When the  Georgia Straight reaches Ian Bevis, the frontman of electro-dance act Bear Mountain, the band is at a breakfast joint in Kelowna, beginning a trip to Austin, Texas.

It’s the start of a busy summer of touring for the Vancouver group, a schedule that will see the musicians travel across the U.S. Bevis laughs when asked how he feels about spending much of the next few months packed into a ’96 Chevy Tahoe with his three bandmates.

“It’s cozy,” he says of the group’s mode of transport.

Despite the long hours ahead in the tour van, the musicians have a lot to be excited about.

After playing at SXSW this month, upcoming tour dates will include Sasquatch!, the Squamish Valley Music Festival, the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York, and opening for Bloc Party at shows across the U.S.

“We’re super-excited to play these shows—I mean, how could you not be?” Bevis tells the Georgia Straight. “It’s been a dream for us to play Sasquatch! since forever.”

The group is also developing a live show that it hopes will leave a lasting impression on audiences. The four-person band now features a full-time member dedicated to producing visuals.

Kenji Rodrίguez Tanamachi, who has worked with Vancouver’s Tangible Interaction, the company behind interactive lighting used by Purity Ring and Arcade Fire, is aiming to eventually sync the visuals to the music through inputs from each of the instruments.

“He’s kind of creating new visuals as he goes—he’s filtering them and mixing them kind of the same way we’re doing with music, but just all with light,” Bevis explains. “And then he maps those images onto objects, so it’s different for each show.”

Bevis adds that the aim is to offer an original experience for audiences.

“We’re just racking our brains and always testing out new technology…to see what we can do that’s really creative and really unique,” he explains.

The musician is no stranger to engaging performances, as a member of Vancouver indie-pop/electro act Top Less Gay Love Tekno Party, a group known for energetic shows featuring costumes and glitter guns.

But while Bevis has played in bands for years, the electro genre hasn’t always been his milieu. He and long-time friend Kyle Statham first collaborated as part of a short-lived punk group in Victoria.

“We called it garage rock, but it was pretty aggressive; it was called Danger Like a Dagger Now,” Bevis recounts. “The energy in that band was insane. It was me and Kyle.…I was on bass, he was on guitar, and there was a drummer…and it was just like a tornado—it was so intense.”

Bevis eventually got interested in making electronic music on GarageBand, then graduated to an MPC. From there, his sound evolved to the soulful vocals of Bear Mountain, combined with samples found searching through vinyl.

“I would sing acoustic songs on the guitar, and I knew somewhere in the middle, that’s where I wanted to be,” he said, noting the sound is still evolving. “The voice and the electronic music…in the middle there, there’s a magic zone that we’re trying to find.”

After releasing a few demo songs on the Internet, Bevis played his first show solo at the Cobalt, which he recalls “didn’t really go that well”.

“We had another show booked two weeks later, and so I called Kyle…and he played the show with me, we got a drummer, and the next show was amazing,” he recounts. “So then…we knew we wanted to be a band.”

The group has since released XO, its debut album, and has secured a manager and an agent and been in talks with record labels.

“It was a pretty crazy time,” says Bevis.

While their current sound is a far cry from their garage-rock days, the singer adds that he, Statham, and their bandmates channel the same level of energy into Bear Mountain, which also includes Bevis’s twin brother, Greg, a drummer and keyboardist with a degree in jazz.

Following SXSW, the group is planning to head into the studio with the aim of releasing another album this summer.

“Basically, we’re just going to go in there and not come out until we have to leave on tour,” says Bevis.

The band is also set to play the Biltmore after making the journey back from Austin.

Despite the major festival gigs and Bloc Party tour dates ahead, Bevis admits that he’s actually “most nervous” about playing a hometown show.

“We’ve had people in Vancouver who’ve been so supportive of all this,” he notes. “So we just feel really lucky that this stuff is happening to us.”