the living-room stereo went casually back and forth between Merle Haggard and Nick Lowe, and I accepted it all on face value. And I also got all my brothers' records as hand-me-downs when they finally moved out, so my musical education started there.
The first record I ever bought with my own allowance was the soundtrack to the MAD Magazine raunch-comedy Up the Academy, which introduced me to Blondie and Jonathan Richman and Sammy Hagar and the Babys and Ian Hunter and whatnot, and that helped broaden my musical tastes at a very young and impressionable age. As I got into my teens it just got wilder. MTV came on the air and I was introduced to all sorts of stuff: Def Leppard, Duran Duran, ZZ Top, the Kinks... my first introduction to prog in particular came from the videos for Rush's "Distant Early Warning" and Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart," which aren't bad places to start. And then everything changed for me when I discovered Pink Floyd. They were the first band I ever fell in love with and was obsessed with - a schoolmate leant me a cassette of The Wall and it blew my mind — this doesn't sound like Swing Out Sister at all! - and within a year I had all their albums. I was dazzled by how no two songs sounded alike, and how the songs had uncommon structures and crazy sound effects, and the lyrics were deep and cerebral. They were my gateway to the other British prog giants of the 1970s, especially Yes and King Crimson, and I dug more into Rush... which is only the Canadianest thing to do. At the same time I also glommed onto punk rock and heavy metal and dove back into earlier classic rock, and I absorbed and enjoyed it all without feeling contradictory about it. That's when I started my ravenous record collecting, and everything's gotten crazier ever since.
AM: What was your first kick as a player or composer at progressive music? Was it at all daunting for you?
I was inspired to become a participating musician through Metallica's ...And Justice for All album, which was a crucial mind-blowing experience for me. Here was angry anthems of protest, barking about environmental collapse and corruption in the courts and judgement-surveillance and the horrors of war and crazed depression, and it was all framed in jagged, angular prog-metal riffery and lengthy arrangements, with this harsh and abrasive trebly punk-like production - it was exactly the type of music I was waiting for. My first live concert experience was watching Metallica on the "Damaged Justice" tour at the Calgary Saddledome in June 1989... the same night of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the same night the Ayatollah Khomeini died, so the historical weight of watching James Hetfield roar out "Eye of the Beholder" from 100 feet away nailed it home in ear-splitting fashion: this is what I want to do. Nothing else.
Playing music was indeed an anxious challenge for me at the start. I got a white Profile Stratocaster copy from the Sears catalog, and the neck was a warped baseball bat that was unforgiving on my short, stubby fingers, and the geometry of the fretboard was a maddeningly incomprehensible puzzle to me, but I had a compassionate guitar teacher who patiently walked me through the basics of 12-bar blues and the "Iron Man" riff so I had basics to build from. A bunch of my friends were also getting into musical instruments at the same time and they were all learning faster than I was, and I was scared that I'd never catch up. And then my Dad offhandedly said to me: "Why don't you try playing bass? Four strings, no chords, how hard could it be, really?" That made all the sense in the world to me, so I switched over and thought smugly: now I'm on my way! Which I was, but I soon learned to renewed terror that bass is as deep of a well as any other instrument.
My first real band was Ninepin, back when I was 20, and right from the get-go there was proggy elements in there. My good friend Aaron Granville-Martin was the main guitarist and composer, and he took influence from Metallica's golden years and Soundgarden's Louder Than Love era and combined them into a precocious hybrid that you'd never expect would form in a small podunk town like Cranbrook. But I rose to the challenge and dutifully ground my way through this excitingly complicated tunes, which was way different from the more straightahead punk and grunge stuff the other teenage garage bands were doing in town at that time. That band also included lead guitarist Eldritch Priest, who's now a professor of music at Simon Fraser University and a leading figure in the Canadian avant-garde compositional world, as well as Aaron's brother Ryan, who currently drums for the Great Lake Swimmers and hobnobs in the Rheostatics circles. So I got into the prog approach right away.
