Northern Exposure

LP, the banally-titled latest album for d'Eon, is 2012's most audacious work of thematic lyricism. Conceived as the opposite of “a band like Yes or Tool, all these stupid cosmic lyrics that don't mean anything”, it's a double-album discussion on the place of old-school theology in the information age. “There's not a lot of spirituality on the album,” says Chris d'Eon, the not-related-to-Celine Canadian behind the work. “It's more like: 'Where is God? If Gabriel is the bringer of information in the Bible and in the Koran, why is he, in this era of abundant information, not even in the equation?'”

Raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, d'Eon's father built IT databases for provincial government, and instilled in his son a suspicion in the budding internet. Throughout his youth, d'Eon dreamt only of being a composer: studying piano, music theory and composition through his adolescence. D'Eon would eventually drift to Montreal in 2009, first playing keyboards in a rock band called Omon Ra II, then finally debuting solo amidst an inspired creative scene; his first d'Eon show in the apartment of Doldrums' Aldrick Woodhead, amongst 30 friends who included Sean Nicholas Savage and members of Tops and Braids.

“It was the first d'Eon show, the first Grimes show, the first Majical Cloudz show,” d'Eon recounts. “Through 2010, 2011, there definitely was this feeling that something was happening. We were all friends. Everybody's been friends with each other, dated each other, had sex with each other interchangeably over the years.”

D'Eon's solo sound would draw from a strange mix of influences: kosmische synth music, Indian classical, Steve Reich, early-'90s New Jack Swing (“If I tried to be any more R&B than the music currently is, I think it'd probably sound pretty distasteful.”), mid-'90s drum'n'bass, and '80s Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins. “My whole life I've been listening to Genesis and [Gabriel and Collins'] solo careers,” d'Eon offers, on the latter. “When people on the internet started saying 'his voice, it sounds like Phil Collins', I never would've placed that comparison. And it's true! It's a totally apt comparison. But it's totally unintentional. I never intended to sound adult contemporary, it's just come out, amidst all this stuff.”

All this stuff is, of course, all the thoughtful compositions and dense themes of the heady LP, which grew out of daily life in the new millennium (“when I scroll through a Twitter feed or a Facebook feed, I read all this shit, I know all this shit, but is it really providing any kind of substance?”) and explores the surveillance state as proxy for an omniscient God, and technology itself as a kind of religion; the song My iPhone Tracks My Every Move effectively boiling down those sentiments into its title.

“You can hear the narrator – whoever the voice of the lyrics is – becoming paranoid,” d'Eon says. “'Everyone is watching me except for God. All my friends can see what I'm doing, all my peers can see what I'm doing, anyone can Google me and see who I am and what I am, but there's no sign of God.' Who, traditionally, before the internet, was the only one to have known all those things. It's as if God has been crowdsourced to the rest of society. And I feel like we're definitely underqualified for that role.”