FRACTAL PATTERN
McDougall United Church (10025-101 St). Sat, Mar 28 (8pm). Tickets: $15, available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.ca).

When you’re dealing with Fractal Pattern, things are rarely simple. At the band’s insistence, we have switched up the conventional interviewer/interviewee relationship and instead allowed guitarist Andriko Lozowy to interview me. I was able to answer some of his questions, but others ... well, let’s just say he posed some toughies.

“Fractal Pattern is kind of coming at it in from a different angle now,” Lozowy begins. “In the past, we would write things, in one sense, to fuck up the listener. We wanted them to be listening to a part and then be like, ‘Whoa, what the hell happened there?’ by us doing something different or just completely ridiculous. But now, since last summer at least, we’re coming at it from the angle of making something for our listener to easily digest. We’ve always seen ourselves as one of those moments where you say, ‘Wait a minute; music is something different from just what I hear on Sonic.’”

“Andriko, that’s not a question,” I reply.

“I’m not done.”

“Sorry.”

“Let’s say there’s a band that goes away for a while,” Lozowy continues, a little peeved. “What do they do when they come back? Do they play the same old songs that they were playing four years ago?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I guess it depends on the consensus of the band.”

“This is the point of contention right now,” Lozowy says, “because we don’t know if we should play those old songs that people know or do you play new songs? When you think of the people listening to the music, you’d think that they’d want to hear your older stuff because that’s what attracted them to you in the first place. But on the other side, they may want to know what you’re working on today. People in North America have become extremely savvy to what they want and it has become extremely easy to just drink your soma and be pacified by whatever it is you want to be pacified by. Can we offer something to people that is different from what is out there in the spoon-fed media, in a reality where people may not want to be engaged?”

“But this is the plight of every band,” I reply. “You guys just seem to actually care about the people who are listening to your music.”

And if I may interrupt Lozowy’s interrogation for a second, this seems like a good point to mention that Fractal Pattern’s next show is a benefit for Project Hope, a program that promotes awareness of global issues and helps build much-needed infrastructure within the global community. And in their music, they’ve covered environmental issues such as Syncrude’s toxic “dead bird pool.”

“There is a quote from a horrible movie that states that only at the critical point do we even contemplate changing what we are doing,” Lozowy says. (Was that a question? I’m not sure, but I’ve learned my lesson and keep quiet.) “Not that Fractal Pattern entirely parallels that,” he continues, “but we are doing things and in the band we try to do things a bit differently.”

Interviews, for example.