The next serious band for me was Cellar of the Sun, which formed in Nelson BC when I attended music school. That was with Ezra Cannon, who later reinvented himself as a punk icon as Ezra Crack of Leftover Crack, and Dale Butterfield, who's now the live drummer in Junior Boys. That band wrote lengthy and intricate songs that combined elements of Jane's Addiction and Smashing Pumpkins and Fugazi and Sunny Day Real Estate..."emo-prog," maybe? That's where I really came into my own as a bassist. We recorded two amazing albums that hardly anyone listened to. The first band I toured the United States with, and I still miss it. I'm always the most musically comfortable when I'm challenged.
AM: Was there ever a time when you were more into punk or metal or such and prog seemed too cerebral or self-indulgent? You have mentioned wanting not to alienate kids who are into punk or metal… I think that is kind of important to what you do in Phaeton; it's ambitious, but never does it seem self-indulgent.
AM: Was there ever a time when you were more into punk or metal or such and prog seemed too cerebral or self-indulgent? You have mentioned wanting not to alienate kids who are into punk or metal… I think that is kind of important to what you do in Phaeton; it's ambitious, but never does it seem self-indulgent.
FB: I got seriously into punk and metal at the same time I got into prog, and I didn't consider it schizophrenic to love it all simultaneously. I found connective tissue through it all to latch onto. My favorite punk bands were the more technically accomplished ones, like the Dead Kennedys and NoMeansNo and Bad Brains and Television, but I also love the Stooges and the Sex Pistols and the Dead Boys; you can't deny visceral immediacy, which I dive into in other bands I play with. There is admittedly a big heap of prog that gets too boring and meandering for me, and that's where I tune out. Geoff Barton and I had a good conversation once about how prog is most effective when there's punch to it. Feel free to get as extensive and intricate as you want, but there's a point where emotional expression ends and you just end up whacking off. Which is only fun for yourself.
I'm a people person, and I take seriously the traditional shamanistic and holistic values of the connection between performer and audience, and it's a rare privilege for me to be a musician. And connecting with people is far more important to me than alienating people by being some arrogant egotist with a bass. Not to say that I compose from a pop-mercenary mindset - it's not as if Phaeton's going to appear on American Idol, or record jingles for Hot Topic; but if I don't enjoy listening to what I've recorded as a music lover, I'm certainly not going to enjoy performing it. Look how NICE I'm playing, Ma!
AM: Do the band members of Phaeton have different favourite bands or orientations? There’s a real heavy-metal element that surfaces; is that the influence of any one member? I assume the title Between Two Worlds references the tension between prog and metal?
FB: That's correct. The four of us have a lot of common influences, but we all have different musical tastes. And it all compliments the creative whole. Colin's our in-house authority on all things metal: he's into metal the way the Pope is into Catholicism, and he's always raving about new bands he discovers every week in the tech/death worlds, but he's not monochromatic in his taste; he's a huge Tom Petty fan too, so go figure. Kevin is very much immersed in the classic prog of the 1970s and the neo-prog of the 1980s, and even though it makes sense that he'd be a fan of Phil Collins through the Genesis connection, he's also an unashamed Huey Lewis fan. Dan cut his teeth on grunge acts: Alice in Chains was huge for him. And he's a devoted fan of Jeff Loomis and Guthrie Govan. The others have introduced me to music I either ignored or was unaware of, and in turn I'm doing my best to turn them on to Budgie and Sparks and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band. They all smile politely and nod at the right times.
AM: Are there bands that are divisive?
FB: Well, we don't necessarily do the snotty teenage sneer at anyone's musical favorites. There's stuff we like better than others, but for the most part it's very fun when we all set the instruments aside and hang out as friends and just talk Music Music Music. It's what I loved when I first became a musician and it's still a heartwarming joy to me now. I mean, I don't see the others getting into Matthew Sweet the way I am, sorry to say, but you gotta take the sour with the, er, sweet.
AM: Curious if “Magma Chamber” is a nod to Magma? Magma had played Vancouver back in 2015, which was a couple of years before Between Two Worlds came out. [Aside: I interviewed Christian Vander when that show happened].
FB: Ha! No, not directly. Kevin and I are big Magma fans, but Kevin came up with that title while describing the subterranean workings of an active volcano. I was first introduced to Magma by [former Scratch Records honcho] Keith Parry; I dragged him along to a Styx concert at the River Rock Casino back in 2009 and we had a whale of a good time. He only lived a few blocks away from me in Hastings Sunrise, so after the show we went back to his place and stayed up until dawn, picking records from his towering shelves - we were so wired and gleeful - and he played me Magma's Mekanik Destructiw Kommandoh and I was immediately hooked. Stephen McBean was room-mating with Keith then and locked himself in his room all night while Keith and I raved about Bo Hansson and Triumvirat. Good times!
