Behind the Music: Nova Scotia, the '90s math rock band from Washington state

When Marcus Fischer was brainstorming a new name in the mid-1990s for the Olympia, Wash., band he was in, he scoured some atlases for inspiration.

Geography was always important to him and summer trips as a kid were frequently spent in the family station wagon travelling across the United States and into Canada. Drawn to the letter N, there was a place name that stood out to him.

"Nova Scotia seemed like one of those places that was far off on the edge of what I knew and I had never been there, but it was sort of this idealized spot as being northeast, far from the corner of southern California where I grew up," said Fischer.

His bandmates, Alex Neerman and Jason Powers, were on board with naming their "noisy math rock" band after the Canadian province.

Nova Scotia replaced the group's previous name, Shady Lane. The trio was unaware that there's a street in Halifax with that same name.

In another odd coincidence, Neerman, originally from Arlington, Va., had visited Nova Scotia a few times on summer vacation when he was a child, along with other provinces like Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. He's the only one in the group who has been to Nova Scotia.

With the group name intact, the group honed their craft and put out an EP in 1997. A year later, they released their only full-length album, The Circular Ruins, named after a short story by an Argentine author. Primarily instrumental, the album has complex and unusual time signatures.

Pressed on clear vinyl, Nova Scotia embarked on a memorable tour of the U.S. that took them to California, Texas, the southern U.S., New York, Washington and Chicago.

"That was a brutal one for all of us, for different reasons," said Fischer.

The problems started as the band headed to a show in Amarillo, Texas, when the van's engine gave out about 80 kilometres east in Adrian, Texas. The group spoke with a local and said they needed a tow truck.

"They're like, 'Oh, y'all need a wrecker.' We're like, 'A wrecker? We just need a tow truck,'" said Powers.

When the tow truck driver showed up, he was with his young bride — who Powers describes as being "questionably legal age" — and their child.

This meant there wasn't enough space for the band to ride in the tow truck and forced Powers to lie down on a bench seat in the band's van, which was perched atop the massive tow truck.

The band then spent close to a week holed up in a Motel 6 in Amarillo as the engine got replaced, which meant they had to cancel some shows.

In North Carolina, Fischer said he got dumped over the phone by his then girlfriend.

And on the East Coast, Neerman came down with mono, which meant they had to cancel the last half of the tour.

"I have a memory of being in the back of our tour van with a fever, shivering, which is kind of a bad memory, but it's kind of a good memory because they took care of me driving back and made sure I was good," said Neerman.

The band did manage to play one final show in Chicago, partly because they needed gas money, but also because they'd be opening for a band they admired, June of 44. The group then headed home.

"Every experience was kind of new, so even if we maybe we had a bad show or a promoter that was kind of shady, it was all kind of exciting," said Neerman.

After all the group had been through on the tour, their friendship remained intact.

"It was like it would have taken too much out of us to have not been getting along, but it was a real testament to how close we were at that time," said Fischer.

Besides these incidents, the lack of technology made touring far more complicated than it is today. For example, directions for venues were usually obtained by making calls from payphones.

"None of us owned a cellphone," said Fischer. "We booked our tours by sending tapes in the mail and leaving messages with unreliable roommates and answering machines and all kinds of things, but yet we still were able to do it.

"You know, we self-released our music, figured out how to record, we did all of these things and found out how to do it the hard way. And I feel like that was such a huge and influential experience on my life."

Today, Fischer is an acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and musician.

For Powers, Nova Scotia was the first band he was in and it gave him valuable insight.

"I always got really nervous performing and never really grew to enjoy it that much, but I did like being in the band," he said. "I thought it was really fun and I liked going on tour and I still actually go on tour quite a bit these days as part of my work."

Powers tours regularly providing live sound for bands. When he's at home — he now lives in Portland, Ore., which is where Neerman and Fischer also now call home — he has a studio where he does recording and mixing for other groups. His resumé is lengthy and includes serving as the engineer and mixer for the 5 Songs EP, the first album by the acclaimed indie-rock group The Decemberists.

"I always joke that of all the things I've done, probably the most people have heard that, and it was at the very beginning of my career [in 2001], like when I hardly knew what I was even doing," he said.

Neerman, who now works as a fish biologist, still makes music as part of a psychedelic techno project called Apartment Fox.

What happened to the band?

Nova Scotia officially came to a quiet end in 1999 ahead of a summer tour. At the time, Fischer had been touring as a projectionist with another band and was feeling burned out. He was also in a new relationship with a woman who later became his wife and didn't want to head back out on the road.

"Alex and Jason kind of felt like, 'What was the point of having the band if you're not going to tour?'" said Fischer. "And that was kind of it. It wasn't a big blow up. We just kind of quietly stopped playing."

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