Talking narcissism, the devil, and Drake with Loji

On April 17th, Toronto-based duo Loji released their seventh single “Hunt,” a bouncy electro-pop anthem that leads any listener down a tunnel of ultimate distress and nirvana. Ever so gracefully walking the line between the two, the band – consisting of Marko Cindric and Sam Earle – has shown how carefully and eloquently they’ve been able to do so on their other singles as well – “Difference,” “Language,” “Eden”; I could go on forever.

Even with all the intricacies of every tune – how the bass flows into the melody into the lyrics into that feeling you get, the one you can’t describe but feel it pouring out of your skull – there’s a level of comfort in the discomfort, something you can hold onto and swiftly let go. It’s a hard feeling for a musician to create, and it’s unbelievable they were able to get it right their first time and keep it consistent ever since.

After speaking with the boys about Toronto, music, and everyone’s favorite Canadian export Drake, I learned that it would be wrong to describe Loji as just a band, or just two guys making beats. They are something bigger, something greater.

What is kind of a brief history of Loji?

Marko: We were both in the same film class at [University of Toronto], but we technically first met at a Crystal Castles show — Sam recognized me from our tutorial earlier that week. I’m like 6’1” and have very specific hair so I was probably just a strange beacon.

Sam: I’m also like 6’1”, so even in those first meetings, we were already seeing eye to eye ;). I noticed a striking group of kids chatting in a circle outside one of my tutorials. Marko was bobbing about, greasing the wheels of conversation. It was a good, fruitful social moment amid an often brutal academic experience. Soon enough, Marko was showing me some of his dark electro beats through laptop speakers on a campus bench. I’d long had lyrical leanings, so the match was made.

Marko: Sam had a few rough project files saved on his laptop too, and it was pretty obvious that we both kind of filled in each other’s blanks in terms of our respective skill sets. So we started hanging out, I kept crashing on the couch at his parents’ house, and we eventually moved into our own apartment so we could start putting together a studio space. The band name was Sam’s idea, actually — I don’t remember exactly how it came about, but I know I was thinking about “Ecology,” “Topology,” things like that. We basically conceptualized the project as a contained ecosystem, and the songs were the creatures populating it.

You guys have a super unique sound for sure — where does your inspiration come from?

Marko: Honestly, it’s a pretty hilarious combination of things. Like, Sam’s really into Drake and got me hooked pretty early on, and I’m really into like… weird IDM and lo-fi house and music that sounds like it’s from the ‘80s when it was really created in 2014. But I’ve always preferred catchy, poppy things to stuff that’s complex for complexity’s sake — I used to play in a pop punk band in high school so I pretty much learned how to make electronic music by spending a lot of time listening to the Ramones. But in terms of specifics, I feel like everyone should be listening to Smerz right now (we actually covered “Blessed” at a few live shows), and I’ve always loved iamamiwhoami and TR/ST and Fever Ray / The Knife.

Sam: My filmmaker friend got me into The Knife — it busted my ass. That shaped my ear for electronic music. I was already out here covering “Shut it Down” on acoustic guitar. We won’t talk about it. All these Mac DeMarco type kids — Homeshake, Chris LaRocca, Young Clancy — I love them. I would be doing a bad homage to that kind of thing had I not been so thoroughly consumed by the digital (my undergrad was one long, multi-lane swerve, out of literature into machine learning), and — much more significantly — met a willing collaborator who was able to masterfully create emotional, melodic, EDM-playgrounds on a laptop, in an instant, often in a park.

Toronto is such a cultural hub for art — especially music — and the past decade or so has seen an incredible amount of work come out of there. How would you say being in Toronto has influenced your guys’ work, and what are some of your favorite parts of being there?

Marko: I grew up in a small town just outside of London (Ontario) and basically ran to the city the moment I got the chance. I almost ended up in Montreal — and still might someday, because I love it there (shoutout to Arbutus Records) — but Toronto’s been so good to me. I started out working the merch table for this promoter called Wavelength, and I got to experience so many amazing local bands as a result. I was barely a student for most of my time at U of T — I became so enamored with the music scene and basically just threw myself into it every chance I got. I’d say we’re definitely in a bit of a transitional period here, especially since everything is so damn expensive, but Toronto has always been a resilient place, and that definitely comes through in the art being created here.

Sam: It’s hard to know how Toronto influences me, because it’s hard to know how it doesn’t — I grew up here, and I’m quiet. I’ve travelled, but I have terribly extensive roots here, roots that go back and intertwine with my parents’ pasts in comedy and theatre. Now, post-school, searching for a greater sense of agency and direction, I’m starting to understand these gifts as gifts. There’s so much interesting work being done in Toronto — in music, film, theatre, new media — that I remain totally absorbed by the little roles I have to play in these intermingling worlds. I’m swept up in, and indebted to, all these different currents at once, to the point where the idea of Toronto is either raucous and ever-expanding (real life from within), or sly and self-diminishing (“The 6ix” from without).

