[Transcript edited for clarity]

Andrew: I'm AJ. On drums is Duncan.

Duncan: That's me.

Andrew: We have Arin on guitar.

Victor: I'm Victor in the back. We crammed the keyboard player in the back.

Absent Sounds: That's awesome. And this is Weadee, welcome to Absent Sounds here on CJAM 99.1 FM reaching higher ground in Windsor and Detroit.

Absent Sound is an album play through show. As you know, where we pick two albums to dive into each week, one Canadian album and one album from anywhere else. Giving you interesting tidbits and stories along the way. Sometimes we have the pleasure of being able to chat with bands themselves and today's one of those special days because we are joined by Conjure Hand.

You guys are from Victoria BC. Shout out to CFUV for introducing us to the band, and we're gonna be doing an interview with them. To start us off, I always love to ask just to give us a base of, who you guys are and how the band even started off. Tell us a little bit about that.

What do you guys do? How do you join the band and what does that look like today?

Andrew: I guess the band started with my love for classic rock music and blues music and everything associated with that. I had a bunch of songs dating back to when I was a young kid that I never really got to write.

I played in heavy metal bands and then had the idea for this around 2020/2021 when I had moved to Victoria and then kind of ran into Victor, a bass player at a party. And we had our old drummer then, and we started just jamming, not really sure where the direction was going, and shortly started making songs, new songs, and decided we need to actually make this a real thing.

And then it just kind of grew from there. And now we have the lineup. We have and everybody's pretty much from different musical backgrounds too. Duncan and I played together for a while in different bands growing up. And then Arin's played guitar for a while. Vince is actually from Windsor and

Absent Sounds: ah, shout out.

Andrew: Yeah. But he's a, a multi-instrumentalist and he is been playing in groups out in Victoria and beyond. And, and then Victor as well played with some bands in Alberta. So

Absent Sounds: Wow, that's definitely pretty spread out. You mentioned that you know, you all had kind of different musical backgrounds when you came to the band.

Does that include like musical interest as well? Is there different genres of music or bands that you all kind of gravitate towards that, you know, maybe someone else in the band doesn't really like or vice versa?

Andrew: I think we all kind of have a general thing circle of artists that we listen to.

Like when we go into writing songs, we're all pretty much influenced by classic rock, jazz, blues, anything that you could hear on a vinyl record in the sixties and seventies. It's kind of fair game even disco music and progressive music and stuff from there.

So you know bands like the Allman Brothers and Fin Lizzie are bands that really unify us. Like we all really like them. Same with like pretty much all Blues, BB King, Buddy Guy. We were just listening to King Curtis in the car here. And then there's stuff that I wouldn't say that nobody doesn't like.

Maybe they, some of the extreme metal or punk stuff that some of us like or something, but that’s probably not as much of a focus on what we don't like. It's the stuff we don't know. So,

Absent Sounds: ah, okay.

Andrew: You know, Duncan might come at me with a Toric band. You know, Arin might come at me with something and Vince might come at me with a jazz band that or each other with these groups that we don't we aren't familiar with.

Absent Sounds: That's a good way to describe it. Bands that you don't know rather than necessarily what you don't like. And I think that's kind of, that openness definitely shows up in the way that you play music too. How you just kind of let the music flow instead of trying to necessarily pigeonhole it into something.

I guess I'll jump a little bit back 'cause I'm curious about the names, I love names and how you guys came up with it. Where does Conjure hand come from? What is Conjure Hand or a conjure hand?

Andrew: So when the project started, I kind of knew that I wanted to write it about Black history and the Black experience mainly lyrically.

And so being from a Trinidad background and having Canadian American roots and stuff, I felt having something that to do with Voodoo would work. And our old guitar player Tanner and I, we kind of bounce names off of each other. So I think the first one he had was Mojo Hand, which is just a Lightning Hopkins album.

And then, we kept switching and I had saw a old blues pamphlet that said, con your hand in it, or and it was an old flyer trying to get kind of Robert Johnson era players together at a juke joint to play. So the conjure part obviously kind of touches in with the voodoo that comes out of our culture.

And then the hand as well is the con, the mojo hand that was part of the southern mystery, I guess.

Absent Sounds: Mm-hmm. There's two things that kind of really stood out to me in what you're saying there. The idea, well, of having so much diversity of really wanting to tie back into you know, American, but also like Trinidadian roots and Canadian.

I know some people don't really feel very connected to wherever, but it almost feels like a diaspora of roots. I'm curious about where each of you find yourselves situated from.

