LE LOUP
Interview by Melis Alemdar
Images by Ebru Yildiz
Le Loup, a young D.C. band, went from playing 100-person venues to 500-person venues in the space of
a month (which used to take other bands six months to a year). They got together via frontman Sam’s ad on Craigslist and practiced a lot. They wish people would stop commenting on the length of their album’s title, and focus on the content instead. So let’s do just that: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly is good. Really good. We caught the band right before their first NYC show and had a few revelations…
[Editor’s Note: Le Loup preferred to conduct this interview as a whole entity, and not individual members.
For the record, the band are: Sam Simkoff on banjo, keyboards and vox; Christian Ervin on computer and guitar; Mike Ferguson on guitar, amp and vox; Nicole Keenan on keyboards, French horn and vox; Dan Ryan on bass, percussion and vox; Robert Sahm on drums, percussion and vox; May Tabol on guitar and vox; and Jim Thomson on guitar, amp and vox.]
Everybody seems to be a multi-instrumentalist of some sort. You’re not sticking to just one instrument, although I’m sure maybe you play one better than the others?
We all play different things. Nicole plays keyboards and French horn, May will play guitar and bells, Sam
plays a bunch of things [laughs]. We’re adding percus sion instruments, hand claps and all that stuff. A lot of us are seeing this as an opportunity to expand upon some of the instruments they’re not proficient on.
What struck me is the amount of time you’ve been around as a band is less than a year, yet the band sounds… not necessarily overly polished, but well put together.
Nine months. We rehearsed a lot. We practised three times a week for six months, at least.
You can tell.
Yeah, it makes a difference. Glad it shows [laughs]! And there’s a lot of communication on stage, all the time,
as we got to know each other musically. We did a lot of detailed work on the songs. It’s not like we just go in and we all play what we think we should play. We analyze every part of the song, every piece that anybody plays. It took a lot of hard work to put it together; it is pretty complicated. It was funny ‘cause we all worked so hard,but I didn’t realize that this was gonna be something that we really did, until it happened. We worked really hard.
You had regular jobs and then you got together to practice?
We still do. [Laughs] Splitting the money seven ways makes it a little bit complicated. Sam’s CD had so many parts that it takes minimum seven people to play them all. We could use seven more people.
Your album is coming out at the end of the month?
Actually it’s coming out this Tuesday, right there with Kanye. We’re gonna bust the charts. Kanye, if you’re
listening, this is going down.
So. The record title.
[Wearily] Yes.
Lengthy.
Thank you, for pointing that out! [Laughs] You’re the first person to tell us that! The first slew of reviews has just came through and it’s ironic, they waste about fifty words per review talking about how annoyingly long the album name is.
They don’t use an acronym?
Our acronym is still longer than most other bands’. Yes! It is pretentious! But we’re an indie band! [Laughs] The album name comes from a piece of art I saw at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. The first time I saw it
I think it was the first art gallery I went to in D.C. and the downstairs there’s a Folk art section. At the centerpiece of the Folk art section is this piece by James Hampton called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. Are you familiar with it at all? [Laughs]
I checked it out online but the picture was kinda small.
It doesn’t do it justice. It’s great. The way they have it set up, they’ve got these really nice soft yellow lights on it, it looks really gorgeous.
Is it in the permanent collection, or on loan?
I think it’s on loan to them, and it’s only a piece of it. It’s actually in colonial Williamsburg, I think. It’s staggeringly large and they’ve only got a portion of it at the Portrait Gallery. Even that portion is, just, astounding. Basically, he wrapped pieces of discarded furniture and lightbulbs, detritus in gold and silver tinfoil . He’d go late at night after work; nobody knew he was doing it, building this collage. He’d work all night putting together this shrine for 14 years. It’s really beautiful in a very odd and very delicate homemade way. After I learned about what he had done and why he did it and how he did it, that was just an interesting process – one that I think anybody who holes up in their bedroom and makes something can relate to. So that’s where I got the name. I apologize for the record but I want to hear no more about it!
I can imagine reviewers abbreviating it as The Throne…
Yeah The Throne… would be great. That piece of work was found after he died, though. Whereas this man is very, very alive.
What’s the cover art?
The cover art is something I did at work, when I was supposed to be working. I had a desk and it was facing
the door. There was this drawer in the middle of the desk. I had it laid out in the flat drawer. When nobody was walking by, I would open up the drawer and start drawing more of it. When someone walked by, I would close it and pretend I was working on my computer. It’s all text-based, and the background is the gold color and it’s all the lyrics packed inside 4.5 by 4.5 inches, and in gold foil it’s just the name of the album and the name of the band. It’s very simple,but I think it looks nice. It’s very delicate looking. It kinda looks like a crazy person’s manifesto. But I think it’s pretty.

artist=Le Loup
interviewer=Melis Alemdar