Sometimes life takes a different path than planned. This may have happened to Lachlan Tocher, bassist, composer, and co-founder of the Canadian band Pareidolon. What began as a musical project in 2015 at Selkirk College in Castlegare, British Columbia evolved into a progressive rock band that released their debut album Aporía in 2017. Now, after a hiatus of eight years they released a highly professional concept album called The Unattainable Shore. This album evoked positive reactions from all around the world. The editorial staff of Background Magazine was also impressed and asked Lachlan Tocher to explain how it all came about. He got some help from keyboardist Anna Katarina.

Lachlan Tocher

Where are you coming from and could you please introduce the band members?
"Currently we're living and working in Vancouver, Canada, but we're from all over! My name is Lachlan Tocher and I am the bassist of Pareilodon. I grew up near Toronto in the east of Canada and then moved out to a small town called Nelson here in British Columbia, where we all went to music school and where we met each other. Our keyboardist Anna Katarina is also from there, and together we went to high school. Our singer Brittany Keller hails from the prairies of Saskatchewan, and our guitarist Ashley Pearce grew up mostly in Canada's only desert region, the Okanagan. Last but not least is our drummer Aybars Savat. He came all the way from Izmir in Turkey."

Why did you call the band Pareidolon? Does it have a special meaning?
"I agonized over possible band names for years, and in my first year of college I was procrastinating a project by playing some video games and listening to music. I had been fighting some enemies in the game call Eidolons - the word itself means ghost, spectre or apparition. When I listened to Haken's masterpiece song Pareidolia - that word describes the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in random natural formations like clouds or tree bark - I figured it would be cool to merge them into Pareidolon. I guess it means ghost face or spooky presence."

In 2017 Pareidalon released Aporia. That debut album lasts only half an hour and has a different line-up compared to The Unattainable Shore. What can you tell me about Aporía?
"Aporía was written during music college, each song mostly being for one project or another that had to meet certain requirements. The original intent was just to put together a band for my graduation recital, perform

the songs I had written, and that was that. However, we put so much effort into rehearsing for that show, and we all got along so well, so I figured it would be easy and smart to take advantage of the school's recording studio before the year ended, and everyone parted ways. We managed to record the whole thing in about nine hours spread over three days, and then we all moved away to pursue our dreams. It was rushed and disorganized, but we're still very proud of it. Mostly the line-up is still the same, we just lost two band members who moved on to other things. It was also originally meant to have one more song which would have brought it to about 42 minutes, but we didn't have the time to get that one ready."

What does the title Aporía mean? Has the album a certain theme or concept or is it just a selection of songs?
"Aporía is an old Greek word for profound confusion. It seemed very fitting for the whole project. The album doesn't intentionally have a theme, but it ended up having one in a way due to the nature of its creation. We had no idea how to record an album properly. All the songs were eclectic and mismatched, and we were facing the big scary world and trying to find our place in it as we hunted for careers and new lives fresh out of college. We were all very confused, the album itself sounds confused and unsure what it wants to be, and I think that it makes the album cohesive in an odd way."

The line-up on the album is an equal mix of men and women: three of each gender. Did this happen by accident or on purpose?
"An almost equal mix to be precise. Aporía had four guys and three girls! I didn't intend or even dream that it would be possible to have a gender balance, but intentionally I tried to have a woman in the band as I was aware of the severe lack of estrogen in prog music. When we started in 2015, it was less common for women to be part of a prog rock or metal band. Thankfully, nowadays it happens more frequently. I just lucked out with these awesome ladies being willing to join, and step outside their comfort zones. I got even luckier when they all wanted to keep going for the next record!"

The opening tune Abducted! on Aporía and the closing tune Behind The Glass seemed to be more influenced by metal bands compared to the other tracks. Am I right?
"Absolutely, most of us are huge fans of metal in general, and it always was a considerable influence. Abducted! was meant to be a hybrid of something goofy like Clutch would do, fused with something from Metallica's Load era. Behind The Glass started out as a doom metal song which I fully intended to develop for my solo project Soular, but then I fused it with that proggier, Tool-esque middle section and sped it up a bit. You hear a bit of that metal influence come through on the new record as well, but a little more restrained and nuanced, I think."

