Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Trevor Lang is the New Music Monday highlight!
Trevor Lang has been a mainstay of the Victoria music scene since he was young, going from playing in Cartoon Lizard to releasing experimental pop music as a solo artist.
He recently released a project he had been working on for years, a cosmic country-inspired album called Way Out Yonder.
Though he moved to Germany just over a year ago, this record was recorded in Victoria at Risque Disque Studios and was largely inspired by experiences Lang had while living in BC.
“I guess I was just looking for a change of scenery, it’s as simple as that,” Lang told Victoria Buzz.
“I lived in Victoria basically my whole life, besides a very short stint spent living in Vancouver.”
Lang continued that he had travelled out to Berlin to visit a friend shortly after a breakup, and fell in love with the city and the European lifestyle.
“I was really taken with the lifestyle here, and having made [friends] here, I thought this could be a good jumping off point to explore the rest of Europe and got myself a one-year visa,” he said.
“I didn’t expect to be here for over a year, I didn’t know what I was going to do, so I said ‘I’ll just get a visa, a year will fly by and I’ll have a better idea if I want to stay or not.”
After making the move overseas, Lang found a new community, immersed himself in the local music scene and has now been in Berlin for over a year and a half.
“Now this is my life,” he noted. “If I were to go back home it would basically be the same experience, obviously more familiar, but I would be losing a lot of the things that I have here.”
On his new record, Way Out Yonder, Lang says the idea for this recording project began with a themed party he had been asked to play music at.
“The whole thing started when a friend of mine, Louis Belcourt, asked me to play a show on Cortes Island that was a space rodeo,” Lang explained.
“You go dressed in like, western wear and there’s sci-fi vibes and stuff like that, but I was under the impression everyone was going to be playing space country sets—nobody did this, I was the only one who made a space country set.”
But this was just the catalyst Lang needed, as he says he had always had the idea to do a recording project inspired by old B-movies and country music.
“The two have always felt connected somehow.”
So he began pulling from old notes in his phone and writing country songs about loss and grief, all of which followed the narrative of a sad, pathetic cowboy character which Lang imagined as the album’s protagonist.
He then took these songs to Risque Disque and recorded them very simply live off the floor, and then began layering samples of old songs and sci-fi sound effects overtop.
The result was Way Out Yonder, an album meant to be listened to as a whole to glean the journey of this sad cowboy Lang imagined.
For this week’s New Music Monday, Lang chose to highlight the album’s second track, “Reno Casino.”
Highlight track
“I feel like the crowning jewel of this record is ‘Reno Casino,’” said Lang. “It’s also maybe, sonically, my favourite recording I’ve ever made.”
He says this song came from an experience he had in 2015 while touring with a Vancouver-based band through the United States, and walking around the streets of Reno, Nevada.
“I don’t remember much from it, but I remember a few visceral sense memories,” he explained.
Lang said it was extremely cold when he was there, walking the streets of Reno, and the air had a fog to it at night.
“Also, I kept seeing these people that seemed really kind of sad,” he continued.
He says he also kept encountering people who seemed sad and downtrodden, and began to imagine a narrative for them.
“I’d see this guy, sitting in a bar by himself, huddling over his drink,” said Lang.
“There’s something about Reno and the fact that it always lives in the shadow of Vegas, like, it’s the second best for this kind of thing and I love their motto: ‘The Biggest Little City in the World,’ which is kind of pathetic but also awesome.”
While walking about with the band, a member suggested going to a “Reno casino” and that stuck with Lang. He wrote the words down in his phone and came back to them when thinking about the Way Out Yonder project.
Listen to “Reno Casino” by Trevor Lang below:
To listen to the rest of Way Out Yonder, and the rest of his catalogue, check out Trevor Lang on Bandcamp, Tidal, Apple Music or Spotify.
Though he lives in Germany, and doesn’t plan on permanently moving back to Victoria anytime soon, Lang says he will be visiting during the holiday season this year to see some friends and family.
Those who want to see him perform while he’s here can catch Lang playing alongside Elbow Kiss at Little Fernwood on December 22nd.
Aside from that, Lang is loving the music community of Berlin, and has already found himself playing drums for a handful of bands, as well as playing more folk music as a duo with his friend Sam Geraghty-Cohen called Sam & Trevor.
Follow Trevor Lang on Instagram to stay up-to-date with all he does out in Germany, as well as here in Victoria.
Related:
- New Music Monday: palace oaks cosmically driven to write music for debut album
- New Music Monday: Horseback Jesus blend art-rock and noise on debut release ‘The Cart’
- New Music Monday: Pony Gold surrenders to feeling on debut full length album
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“CFUV, but also college radio stations as a whole, this is the forefront of culture. It starts there and everything flows up from the bottom,” Lang said.
“Before the bigger radio stations start picking stuff up, or people start getting record contracts and stuff, the people who are actually paying attention and digging deeper than the general population are the people working at these stations.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Trevor Lang in the comments below!
