For Amber Webber and Joshua Wells, Lightning Dust is an
opportunity to chart a different direction from Black MountainThe first point to clarify when it comes to Lightning Dust – the latest outgrowth of Vancouver band Black Mountain – is that as tuned in to nature as Amber Webber and Joshua Wells are, they did not actually record their self-titled debut in a cave.

No carting in a generator and a clutch of recording equipment to capture the sonic nooks and crannies of a dark, dank hole for these two as electronic artist Matthew Herbert did on last years’ Scales record. Instead, when Wells refers to the cave they used as a recording space, it was a dark, dank basement. “That’s what we call our jam space, which is sort of like a cave ‘cause it’s underneath a hotel in the downtown East side and one wall of it is basically a cave,” Wells explains, adding: “it’s a really old hotel and it’s really decrepit and this whole one wall is just this crumbling rock, and it’s full of mold and it’s really moist and dank down there.”

The use of the ‘cave’ as a recording space was important to Webber and Wells because “we tried to kind of set up a dark atmosphere for when we were recording – the atmosphere helps a lot.”

Webber has been quoted in prior interviews as viewing Lightning Dust as an opportunity to explore her Goth side, and Wells is quick to confirm this in his interview with Earshot. “I’d say we’re definitely on the same page there. Although I’d say it’s just more of our basic conception was that it was going to all be about melodrama. We didn’t want it to just be a ‘band’ sort of thing – we wanted to incorporate a bit more theatricality, more of that ‘non-band’ type stuff. … If it comes off as a bit over-the-top at times, then that’s good,” Wells divulges.

As much as the pair pre-conceptualized their material, when it came to recording the album caprice played a hand in the final results: “Everything just sort of ‘appeared’ the way it is on the album as we went along. We didn’t really have everything worked out in advance. But usually I find if you do that’s going to change anyways because it’s never possible to totally translate what’s in your head onto a recording – that’s a good thing because it’s nice to free yourself of those constraints,” relates Wells.

Speaking of We didn't want it to just be a 'band' sort of thing - we wanted to incorporate a bit more theatricality, more of that 'non-band' type stuff constraints, Wells notes that Lightning Dust allowed both he and Webber to explore sounds that just wouldn’t fit in the canon of Black Mountain. “Amber and I both have our little things that we do in our spare time and one of the things that she does is she writes a lot of songs and she’s really good with lyrics and she just had all this stuff floating around that wouldn’t really work in a rock band context.”

For Wells, Lightning Dust provided an opportunity to utilize material he’d been developing for quite some time: “I mess around on the piano a lot in my spare time and I had written a bunch of instrumental things that weren’t really just good enough to be instrumental, they needed to be used in some way,” he says, “and we sort of brought our stuff together for this.”
Their collaborative efforts wouldn’t have been known beyond a small circle of friends had they not been so pleased with the results of their recording session in the ‘cave.’
“We had played a couple shows as “Amber & Josh,” just sort of our friends’ functions and stuff so we weren’t really that serious about it,” Well notes, “and then we made this record and didn’t really intend it to be a record but it sounded like one and we liked it a lot, we were proud of it and figured we might as well put it out. Which meant we had to come up with a real name.”
This final hurdle to sharing the record proved more difficult than recording it as Wells reminisces: “We had a pretty gargantuan, month-long brainstorming session about it and I think eventually that came out of Amber.”