BEACH SEASON RIDING BOOTY WAVE TO DEBUT
Calgary’s Beach Season ride their “booty wave” to major-label debut.
That sentence literally wrote itself.
Seriously. The second the document was named and a couple of pertinent facts were placed upon it, there it was. Must be the new software: Hacktel. Anyhoo. Before we get to the filler, let’s get to those quick, pertinent facts, which are that Calgary duo Beach Season has just released their debut on Universal Music Canada — an EP titled Libra Year, which features six sensual and sumptuous songs of their trademark electro-soul sound self-dubbed “booty wave.”
Sitting with the pair of Sam Avant and Simon Blitzer outside of 17th Avenue caffeinated landmark Caffe Beano they add the rest of the story so far, which, they say, began more than a decade ago when they met as band students back in junior high school.
“It’s all just been one big evolution from when we started playing instruments, which is when we were 10 or 11,” says Avant.
Blitzer admits that it took a turn more toward their current sound and style when they were in high school, and began “messing with synths and laptops and programs and software,” which eventually took them to the hip-hop project Obey the Crooks before they “made our way to Beach Season” about three years ago.
Which has brought them to here and now and the release of Libra Year, which they’ll celebrate with a show in Calgary at the Hifi on Wednesday night before they jet off Thursday for a release party in Toronto.
The two locales are actually fitting considering when it comes to the former it’s here in the scene where the pair honed their sound, initially made their mark and continue to make their music.
Blitzer acknowledges the role that the inclusivity and strength of the local music community has played in their success so far.
“It’s a very accommodating scene right now. I think anyone if they put enough time and effort into it they can make a name for themselves in the scene and be recognized,” he says.
And, more importantly, people will notice.
Which takes us to Hogtown, where the band was performing a couple of years ago and made their way onto the A& R radar of the label. They kept an eye on them and, after a local performance opening for Calgary rapper extraordinaire A.Y.E. a year ago, interest turned a little more serious and discussions escalated to a union.
“I feel like a lot of what’s happened in the last couple of years has been right place, right time,” says Avant.
“And we’ve had a lot of really good people to get us to those right places and right times. “We’re very fortunate.” But, again, they’re also very well formed as a band, with that aforementioned, unmistakable booty wave sound, which is a hybrid of spacey, ambient pop and smooth, sexy R & B.
Avant agrees that while still evolving, they’ve happened upon something that’s all their own.
“It’s interesting, especially with production on laptops, it’s like handwriting: nobody knows why they hand write a certain way, they just do. But everyone’s is different and we can definitely recognize some of our friends’ handwriting because it’s atrocious, know what I mean? It’s built in from what they learn. And I think I our production styles we just naturally gravitate towards certain things and we naturally have had a taste for certain sounds,” he says.
“We definitely try to jump outside the box every once in awhile but at the end of the day … it’s all an internal thing, to us it feels right and that’s why we do it.”
Blitzer says that the pair’s “filtration system” when it comes to their music allowed Libra Year to become the cohesive listen that it is.
It certainly wasn’t any outside influence from their new benefactors that shaped the record, as they explain that the label took the self-produced EP without dictating much when it came to the sounds that appeared on it.
“They’ve given us a lot of freedom, which is something that we didn’t really expect working with a major,” Blitzer says.
Instead, they say, much of the discussion has been asking Beach Season about how they want to market themselves, where they see themselves and what they hope the outcome of this has been.
Both admit that it was an interesting thing to be asked and something they’d never really pondered before, instead being happy just to make their music, reach as many people as possible, hopefully “building” on those results.
And already the results are paying off, with the first two of Libra Year’s seductive singles — Tribes and Midnights, with the third, Pink Room having just dropped — doing well on Spotify, turning up on some fairly highprofile playlists including down in the States.
It certainly bodes well for their major new relationship, which, for now, is for this album and this country only.
“If things go well,” says Avant, “who knows?”
A story that’s yet to be written, but one that’s worth waiting for.