There is a definitely a visual aspect to Loji as well (I know Marko creates all the cover art for your tracks!), what would you say is the importance of combining the visual aspect with the music?

Marko: It’s actually pretty wild — I don’t consider myself to be that visual, and yet the songs take on such a clear environmental or elemental orientation almost immediately in the process. It’s like the production is the space and the lyrics are the body moving through the space. We make a lot of references to water, so that tends to be a persistent motif. When I first started making things using Blender, I got really into the fluid simulation function, and I think Sam and I both share a fascination with complicated simulations and systems in general (especially in games like SimCity 4 or Civilization, or even Roller Coaster Tycoon). I’m particularly interested in the interplay between something that looks photorealistic but remains “impossible” in some way, and I also just really like drawing attention to the weird seams of the software in that sense.

Sam: The idea of those simulations is solid ground of the songwriting process. It’s a tricky game; sometimes it feels like I’m speaking with the devil, sometimes I feel petty and narcissistic, and sometimes I feel transcendental to the point of self-annihilation. That’s when I have to reframe the work in terms of a simulation. Then the song again becomes a story, an observation of something real, and yet I can do away with gravity, cause, or non-contradiction if the story demands it, because the simulation is only a shared idea between me and Marko, and we’re only ever approximating or instantiating some of it in any given piece of work. The simulation is the subject that liberates us from all other subjects. By dressing the music up in a physical system, my emotional impulses are able to coexist with, and placate, my thirst for concrete, mechanical things. Often, I feel these different sides of myself wanting to destroy each other for their respective imperfections, so they need to be aggressively bound together in order for life to make sense.

What does the typical songwriting process look like? What are some of your favorite parts of creating music?

Marko: Oh god, haha. It’s one of the few things I can actually sit there and focus on, and when I do, I tend to focus so much that I’m forgetting to drink water, and next thing you know it’s like 6:00 AM. But Sam’s got a very similar work ethic, and sometimes just being near someone who’s on the grind is super inspiring — I remember writing the main melody of “Stepper” in the computer science building at U of T while Sam was pulling an all-nighter working on a group project. I was probably supposed to be writing a paper.

Sam: Yes! It was a natural-language-processing thing, which is a fun juxtaposition. I think someone’s beat me to a text-generation algorithm trained on Drake lyrics scraped from the web (though the results were not particularly impressive…), but these are exactly the kind of ideas that complement my songwriting, and that Marko’s precision-beats underline so well. I tend to write in short bursts surrounded by work demanding equal creative exertion from other parts of my brain. A creative outpouring will typically start in my body and move me to dance right off the bat, before materializing as lyrics, then sometimes music, and finally I’ll return with a heightened sense of rigor to something with a more explicit logic, until I’m consumed by some puzzle or other that I can’t surmount. It can be exhausting. Sometimes I’ll wake up and write a small chunk of something pure, and it will leave my head completely as I promptly go about a day’s worth of less-abstract things.

Marko: I feel like one of my favorite things about the whole process is that the songs always end up being so connected to the time in which they were created. I mean, even when Sam shows me the lyrics he’s been working on, it feels like he’s writing about exactly what’s been happening in my life. But I think we both want the songs to leave a lot of space for the listener’s own projection and interpretation. So maybe my personal experience is just an example of Sam’s lyrics being incredibly effective in that sense. I think I referred to them as cubist once — it’s like they construct an account of something from multiple angles at once.

What do you guys see as the future of the band? Where would you like it to go?

Marko: I feel like Sam and I both appreciate the challenge of evolving the sound and trying new things, so I just want to keep following threads in the network and seeing where they lead — both in terms of the music itself, and the places it will take us to. We just played our first Montreal show earlier this year, and last year we played this amazing little DIY festival in a farm field near Ottawa, and both were super rewarding experiences, so I think we’re definitely getting more interested in the idea of touring.

Sam: The fun thing is that the work has a life of its own. I want to design software that can extend and complement the process of artistic creation, and I want this software to empower regular, creative people, though that’s a glint in my eye at the moment. The music, too – if we’re going to bother putting it out – should absolutely exist for its listeners. I’m inspired again and again by feedback to our work, and there is a dialogue in my head between our music and a kind of faceless crowd of local (or internet-connected) consumers and producers. Ultimately, I’m a blind animal struggling for power, so… yeah.

You can stream “Hunt” and the rest of their singles on Spotify, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud, and follow the group on Instagram and Twitter.

Written by Leka Gopal