“Everything’s covered in dirt,” 25-year-old Conduct singer and guitarist Nick Liang says over the phone from Winnipeg. “It’s just a dirty city right now. These weather extremes are trending in the direction of the end of humanity.” It’s not cold in Winnipeg, where Liang lives. This is odd in December, especially for a city that, late in 2013, registered temperatures colder than Mars. Environmental issues are only a small part of a large, complicated mess of things that make Liang frustrated. That frustration is apparent in the urgency and immediate danger of Conduct’s debut album, Fear and Desire, a sharp, tangled, heavy web of noise assaults, ranging from skewed punk rock to German progressive. The album is set for release on Jan. 27 through Liang’s own Public Tone Records.Winnipeg has a long and storied history of brash noise rock and punk, and Liang has been a part of that for some time now. His previous band, Departures, was a dense, college and post-rock-esque monster, whose 2012 album Still and Moving Lines swung for the fences in a big way. However, after losing a couple members, it felt no longer appropriate to carry on as the same band.“The Departures record was made with a certain set of people and also reflects a very specific time, and all of those things are no longer realities of the band,” Liang explains. Instead, Liang did away with old ideas, and started a fresh slate with the group’s core members, Stephen Kesselmann (guitar), Graeme Wolfe (bass), and Rob Gardiner, one of the city’s most talented young drummers. Once the Fear and Desire was written, they set off to Chicago to record with famous (or infamous, depending on who you talk to) producer and engineer Steve Albini, the man partly responsible for records by bands like Nirvana, Pixies, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. During the short time they were in the studio, Tim Midyett (Silkworm, Bottomless Pit) did some guitar for the title track.The result is an album as intense as Conduct’s live show, which is saying something: late in December, for the local, early release show of the album, Liang set himself on fire.Noisey: Why go with Steve Albini? Seems like a pricey decision for a young band.
Nick Liang: Well, committing to a certain fidelity means incurring a minimum cost. We decided it was in our best interests to work with someone who was both extremely experienced and sympathetic to the music we're making, and Steve satisfied both those requirements. And we wanted that not because of his pedigree or artists he'd worked with in the past, but because it insured the recording won't fail the record. If anything, we'd be the ones who fail the record.You say in your press release the record is “an angry polemic against the complacency that pervades modern life.” Why is art that stands against complacency important?
The band is in no way political, although we're political people. It exists solely to satisfy our creative whims. A natural extension of being political people is that it might inform some of the content of the band, but the band doesn't operate as a political outlet.So you’re not trying to start a revolution, this is just how you feel.
If [revolution] was ever the by-product of a single piece of work or art, that'd be pretty amazing, but we don't have the hubris to ever say that anything we’ve been involved with could have that profound an effect on people.The record sounds pretty angry.
The bare minimum we can do as people, and particularly as citizens, to be as educated as possible about what's informing the culture we live in. And not only that, but what our governments are doing on our behalf, and that education leads to a temperament that is probably evident by listening to the record. You don't have to look very far to be incensed by the current climate, both environmentally and politically.Is there anything you’re particularly frustrated with?
There's no one social or political ill that's driving the content on the record—it's everything. The least worst result is being angry. It's very reasonable. What's even more angering is the fact that people who are victims of this oppression aren't even given the dignity of indignation. Someone can kill your children and there's no accountability for it, no recourse for it, anything. But then on top of that, the victims of these crimes are then expected to behave civilly. They can't just be angry for themselves and the crime that's been committed, they also have to then comport themselves so their actions are representative of their entire people. It's an astounding pressure to put on someone whose family members have just been killed or raped. And they're not even allowed this dignity of being indignant.If anything egregious ever happens to the people you love and care about, you want to shout in the streets, you want to be angry, you want to be expressive. You don't want to be muted, you don't want these crimes to go unaccounted for and you don't want your family members to be a punctuation mark in history.Would you call Fear and Desire a reaction to these things?
I don't think it's reactionary as much as it is persisting as a person in the times we live in. I think it takes a pretty shuttered person to not have these things have that sort of effect on them." We're angry and affected by these things in real life, so it's going to bleed into the music as well. It's not like we're constantly angry, but I think our general temperament is disillusioned.What’s the most disconcerting issue, globally, to you?