Andrew: Well, probably for me, partly it's, I'm really into Marcus Garvey and stuff, so the Black experience and being adopted. I was kinda always into all of it, all corners of it. So yeah, I've got personally Trinidad roots. You know, Duncan and Victor and, I dunno, Vince are probably more straight Scottish UK average nothing too, too crazy. Might be some Scandinavia or something in there that's interesting. But Arin's Iranian though, so. Hmm. Persian roots. And then I guess think the one unifier though, besides ethnic roots is we're all from, like we all have working class blue collar backgrounds.

In that terms, which, which I think is another theme that's in our music. We're not writing music for rich people or, or anything. Or people really in offices. We're very much working in factories, warehouses, shops, kind of people. And yeah. And I think that can, I think class can supersede race sometimes, or area or it can help better understand racial divides and things like that. So we try to bring it out in our music. The fact that we all are from different backgrounds, but they're still they're still very strong, unified thread.Yeah. There's still a commonality within that.

Absent Sounds: Yeah I love that. And also I was wondering about other bands that you know of that also have a focus on this in their musicality whether in Victoria or in BC 'cause I'm always looking for new music. I love hearing about different bands that are doing cool stuff.

Andrew: We we're still kind of young and new in BC so I don't know if I know a whole lot. There's some really unique bands I've had to, pleasure of seeing you know, TK the artist is from Nigeria and he's doing more of an Afrobeats thing, and there's a Trinidad fellow named Caleb Hart, and he's doing more of a Soca Trinidad reggae kind of thing. And then Postmodern Connection is a band from Vancouver, I believe, and they have a kind of a, an indie soul thing. And I think he's somewhere from Africa somewhere. And thenthere's interesting bands too, like Blue Moon Mark Key, where you have a band that kind of blends Zydeco music and wash tub, kind of hillbilly music with indigenous music, indigenous singing and folk tales and with Southern Memphis blues.

So that's like a band that I saw recently that you can really tell when you watch them that there's three people from different backgrounds, musically, and just lifewise.

Absent Sounds: Thank you. I'll check out some of those bands that you mentioned. I had some questions based on your latest release, which, it definitely really cool- Spellbound Blues Volume I. First of all, is there gonna be a Volume Two? Does that leave room for Volume Three? Why the name?

Andrew: So it was supposed to be just Spellbound Blues, and we realized in the studio that the album was too long. So for a vinyl record it wouldn't fit, so we decided to better prepare ourselves for that step, to split it into two volumes. So volume two is ready to go pretty much. We're in the final stages of getting that ready to be put together for probably a CD release and then a vinyl release as well. And, there'll just be those two volumes. And then we will be working on an EP soon, and then I guess probably another full length album and to keep on trucking.

Absent Sounds: How long did it take you guys to put the whole thing together?

Arin: Four years? Oh boy. I mean, for something that started in like late 2021 and went through quite a few different permutations. It's been a hell of a long road. As far as solidifying this lineup and besides a couple of songs that started off pretty early, I'd say it was probably around oh, a year and a half ago that everything came together to the point that we were prob pretty much ready to start thinking about recording. So yeah for the most part AJ's kind of our primary writer. He's very good with ideas and he brings a lot of stuff in that he's kind of demoed already and has ideas for everyone else's parts.

So he is definitely the dominant factor in all of this. And it's really great. We all definitely have our own input and kind of hammer things out together. But yeah, this is very much AJ's baby, this, this thing really quite, quite impressively prolific. We're all, we're all, we're all pretty amazed a lot of the time how quickly you can put something together in its own head. So just comes in one day and he just shows us like this new song.

Andrew: I'm excited for our newest stuff because this is the first. The band had a quite a few different lineups before it actually recorded something. And now that we've got this record under our belt, which was songs that I mainly mostly wrote, labored over with Victor and, and Duncan's a big part of too.

But now going forward, everybody's kind of there at the beginning process more so, so everybody's individual flare is getting put into the songs more. So it's I hope that my goal is that the songs are more exciting live because the players that are creating them and making them are more invested in them.

Absent Sounds: Yeah. That totally makes a lot of sense. And I'm sure that your songwriting is gonna change or not change, but evolve over time slowly. What does your live performance look like right now? 'Cause there's some bands that I would say their albums sound…not different from their albums, but it not you know, there's a recorded version and then the studio version. Were you able to capture that kind of live recording sound in your studio recording?

Andrew: think we try to just aim for how it sounds live or- how it sounds on the record, it should sound live, but with more energy.

Absent Sounds: Mm-hmm. Gotcha.

Andrew: You know, sometimes I think the biggest struggle for us now is getting that consistency going whereyou feel like you're nailing it every time.

And I feel like the band, before we had the record done, when we'd play songs live, it was always a question of what you could maybe do to this part of that part. But now that recorded, you kind of have more of a direction in which to shoot for.

