Interview with Elephant Stone

ELEPHANT STONE: PASSING THROUGH THE INTERMEDIATE STATE

"These days, there’s less of that ‘oh, here’s the part where he breaks out the sitar!’" - Rishi Dhir

Words by Jasper Willems
Photo by Remco Brinkhuis

Rishi Dhir’s a cool cat, just not in that conspicuous, braggadocio rockstar sort of way. Naw, Dhir is more the Matt Hooper-archetype, that goofy science maverick who wears a profound love for the job on his sleeve. As opposed to dropping into a shark cage, though, Dhir drops the sitar for the likes of Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Horrors, Allah-Las and The Black Angels.

Oh, right, he also happens to front his own dynamite outfit since 2009: Montreal-based psych rockers Elephant Stone. With third album The Three Poisonsdue for release next week, Rishi sat down with us within the confines of the placid press area at this year’s Best Kept Secret festival to discuss what may be the band’s most ambitious LP yet.

So…the show went down well?
It was fun! It’s the last show of the tour. How many people, two thousand? I don’t know exactly how many people showed up , but it was packed! It was like four thousand capacity. Basically if you would pile up all the crowds of our previous shows this tour, it would basically be as big as this show.

So you’re basically saying Best Kept Secret was the biggest Elephant Stone show yet?
I think so… *suddenly has dumbstruck expression on face* Yeah, totally! That’s the biggest show we’ve ever played! In cities like London or Paris we’ve been playing for a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty people. *laughs*

Have you guys figured out the new songs by now? The material on The Three Poisons seems tricky to translate to a live stage.
We’re still figuring those out. We started the tour by playing a lot of new songs. And then we realized that the mood of these songs were different from the last record. So we kept moving songs around. By the end of it, we realized people actually know our last record, so they want to hear that record. People knew the lyrics and they were singing them along! So when we play the new songs, it doesn’t get as much reaction out of them. So we played about two new songs each night. We’re playing our single “Three Poisons” and “Echo & The Machine”.

I recall you mentioning one particular show where you played The Three Poisons in its entirety.
Yeah, that was pretty much a week after we finished the record. We played Austin Psych Fest and my publicist wanted me to play the whole record. So we learned everything within a week. And it was really stressful! But the crowd appreciated it. I hope people thought it was a bold move to just play the new material. I think people liked it, it was an interesting challenge.

I could imagine you engaging different entry points while constructing these tunes, less of a traditional songwriting MO for one. Can you tell a bit more on how The Three Poisons deviates from your previous LP’s?
We’ve been touring for a year and a half, almost two years together with this formation of the band. Gab (guitarist Jean-Gabriel Lambert) and I recorded our last (self-titled) record with two other guys. With The Three Poisons, the four of us went in already knowing what our respective strengths were. We’ve been developing the sound a lot live, so as we went to the studio we just really took our time with it. Actually, we mostly worked on a song-by-song basis. Also, we didn’t have our current drummer Miles (Dupire) on our previous record, which was more straight up rock.  With him playing our music has definitely become more groovy. He’s really taken the band to the next level. So much in fact, that as we were mixing the record we made drums more present. These songs are a lot dancier now. Touring a lot makes you realize that people like to dance. Girls like to dance. (Meanwhile Gab, sitting next to Rishi, muses on why Elephant Stone doesn’t just do “what girls like!”)


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