There is a musical surprise after the last song has ended. After a few seconds of silence, I heard some weird instrumental music in a hidden track. Who came with the idea to do this?

Anna Katarina

Anna Katarina: "I didn't realize that we did this. When I was listening to the album earlier this year it really took me by surprise!"
Lachlan Torcher: "That is a funny story. I didn't do super well at school, I often wrote what I wanted rather than the assignment asked for, so I passed school narrowly with C and B grades. That hidden track was written for a project demonstrating the concept of parallelism in music, and I was sick of having all my hard work in composition class got such low grades. Basically, I put in zero effort, slammed my hands on a midi keyboard, and threw some quickly programmed drums on it! As a light-hearted middle finger to our truly amazing teachers, the others thought it would be fun to put it on the album as a representation of the 'best' thing I ever accomplished there, so I added it as a hidden track."

Was it difficult to record this album? How do you look at it in retrospect?
"In a way it was difficult since none of us had recorded anything properly before. Five of us were in the audio engineering program, so it came together pretty quick and simple. We had rehearsed well, so recording went easily. I think we only did three takes of drums and bass for each song, and then we recorded the guitars, keyboards and vocals afterwards. Looking back, I feel a combination of pride and disappointment. On the one hand it turned out surprisingly well; on the other it wasn't as detailed or focused as I had hoped. I was too busy stressing about the show, teaching people their parts, and organizing everything to put much effort into my bass parts. I really regret that, but I'm pretty happy with the songs themselves."

How difficult was it to find a record company for releasing your music?
"Well, we didn't! We didn't any promotion or label hunting for that album, we just put it on Bandcamp, and I sent some e-mails to a few prog review sites. The remarkable thing about this genre is that people - like me - are always looking for new obscure music, so it tends to spread well by word of mouth. It would be great to have the back-up of a record label or a record distributor to help us cover the costs for marketing and promotion, but right now I'm just doing everything myself and funding merchandise out of pocket."

Some musicians that appeared on your debut album didn't play on your second one. What is the reason for their absence?
"Indeed, two members quit the band: guitarist Brandon Green and singer Jon Kwak. Brandon just wouldn't continue making music after school. He got 'blue collar' work and focused on building a family. Jon moved away from rock music as a style he didn't want to perform. He went more towards electronic and pop music, so he only partially contributed to the recording sessions for the second album. He can still be heard singing some lines in Voie Aérienne as The Captain, and he's doing the background vocals in a few other songs."

When I compare your picture from your debut with the one on the second album, it seems you have grown from a young boy into an adult with more life experiences. Just like you the compositions are more mature. What do you think about that?
"Thank you, that's very kind to say, and I would definitely agree. I moved away from home and family to find a life of my own in the big city. I went through a depression during the writing of the second album. I dealt with the worldwide pandemic shutdown, and eventually I came out stronger with a clearer sense of myself. The music reflects that: gone are the confusion and the uncertainty that fed Aporía. I replaced it with a complete vision of what I wanted The Unattainable Shore to be. Plus almost ten years of playing live, mixing other projects, and working in the music industry to bolster the quality of the product."

The Unattainable Shore is a concept album. Would you tell us about the content and where did you get the inspiration from?
"It's a concept album like Octavarium by Dream Theater or Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes. It has no plot, no characters, no story to follow, but it was created with a throughline idea of striving to reach a goal and falling short at the last moment. All songs are pervaded with that idea. As I mentioned before, my first years of living on my own in the city were mostly unpleasant and depressing, so that was the mindset in which I began writing. In A Distant Orbit, Emotional Tides, and Ghost Ship were all written in that period. These songs are very pessimistic, and somewhat angry. After that, I started to discover myself and to build up my life, so it was difficult to stay in that headspace for the music, but pulling from real life disasters, mental illness, and loneliness helped me to complete the other songs."

