Edmonton based rock group I Am Machi are about to embark on an interesting journey for the next couple months. Most artists tour to promote an album, but this husband wife duo are about to road trip across Canada playing shows from Cranbrook, BC to big city Toronto to find the inspiration for their newest project. The album will appropriately be named Magnetic North and won’t be the first challenge for Nathan and Jileane.
I Am Machi began as a challenge when their friends, and bandmates, moved away or started families. Instead of trying to find replacements, the pair decided to just see how much noise the two of them could make on their own.
With Nathan on guitar and lead vocals, and Jileane banging on the drums, the pair manage to create some of the best live rock’n’roll in the city. Their shows give off a Biffy Clyro meets The Kills kind of vibe, plus a lot of fun on stage banter between the two.
These “partners in everything” have a lot to look forward to as they take on the entire nation for the very first time, but as nervous as they were, they were twice as excited when they sat down to talk about it.
Where did the name, I Am Machi come from, and who is Machi?
Jileane: I drew this like weirdly sketched, very detailed picture of a gnome holding his hat and it was kind of cute and our brother-in-law looked at it and he was like ‘his name should be Machi, spelled m-a-c-h-i.’ I was like good and wrote a little speech bubble beside the gnome and wrote “I Am Machi”. Months later we were looking for a band name, just flipping through and were like ‘that’ll work’. That was it. So it doesn’t actually mean anything.
Nathan: And now it’s too late because you can google it.
Jileane: Yea now we’re googlable [sic] so we can’t take it back. It’s too late.
Q: What was the story you were planning to tell?
N: What I’m trying to come up with is: Something by day, destroyer of misogyny at night. I don’t know what he does by day. Librarian? And destroyer of misogyny at night.
J: Is it just destroyer of misogyny? That seems oddly specific.
N: Yea well he’s got to fight the patriarchy. I don’t know. The fake story means more.
Q: You guys started off just as a two-piece wanting to see how much noise you could make. Have you ever thought of adding another member to the band?
J: You know we did for a bit. We thought about looking for a bassist.
N: It was sort of like a cocktail of convenience because it’s so easy to practice at home because we both live under the same roof. If want to practice we practice, if we wanna wear sweat pants and watch cartoons all day then we’ll do that instead. So it kind of relaxes us on that front but also I think we also want to keep challenging ourselves so we kind of stay away from getting a bassist.
J: I think at this point if we got a bassist at this point it would make us recant a lot of statements we made about why we even started the band. I just like the challenge of it being two people. When we go on tour, I mean our roommate Colin Close is coming which is awesome, but if he weren’t it would just be the two of us and it would just be a family road trip. The two of us is just really convenient. And we’re like the laziest people on the planet so this is the best way.
Q: Your upcoming tour is pretty big, have you ever done anything to this size before?
N: No. We’re very excited and nervous at the same time.
J: Yea it’s a first time. I’ve never been farther east than Manitoba and Nathan’s never been farther east than Saskatchewan. This is like a big deal. We’ve never been to Ontario before so it’s really cool.
N: Our new record we’re working on, we’re calling it Magnetic North just because like, again, we’ve never really seen Canada. It’s a big country to see cause Canada is enormous. A lot of these songs ended up being written in B.C. doing some shows there so we want to like see the country that we call home before.
J: We’re all kind of influenced by our favourite and least favourite parts of this country we live in and we want to see that country before we end up recording a CD. We’re starting with this chunk.
N: Also it gives us time to finish writing it.
Q: Does Edmonton influence your music?
N: We love winter and we hate summer. I know that that makes a lot of people upset, confuses a lot of people. Really Edmonton is like this weird place of furious weather where you’ll have this short stint of summer but winter just digs in and there’s lots of snow. I mean we were colder than Mars last year weren’t we? So that’s awesome.
J: When you’re colder than a planet that’s farther from the Sun than you, that’s cold.
N: All that to say, we live kind of by the river valley so in the winter time our neighbourhood just become really quiet. I think Edmonton and Alberta as a whole, the amount of fury that’s in the land is I think really inspiring.
J: Just the physical beauty of it.
N: The last time we went on tour it was a lot of shows in B.C., and the coming back into Alberta was almost relieving because suddenly the mountains just fell away and you’re left with these contrasts of solid gold wheat fields and indescribable blue skies. There’s just something calming and inspiring.
Q: What’s been the best part of the last few years with I Am Machi?
N: Getting to this point is really neat. When we first started we were like ‘we should make music together’ but I never thought we’d get here as fast as we did. Just being able to tour and make music semi-full time or have it be a significant part of our lives. Also we’d been able to open for Pack A.D. and Taste of Iceland show last year which was, Brixx was packed wall to wall. It was awesome.
J: There’s always those moments that you come away from them going ‘This is why we do this.’ There’s been handfuls of those moments over the two, almost three years that just kind of keep making it worth while. They help keep you going into the less ideal moments, the ones where you’re like ‘Why do we do this?!’
N: We played the Taste of Iceland show which was in front of like 200 people and it was an awesome nice and made lots of friends. The next night we played in Mornville to a crowd of like 10 people who all wanted us to do country covers. We played like a foot away from a stripper pole. It was sticky.
J: It’s those really crappy moments where you’re like told onto the good parts that you know will happen because this is a gig, this is a job that you have to do cause there’s parts of every job that are shitty. Even when we did a mini Western Canada tour last year we ran out of money so we had to go home and call it quits so it was really discouraging. Even in that there were moments that we played a couple of shows in B.C., like the one at Fernandos, it was mad packed, really good. But you come out of that an play some crappy shows and then you end up running out of money and you go ‘oh my gosh this is falling apart’. But even in the midst of that there were some really good moments.
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