AM: There are some interesting words in your song titles -- even the bandname Phaeton is unique and cool, though when I Googled it, I was initially surprised to get “a horse-drawn carriage” as an answer. I had to go deeper to find the reference to antiquity:
Phaethon (Greek: Φαέθων, "radiant" or "shining one") is a figure from Greek mythology, known as the son of the sun god Helios (or Apollo). He is famous for attempting to drive his father's sun chariot, failing to control it, and threatening to burn the Earth, resulting in his destruction by Zeus.
There’s other references to Greek myth, like Tethys, in your song titles. So is someone in the band really steeped in classical writing? With no lyrics, do song titles assume greater importance or are they kind of arbitrary? (Do any of them have interesting stories?).
FB: I've always been fascinated with astronomy and mythology since childhood, and to my delight when the four of us got together I discovered they were also cool with nebulae and centaurs. We chose Phaeton as the band name due to that also being the hypothetical proto-planet that supposedly orbited between Mars and Jupiter; tidal forces eventually shattered the planet and it became today's Asteroid Belt. We originally wanted to name the band Theia, after the other hypothetical proto-planet that collided with Earth back in its molten-primordial days and formed the Moon, but at the time there were two or three other prog / metal bands named Theia, so Phaeton we became...even if occasionally people ask if we're sponsored by Volkswagen.
And yes, the celestial and cerebral elements play a big part in our overall songwriting concepts. The song titles aren't arbitrary. The music gets worked out first and then there's emotional reflection of what the music's telling us, and the titles emerge accordingly. It's along the lines of how instrumental jazz tunes are named.
I named "Tethys Rising" after the moon of Saturn; I'm a big fan of Chesley Bonestell's classic space-age futurism illustrations he did back in the 1950s, and one of his most famous paintings is a beautiful rendition of the view of Saturn from the surface of Titan, looking like the full moon in our sky but with orbital rings; I use that image on my computer desktop screen. But unfortunately, latter-day space probes have shattered the myth and revealed that Titan is actually covered by this annoying opaque orange fog, so you can't see shit. So I thought the view would be better from Tethys.
AM: Where did the concept of the "Isochron" come from, and is it relevant in any way to the song structure?
FB: That's from Kevin. If an isochron, by definition, is a set of initial conditions for the system that all lead to the same long-term behavior, then the structure of the "Isochron" tune parallels that: it kicks off with the main riff, it moves through other riffs which are melodic variations of the initial theme, explores a number of dynamic rises and falls, and then concludes by returning to the main riff again. Aren't we clever!
AM: How does the band compose? Are you working on songs equally, or is someone sending around demos? (Is there one member who is the songwriter?).
AM: How does the band compose? Are you working on songs equally, or is someone sending around demos? (Is there one member who is the songwriter?).
There's a few different approaches we take. Kevin basically lives inside the Cube -- his studio enclosure -- and he'll surprise us every few months by fleshing out full demos of a completed tune. Dan is a 24-7 Riff Machine; he's always got one of his many guitars in his eager mitts and it's one of the very few times in my musical experience where I've watched someone truly channel the muse and relay messages from the Aether through distorted overdrive...he's got this bottomless vault of riffs and sketches and parts that we sift through, and oftentimes Colin acts as the Ulrich to Dan's Hetfield and takes a hand with arranging the bits into cohesive structures.
There is an overall agreement about maintaining collective collaboration, though. Everyone has the right to speak up if they have better ideas of how the song should flow, but even if the idea isn't used in the end, we do our best to keep everything on an even keel. It's important to us as friends and bandmates to eliminate any points of resentment that might arise. We've all been in earlier bands where things went south due to personality clashes and alpha-prick horseshit, and we'd rather avoid that.