Voie Aérienne is an epic track that lasts for 24 minutes. How did you come up with the idea?
"It took me years! I started writing the first riff for that song in 2015 before I had even formally formed the band, and I finished it in 2022. Then we had to learn our musical parts, and we had to re-record my demo, which took from 2022 until two months before the album was released! It is a beast of a song and incredibly difficult to manage. Originally, it was meant to be a story of a man who has a vision about the death of a family member. He tries to stop it, but ultimately he ends up causing the death, but I just couldn't stretch that long enough. So, I used that concept for a different song Call Of The Wraith in my solo project. Instead, I retold the story in a harrowing experience of British Airways airplane flying through a volcanic cloud, which I learned about from a YouTube mini documentary."

Who made the beautiful cover and booklet for this concept album?
"A man I've never met named Jordan Weiss. He went to the same school as us in the graphic arts program, and I saw one of his pieces in an exhibition they had near the end of my time living in Nelson. I immediately fell in love with his style and asked him to paint this cover for me. I've been holding onto it since then just itching to share it with the world, and I'm very hopeful that he'll be doing the artwork for the third album as well. I did the booklet myself, using pictures taken by a friend of ours, and my modest but usable photoshop abilities."

Brittany Keller

Writing and recording the album seemed to be a real struggle according to the info in the booklet. Would you explain this?
"It really was, it didn't take eight years for no reason! Writing was difficult due to my own personal issues, but they helped me to get through them. Apart from that, it's just an immensely complicated album, and coming up with so many ideas for instruments that I don't even play, is challenging. Eventually I admitted defeat, and I asked the others for contributions. Ashley co-wrote on two songs, Brittany and our friend and on/off member Davis Yates for two others. We all have many other projects and full day jobs as well, so time is tight. Then there was the covid pandemic, some band members having chronic health issues, resulting in burnouts and more postponements to record the album!"

What could have been done better in retrospect?
"For the future I hope to involve the others even more to share the load a bit. Aybars and Ashley also opened their own recording studios halfway through our production, so having that, really sped things up and should be super helpful going forward. I don't want it to be another eight years for the next album."

Which acts were an inspiration for your second album?
"Inspiration comes from many acts, but the general atmosphere I wanted was somber and moody like Porcupine Tree, Anathema, Riverside, that kind of bands. Each song was kind of based on an idea inspired by a different band, so track 1 was Pink Floyd, track 2 was Rush and Arena, track 3 came from a dream I had, track 4 was an attempt to merge two songs from Aporía, track 5 was Metallica, track 6 was Opeth and Dream Theater, and track 7 was Leprous. Davis is inspired by jazz fusion, and Ashley brings a lot of influences of Tool and Soundgarden to the parts she writes."

You invited several guests such as keyboard player Derek Sherinian (ex- Dream Theater, Planet X), and drummer Baard Kolstad (Leprous) amongst others. How did you contact them and were they easy to get for the album?
"Very easy, surprisingly. Both are very open and welcoming on social media and they interact with their fans, so I just messaged them asking if they would consider playing on the album after seeing them doing guest appearances for other bands. They were super professional, and they really tried to play the things the songs needed. I would love to collaborate with them again in the future!"

There is a nice promotional colour picture at the back of the booklet. I guess it was taken with a drone flying above you. Whose idea was it?
"That picture actually was the only idea I had for the photoshoot. I wanted something different this time. I thought if we all look a little goofy, having fun on a sunny day lying on a pier, it would be a nice contrast to the moody and cynical music. I'm very happy with the result, and it captures our friendship, I think. We also had the police called on us for using a drone in a public park without a permit, but luckily we were ready and we moved out just before they arrived!"

This time the ladies are in the majority. Does that fact affect the writing and recording of the album?
"Not really, at least not yet. Both albums we've done were primarily written by me, so their influence is there but not massively felt. I'm really hoping for the third album to have equal contributions from all of them. As all three have extensive folk writing experience I want to go for a lighter, more acoustic feel."

