Lost In The Haze

Whilst not currently as fashionable as its northerly neighbour Portland, few cities have made as fertile a hotbed for aspiring bands as San Francisco. “I love it as a home base,” Jon Porras, who's one-half of Barn Owl, enthuses. “I find it a very inspirational city; a very beautiful city. San Francisco is a little bit compact, but you step maybe five or ten minutes out of the city and you're in the wilderness.”

The echoes of San Francisco's rich history – the narcotic embracing, counter-culture of the '60s, progressive politics and the city's famous fog that shimmers like a hallucinatory haze - do not necessarily reflect the city it is today, especially given the modern day gold rush flowing up from Silicon Valley. “Facebook, Google, Microsoft… you name it,” says Porras. “Every big tech corporation is just an hour south of us. There's this huge push toward a hyper-technological lifestyle. It's a little bit strange, strange and bizarre, but hilarious and kind of interesting. So I think in some ways maybe Barn Owl's music is a reaction to this culture. It's like, 'Look, we need to sit down. We need to offer more attention to our music. We need to offer deeper attention toward the art that we choose to enhance our lives with'.”

Barn Owl's surroundings have been a catalyst in driving their impressive output of two albums a year, 2012 aside. “It was a very conscious thing for us not to release any records in 2012,” Porras admits. “We became known as these prolific artists. That's only as a result of Evan (Caminiti, his partner in Barn Owl) and I not ever wanting to stop making music. And then we thought, 'Hey, what if we don't release a record this year?' Maybe that would effect positively when we do put out another new record. We did a ton of touring and a ton of writing. We just didn't release any records.”

Did it work? “I don't know,” he confesses. “It's kinda hard to gauge. I'm not sure it benefited us at all. I think we thought it would. But overall I was incredibly happy with the record. We tried some new processing techniques, some new recording techniques,” says Porras.

“In the past Barn Owl records were more about capturing nuances live in the studio. This was more about post-production; taking those recordings to our home studio and configuring them, cutting them up, processing them and then hoping that something new would come. It's like, an effect here or a certain edit here and something just comes to life in the recording. Those happy accidents or nuances can happen after the fact, where we've made an edit, or EQ-ed something. We thought that was really valuable.”

The exquisitely finished perfectionism, however, will take a backseat when they bring the volume onstage at The Bakery this August. “Expect very deep, heavy low end. We like to bring a strong physical presence to our sound live,” Porras warns. “You can hear this sound, but we also want you to feel it. We're gonna bring as much power onstage as possible. We'll probably play a few tunes from the new record; the rest are going to be brand new compositions. We're very excited. We haven't even recorded them yet.”