Fantasy world

TAKE A BOW Pallett plays Pitchfork Sat 18.

Photo: David Wald

When our peripheral vision first caught Owen Pallett in 2003, the out violinist was playing with queer band the Hidden Cameras. He began shifting into focus with his string and orchestral arrangements for the Arcade Fire starting in ’04. But in 2005, Pallett came into full view with Final Fantasy, his solo violin project whose name is a hat-tip to the video game.

With He Poos Clouds (2006), our sights were firmly set on him. Written and arranged for string quartet, the frighteningly polished, unabashedly queer and complex album is a satirical song cycle based on the eight schools of magic according to Dungeons & Dragons. More impressively, the classically trained violinist manages live solo shows by playing his instrument into a sampler controlled by foot pedals, which then loops back previously played musical phrases as he performs additional parts simultaneously.

This year, the Toronto-based 29-year-old has arranged two songs on the Pet Shop Boys’ new album, Yes. And this Saturday, he performs at Pitchfork, where he’ll play songs from his forthcoming Heartland, Final Fantasy’s first fully orchestral album. We recently e-mailed Pallett…

On embracing gay themes…
I’m not a preening princess in real life, but yes, my music is really flamingly gay. Gay performers, whether they’re Rufus Wainwright or a drag queen, make themselves the irresistible catamite of the audience, debasing themselves, possessed by the audience and yet possessing them, fucking with the power relationship.

On how his own work relates to that musical theory of catamite or, um, daddy-boy dynamics…
If I look at Final Fantasy from a third-person view, I can see those tropes all over the place. I don’t sing “dick goes in bum” or anything, but there is a great deal of subject-object reversal, deconstructionism, solipsism, and moments of intense self-obsession, self-deprecation and narcissism. There is an element of public self-excoriation involved: an artistic metaphor for the mutilation of our natural masculinity that is implied by gayness.

On the intersection of French literary theory and writing songs…
I reread Roland Barthes last year and thought it’d be interesting to write songs from the perspective of the loved as opposed to the lover.

On his comment in The New York Times that drummers ruin bands…
That was a punch line of an argument, the body of which didn’t make the article. I love drums and percussion, but I don’t have a taste for the standardized drum kit and feel that the tropes of “rock drumming” are dated and based on aesthetic and political decisions I don’t agree with. Rock drums sound, to me, 42 years of oppressive heterosexual male patriarchy.

On collaboration versus solo…
Collaboration is my therapy. Working on my own, I second-guess most of the choices I make. It’s lovely work, but also lonely.

On how long it took to arrange those Pet Shop Boys songs…
A day or two each. By comparison, I wrote an arrangement for a song off Spoon’s last album and spent a month on it.

On the popularity of stringed instruments in popular music…
That is nothing new. There are probably violins on more pop records since 1950 than the Hammond organ. Strings stick their fingers into every genre of music except maybe crust-punk and IDM. Personally, I think pop-classical crossover is mostly because classical music is awesome and pop music is awesome. I don’t think strings have much to do with it.

On his new “romance” album…
“Romance” refers to the subject matter. The album narrates the story of a kid named Lewis who inhabits the fictional world of Spectrum, of which I’m the main deity.

On whether he’ll ever outgrow the pop-culture-specific moniker Final Fantasy…
I don’t worry about it. I like my band name.

Final Fantasy plays Pitchfork Saturday 18.

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