With three women in the band, you might expect certain relationships to develop. Did that happen or do all band members have relationships outside the band?
"Being in this band isn't as you would assume. We don't tour or spend that much time together as a unit. The only thing that happened is the marriage of Aybars and Ashley. However, we sometimes forget about that because we are never aware of that fact when we're working!"

You are you the main composer in the band or do other members also contribute?
"As I said before: yes I've written most of our material. One song from Aporía was co-written with Chad Braun another friend from college, while three songs on The Unattainable Shore were co-written with Brittany, Ashley and Davis. I really want to change that imbalance in the future, as the others have their own body of work that speaks to their songwriting prowess. It's exhausting writing an hour of music by yourself! That said, even now they don't just play what I tell them to do,. They write their own solos and adjust my demos to be even better, and Aybars writes all his own drum parts with little input from me."

This time you recorded the album in your own studio. How did this happen?
"Yes, we did! In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, Ashley and Aybars decided to open their own recording studio while rent prices were at their lowest. They managed to snag a basement of an old heritage building, and they convert it into a genuinely nice studio that doubles as a hangout spot for our friend group. Most of the projects we've done over the last four years have been made there. I think we've made about ten albums collectively under the studio's belt so far! It's a massive financial drain on them, and they both work almost constantly to maintain it, while we all pitch in the help, afford rent and store our gear."

Lachlan Tocher

How were the reactions of the audience and the press to the new album?
"Absolutely incredible, we're blown away. When we recorded The Unattainable Shore, we felt strongly that it was something unique and special, but you never know how people will receive it, or even if anyone will listen to it! Most reviews were stellar, we've sold copies all around the world, and while we're far from being well-known, people have started recognizing the album occasionally. We're so grateful to all the prog radios, review sites, forums, etcetera, that have spread the word and to everyone who took a chance on an unknown band and gave us a listen. I think it's a unique phenomenon to this genre that music can be spread so organically and enthusiastically, and even the few negative comments are from people that really took the time to listen. We appreciate that."

I read on the internet that the album is sold out. How many copies were made and did they cover the cost of recording the album?
"Basically, I must cover the cost of everything myself, so we only had hundred copies made. I did the same with Aporía in 2017, and we only sold roughly half in eight years, but it was enough to pay for manufacturing fees. This time we sold out everything, plus the remaining copies of the first album. I covered the costs again plus a part of the production expenses. Probably, I still owe about $3000 from this endeavour, but we're hoping to print more CDs and even some vinyl records, so we'll see how that goes!"

Are you going to perform the album in its entirety live on stage?
Anna Katarina: "We hope so! If we ever get the right opportunity and have the time to put the show together. The material is not easy, and we want to do the album justice!"
Lachlan Tocher: "I think we would all love to do that, but currently it doesn't make sense. To play this complex music and do it justice, we probably would need three months of consistent rehearsal time, during which Anna would need to stop touring, Brittany would need to come back to town, and the rest of us would need to work less and risk even more debt. After all, we live in one of the most expensive cities in the world if I recall correctly. We would also need a show that would be worth playing for that amount of effort. My dream is being an opening act on a prog cruise or something, but we just don't have the audience for any local show or standard tour."

Are you planning to give concerts in Europe?
Anna Katarina: "Yes, we would like to play there, since Europe is the epicentre of amazing music."
Lachlan Tocher: "Planning? No. Hoping? Definitely yes! Anna just got back from a European tour with her solo band, and we're hoping to tour with The Out Seer in Europe in 2027, so that might open doors for a performance of Pareidolon too."

What plans do you have next for the band?
"My current fixation is trying to get some vinyl copies made, but this is more difficult than expected due to the album's length. Aside from that, I hope to start writing for the third record early next year, and hopefully we have new music ready to go within three years. Fingers crossed!"

Thanks for answering my questions!
"Thank you so much for having us, it's been a pleasure!"
Anna Katarina: "Thank you!"