They all bleed into each other, but environmental policy and the environment, I think, is an incredibly urgent matter. And it's not urgent to me or you, necessarily, because we happen to live in a place where there's infrastructure and we have a great deal of social security and things like that, but these changes in the environment are going to affect anyone who lives 50 miles from a coast, which most developing nations, that's a large portion of the entire population, I think about three billion people live near a coast. So even if inclement weather doesn't kill these people, it'll be displacement and economic disaster that will.If this culling of the population was equally distributed across the planet, but it's not going to be. It's going to happen to the poorest people in the world, the people who have the least ability to deal with it.Why did you make the record?
It's a very selfish thing. We're doing it solely to satisfy our creative whims, like I said, and figured it'd be a good idea for our own purposes to document that. We have a very direct relationship between our aspirations and success. That means that, say, if we want to write a song, once the song's written, that's a success. There are no outside considerations beyond that. It seems very silly for us to care because those outside considerations are not measurable.It’s as simple as you wanted to do something, so you did it. Liang: I think that's the only way people really can act, realistically. There's no way to measure the other things. If someone says "I like your music," and you think, "oh, I want more people to like my music," how can you measure that? There's no way to measure that. The only way you really can know is if you like what you're doing. Everything else is just speculation or conjecture. And not only that, it's not very satisfying to try to satisfy other people.Matt Williams is angry on Twitter - @MattGeeWilliams
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Nick Liang: Well, committing to a certain fidelity means incurring a minimum cost. We decided it was in our best interests to work with someone who was both extremely experienced and sympathetic to the music we're making, and Steve satisfied both those requirements. And we wanted that not because of his pedigree or artists he'd worked with in the past, but because it insured the recording won't fail the record. If anything, we'd be the ones who fail the record.
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The band is in no way political, although we're political people. It exists solely to satisfy our creative whims. A natural extension of being political people is that it might inform some of the content of the band, but the band doesn't operate as a political outlet.So you’re not trying to start a revolution, this is just how you feel.
If [revolution] was ever the by-product of a single piece of work or art, that'd be pretty amazing, but we don't have the hubris to ever say that anything we’ve been involved with could have that profound an effect on people.The record sounds pretty angry.
The bare minimum we can do as people, and particularly as citizens, to be as educated as possible about what's informing the culture we live in. And not only that, but what our governments are doing on our behalf, and that education leads to a temperament that is probably evident by listening to the record. You don't have to look very far to be incensed by the current climate, both environmentally and politically.Is there anything you’re particularly frustrated with?
There's no one social or political ill that's driving the content on the record—it's everything. The least worst result is being angry. It's very reasonable. What's even more angering is the fact that people who are victims of this oppression aren't even given the dignity of indignation. Someone can kill your children and there's no accountability for it, no recourse for it, anything. But then on top of that, the victims of these crimes are then expected to behave civilly. They can't just be angry for themselves and the crime that's been committed, they also have to then comport themselves so their actions are representative of their entire people. It's an astounding pressure to put on someone whose family members have just been killed or raped. And they're not even allowed this dignity of being indignant.
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I don't think it's reactionary as much as it is persisting as a person in the times we live in. I think it takes a pretty shuttered person to not have these things have that sort of effect on them." We're angry and affected by these things in real life, so it's going to bleed into the music as well. It's not like we're constantly angry, but I think our general temperament is disillusioned.What’s the most disconcerting issue, globally, to you?
They all bleed into each other, but environmental policy and the environment, I think, is an incredibly urgent matter. And it's not urgent to me or you, necessarily, because we happen to live in a place where there's infrastructure and we have a great deal of social security and things like that, but these changes in the environment are going to affect anyone who lives 50 miles from a coast, which most developing nations, that's a large portion of the entire population, I think about three billion people live near a coast. So even if inclement weather doesn't kill these people, it'll be displacement and economic disaster that will.If this culling of the population was equally distributed across the planet, but it's not going to be. It's going to happen to the poorest people in the world, the people who have the least ability to deal with it.Why did you make the record?
It's a very selfish thing. We're doing it solely to satisfy our creative whims, like I said, and figured it'd be a good idea for our own purposes to document that. We have a very direct relationship between our aspirations and success. That means that, say, if we want to write a song, once the song's written, that's a success. There are no outside considerations beyond that. It seems very silly for us to care because those outside considerations are not measurable.It’s as simple as you wanted to do something, so you did it. Liang: I think that's the only way people really can act, realistically. There's no way to measure the other things. If someone says "I like your music," and you think, "oh, I want more people to like my music," how can you measure that? There's no way to measure that. The only way you really can know is if you like what you're doing. Everything else is just speculation or conjecture. And not only that, it's not very satisfying to try to satisfy other people.Matt Williams is angry on Twitter - @MattGeeWilliams