Alexander: We recorded everything in Toronto in our home studio, which we’ve been building over the last couple of years and collecting gear for. All the features came through to our space and we did them all in person. Matt engineered and recorded the whole thing. What to expect, I don’t really know. It’s a little home of eclectic, very different stuff with different artists. It’s something we’ve tried to make cohesive and that has a flow to it. It’s hard to speak on because it’s a weird little project.
Leland: Something for the kids, something for the grandparents…

Matthew: They are all friends of ours, except for Colin Stetson, who was someone on our wish list. He’s a very chill guy.
Alexander: Where did we meet him? What was the name of that festival?
Chester: Was it in The Netherlands?
Alexander: We met him at a festival a couple of years ago and then we emailed him asking if we could potentially work together. After that, we saw him again somewhere and he told us he was going to respond to our email, and that he’d been really busy. And then, when was the next time we saw him?
Leland: Was it in Vancouver?
Matthew: Well, it was somewhere in the world…

Matthew: Exactly.
Alexander: But it came through!
Chester: Everyone we worked with on this album was someone who we had some sort of connection with, we weren’t just cold emailing people. I feel like Colin Stetson was the person we were going in cold with most because we hadn’t really gotten to know him at that point. But it was an amazing experience; a very intense, musical scenario.
Alexander: He’s one of the most virtuosic, progressive saxophone players of our time…
Chester: We just jammed for six or seven hours straight and then he was like, “OK, see you guys tomorrow and we’ll record the song!” Then we recorded the song!

Chester: I remember Ghostface had that long conversation with us about not letting money get to our heads and staying true to the music and staying true to our friendships. That was super cool – getting to have a real talk with him for half an hour. It was actually one of the first times we met him.
Alexander: I think just getting to be around all these creative people who have such different ideas, but yet were open to coming into our world and working with us and helping us to rewrite the music we’d made, gave us confidence in what we were doing and helped put the material in motion.
Matthew: I think everyone was on the same wavelength as well. The way we work is through memory. I remember growing up and playing with people and if you weren’t on the same wavelength… It was incredibly hard to do form-based things through memory because it’s a lot to remember and you really have to be crafting the song in your head while you’re playing with other people. When we were working with Sam or Colin Stetson or Kaytranada, we’d play it and then everyone knew exactly how it should be even though we hadn’t written anything down. That’s a really hard thing to come across.
Chester: We like to improvise, so tempo and dynamics are important. Every artist we worked with was really good at understanding dynamic and taking away and adding things and emoting the song with us in terms of the arrangement of the piece. Obviously someone like Colin Stetson makes these extensive, amazing long pieces on saxophone, so it’s a crazy dynamic, but that was apparent that that was going to happen.

Matthew: No, not really. I think we’re really adaptable. Even if somebody has a totally different method we will adapt to them.
Chester: Yeah, if we get to the stage where we’re in the room working with someone, most of the time it goes really well. The worst that can happen is you reach out to someone and they don’t want to work with you or they’re too busy.

Matthew: The library has been in effect since we’ve known him. We’ve all played on a lot of its content. It’s pretty amazing. Dukes is not only an amazing beat-maker and songwriter and producer, he has these amazing ideas. It’s the perfect outlet for what he’s best at, which is really great ideas, and people can take those ideas and do whatever they want, which is amazing.
Alexander: His ability to adapt… He came from sampling records for a long time to eventually having access to stems of these albums and trying to make original beats and compositions. Then getting into songwriting, then into sample writing, going full circle. He’s constantly developing his ideas and progressing as the industry changes. He's an amazing mentor.

Matthew: This sounds super hippy-dippy, but there’s this dude who’s a Buddhist teacher and he has this thing about how self-destructing traps are the best teachers. If you go to music school and learn what you need to learn but eventually break out of the ideas of it so that it falls apart, that’s the best education you’re going to get. You gain all the knowledge from it, but then all the bullshit will fade away. That’s the problem with music education or any education, people get trapped and it doesn’t self-destruct. Then they find themselves making music that’s music school-based and music school-sounding when they’re 30 and they’re like, “Why am I not successful? Why does no-one like my music?” They’re using the tools but they’re not expressing themselves. They haven’t broken out from all of the ideas they’ve been indoctrinated with.
Alexander: Similarly to any art school or secondary education you can get, you have to really create avenues for yourself. It’s really easy when you’re studying something to get immersed in the language of it and all the factual knowledge. You have to find avenues to play, ways to express yourself. It’s easy to get wrapped up assignments and homework. It can be a really great thing. Some people get trapped. We found a different outlook and avenue half-way through school, which we didn’t even know would become available to us.