It's an elastic creative process, but it's also even-keeled and democratic, and it works for us. Nothing sounds disjointed, though. Colin's octopus-tornado attack on the drums really ties everything together. And we're drawing from different stylistic elements: there's djent in there ["a subgenre of progressive metal characterized by high-gain, palm-muted, downtuned guitar tones that create a "djent" onomatopoeic sound"], and neo-classical melodicism, and thrash, and tech-death, and the more soft-washy mellow-prog colorings, and it all flows together into Phaeton.
AM: I am assuming that your background in music journalism is why you end up doing the interviews? Is “Tethys Rising” your only compositional contribution so far?
FB: All four of us are intelligent and articulate, but the others are more private people than I am. My spirit animals are Tigger and Foghorn Leghorn, which comes across in my personality, and I'm always eager to babble endlessly to people, so for the most part they leave it up to me to deal with the media. Colin and Dan and Kevin always have interesting things to say, but they'll get into public discussion whenever they're comfortable with it. But I'm not the official spokesperson by any means. I do my best to not misrepresent the others, or say anything libelous or defamatory that'll get us hung in the public square. So far, so good!
During our first few years I was too busy being in awe of Dan and Kevin as riff-writers and composers to get my shit together and write something myself. They aren't intimidating personalities as such, but I was too creatively insecure to write anything to bring to the band that I thought was good enough. I was given free rein to work my own basslines around what they'd written, and find my own instrumental voice, which I do on our recordings. It wasn't until the pandemic arose and I had all this free time unwantedly on my hands that I finally told myself to shit or get off the pot. And so I came up with "Tethys Rising" and presented it to the others, and to my joy they were enthusiastic and complimentary about it. I had most of the riffs and parts and structure worked out, but again I encouraged Kevin and Dan to add their own thoughts to it. Kevin made subtle but effective changes to the arrangement and added the jazzy dynamic breakdown that leads off the bridge section, and Dan came up with these elegiac solos which just made the tune's climax really sing. It was a huge thing for me. I finally felt complete within the band.
We're currently working on a new tune of mine named "The Follower" which will be included in the next album. And I have other sketches and parts and riffs which Dan and Kevin are eager to help me morph into finished tunes. And they in turn have stuff of their own which are developing into new finished tunes. This band never stops thrilling me to pieces.
AM: The Straight piece will focus on Colin's cancer, his epic composition "Clouds of Mercury," and its non-inclusion on Friday, but is there anything else to say about the April 10th set? Any final words on Colin's cancer ordeal?
FB: We were all frightened for Colin when he went through his cancer, and unfortunately that wasn't his first time, but it was certainly the worst. What made it all more despairing for us was that it happened while the pandemic lockdowns were still in force, so nobody except for immediate family was allowed to visit him in the hospital. But he outfought the cancer and survived and he's still in remission, and I hope to whatever gods may be that that's the last time he has to deal with that. Talk about channeling power through obstinacy. And so if he was inspired to conceive a 22-minute sprawling epic which charted the emotional rise and fall of what he went through, then he's well within his rights to do so, Phaeton or no Phaeton.
[As for the show,] we'll be playing selections from all three of our albums, so for the curious folks of Vancouver they'll get a healthy dollop of the full Phaeton experience. We first came out of the gates with our vision and our style fully fleshed out, so it's not as if we'll ever dismiss stuff from the first album as juvenilia. I have a soft spot in my heart for the Between Two Worlds material, since by recording a second album we proved we weren't a flash in the pan, and we pumped up the original Phaeton approach into heavier tunes. Neurogenesis was a big step, and we knew we were onto something when Derek Sherinian collaborated with us... and we're growing an audience, slowly but surely.
We're very excited to be playing our very first Vancouver show. I haven't played the Cobalt in 20 years, and I'm glad that it's hosting metal shows again. A true gem among legendary Canadian venues, and sentimental me can already smell the urinal cakes from here. [Heads up, Ferdy: it smells much better than when you last played there!] And we'll be sharing the stage with very good bands - Vaegon, No Faith in Fortune, and Quasicosm - and it's exciting to see that Vancouver's still as artistically vibrant as it ever was. Vancouver is my true emotional home, and I will always cherish the long years I spent living there and loving there and rocking there, and this will be a true homecoming for me, and I want it to be a welcoming experience for Kevin and Dan and Colin.
Tickets here! Happy birthday, Ferdy!
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