We try to be pretty faithful live to the way that we've recorded the songs now that we actually have them recorded.

Yeah. And I'm sure in time we might wanna play with those songs a bit more and kinda rearrange them a bit. And once we eventually get bored of playing them, that we're trying to be pretty faithful to what we've laid down in the studio. So what we laid down in the studio was also pretty trying to be pretty faithful to the way that we play live.

We play them spontaneously live.

Andrew: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It should be natural. I'm really into bands like deep Purple and the Allman Brothers and like a lot of the classic bands that would just be able to record live and it be a reflection of what they would be like in the studio and vice versa.

Absent Sounds: That makes a lot of sense. Jumping into the album bit more Spellbound Blues volume one- is there a theme or a story that you've seen woven throughout the album as a whole?

Andrew: I used a lot of influence from probably like 19th century slave stories. So there's a lot of that kind of thing. John Ware, our song, is that's early 1900 Canadian, Black Settler Farmer history. And then Henry Bib Spellbound blues, is kind of inspired by a runaway slave from America.

And then The Trick is kind of based on slave catching and stuff like that. But then there's some more current ones, somewhat. Out of Sight kind of deals with the streets and riots and homelessness and things like that. And You Weren't There kind of tackles more of the Black family structure and issues with prison and stuff like that.

So I tried to kind of keep it all to do with like the Black history. I know, but I did kind of gear towards more of an earlier theme as much as I could

Absent Sounds: Even just this power in being able to shape the story, you know, really tell the story in a way that not necessarily is told before, but also being able to share that with others and the way that it comes from. I always struggle with this idea, but really feeling like my story is part of Black history because I am a Black person and this is also part of my legacy toom right.

So I really appreciate that about the band. I wonder is there any of the songs that particularly stays with you or sticks with you because of what it's speaking about?

Andrew: I think John Ware will always have that. There's Spellbound Blues Arin. I think everybody's got a bit of a favorite song in certain aspects.

You Weren't There’s the big one 'cause it's kind of influenced by some of my own family personal history. But I think all the songs, like all the songs we write should always, be meaningful. So I would say that pretty much almost everything is really, it's hard to pick one 'cause they all do have a meaning to 'em.

Absent Sounds: Yeah. If someone was trying to get into the style of music- 'cause I know, at least for me, getting into Southern Gothic took a bit of time. One book that really helped me get into it was Flannery O'Connor.

I love her writing. Is there an album or I guess any a song particularly from Conjure that you would recommend say, this is a song that would really be a first landing place that would be a good place to start.

Andrew: I, yeah, I think John Ware would be. Out of Sight. A good one.

If you're like kind of a country folky kind of person I'd probably show you John Ware because it's a little bit rock roll. But it's enough that it's not,

Andrew: And it really shows a story. But if you're looking for really like groove and musicality, then you're more of just like a music person that likes kind of hard rock then I would suggest Out of Sight, it's got almost like a disco push to it where it's, it's almost a dance song, but it's a rock song too. p>Arin: I'd say Jungle Blood is a bit more than that as far as Bluesier, I think. If you just like to move, The Shake Down.

Absent Sounds: Okay. That's a song for me then, right? I'm just kidding.

Andrew: I mean, if you like more psychedelic stuff, you weren't there, which will be on volume two is more in the vein of that. So yeah, now that I think of it, there's quite a good variety depending on what you're looking for.

Absent Sounds: Yeah, I like that too. There's just such wealth of where you could go with it. Even the places you guys have gone with it too.

I'll ask you guys two more questions. So I know you guys are in your van right now driving off. For anybody who's listening, that's kind of where they're situated.

What does Conjure Hand have on the horizon about live shows, recordings, any new surprises? What's it looking like?

Andrew: Well, we're playing, we're doing this tour with Block Eds from Seattle. Definitely check them out. And then that's just Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo. Then we're playing Duncan in April, which is a little town outside of Victoria.

And we're just hoping to hit as many spots in Western Canada as possible, and hopefully the US in by 2026. Really nothing that we don't want to do with this band. So I think, I think the reason we record music is to play live. We're all really live players. None of us like being cooped up at home too much.

So, I think the goal always is to get our music out there and so we can play and share it with people in the real world. Right. Awesome.

Absent Sounds: And then the last fun question, just this is my own personal selfishness because I like getting book recommendations. What is the last book that you read each of you?

Andrew: Book. Okay. Last book I read was Emma's War, which is about the famine in Sudan in the nineties. What about you, Duncan?

Duncan: The last one I read was the prophet and the rebel. I don't remember who its by, but it's history book about early Islam.

It's such a white answer. Gorman McCarthy, the passenger. Okay. I got a pretty white answer too, but Masters a making of a Wolfenstein and do with the video game