E&D recently reviewed the first full-length album from Sydney four-piece sleepmakeswaves. We put some questions to the band ahead of their Australian tour and appearances at SXSW in Texas and dunk!festival in Belgium.
Hey there. I’m Alex. I play bass and synths in sleepmakeswaves, with Otto and Kid (guitars) and Tim (drums):
How long has the band been together and how did you all meet?
We’ve been together since Xmas in 2006. The band started when our old guitarist Tom met me at uni and we started jamming and recording demos. We found Kid on MySpace and he brought the band name with him. When Tom left a couple of years back, Otto found himself upgraded from #1 sleepmakeswaves fan/air drummer to an actual band member.
Tim came on board quite recently, after our first drummer, Will, left in late 2011. Will’s excellent drumming had been a big part of our sound so we were pretty anxious about finding a good replacement. Tim was (and still is) playing with an awesome noise-jazz-prog band called Pirate. We knew he had the chops, power and groove based on his work with them. When we started playing together, things clicked right away and he’s already made a really strong impression on our old-school fans with his first shows.
So we’ve been through some members and have been plugging away at this for a little while, but it’s all worth it. I feel this current line-up puts us where we need to be right now.
You say that you write love songs about delay pedals. What pedals do you love the most?
Kid swears by his Electro Harmonix Micro POG, which doubles octaves on your guitar lines to give you church organ highs or earth-shaking lows. He also has a cool Line6 DL4 delay pedal that has been modded by a Sydney electronic genius who calls himself Cubisteffects.
Otto’s T-Rex Roommate reverb is amazing, and he is also unswaying in his devotion towards the Ibanez TS808 modded tube screamer and his Boss DD7 delay.
I think the star of any pedalboard is the humble and overlooked tuner; it needs many more love songs than it currently has.
Your music is instrumental, but without putting a label on it, describe what you want people to hear and feel when they listen to sleepmakeswaves.
We want people to feel immersed in an enveloping wall of sound that is alternately calming and exhilarating. We want the chilled-out ambient sections to slow your sense of time and the loud climaxes to reverberate in your whole body and leave you feeling both exhausted and euphoric. If we can achieve even half of that then I think we’re doing OK.
Has this always been the musical direction the band members wanted to travel in or have you dabbled in other sounds?
What we do is what we always aimed to do. We purposefully came together out of a shared love of instrumental music that goes from very chill to epic as fuck, and I like to think we get a little better at that crescendocore sound with each show and album release.
I don’t think we’ll ever leave that basic idea behind, as it’s the love of that sound that keeps the music flowing. But now that we’re pretty comfortable as a band there might be some genuine dabbling in our future, trying to test the limits of our sound without changing it beyond recognition. Otto’s got some pipes on him so we want to experiment with some minimal but emotive vocals. We’ll see…
Who’s on high rotation on your own playlists right now?
Otto is spinning Youth Lagoon’s Year of Hibernation. He also got me on to the latest Fucked Up record, David Comes to Life, which is the best punk rock I have heard in a long, long time. I know he’s also massively into the latest jams from Real Estate, Russian Circles and Bon Iver.
I’ve been enjoying the latest from Fleet Foxes and a cool ambient record calledReplica, by a guy who calls himself Oneohtrix Point Never. Fugazi, Talk Talk and My Morning Jacket have also been getting lots of love from me.
Tim is digging Jojo Mayer’s Nerve project, which is basically some of the most mind-boggling drumming you will ever hear. Kid is keen on Touch It! by Spell Talk, an indie band from Salt Lake City.
In an enthusiastic review of your performance at Peats Ridge, your sound was described as “mainly non-vocal”. Is there a special problem that you think instrumental bands face in getting heard by the public? If so, how do you plan to get around that problem? What part do Bandcamp and Bird’s Robe Collective play in this?
Instrumental bands do have a little bit of a harder time because instrumental music is more obscure, especially in Australia. But I hesitate to call this a “special” problem, because at the end of the day all bands are judged by the same standard: do they write music that makes you feel something and does it excite you to see them live?
Looking at it that way, an instrumental band might be at a relative advantage, since you are a bit different and what you offer in your music and live show is going to stand out. I’ve definitely felt that this logic has worked in our favour before. I try hard not to worry about what genre is more popular and/or lucrative and instead just focus on doing what we do as best we can.
Bandcamp have really helped us, simply by providing a clean and easy interface for us to sell all our stuff. Shortly after we temporarily hit #1 on their sales, Ethan from the company got in touch with us and was enough of a bro to send us some sexy Bandcamp logo swag! Basically it’s a great site run by cool people who care a good deal about helping bands out.
We can’t say enough good things about the Bird’s Robe Collective. The heart and soul of that organisation is a guy called Mike Solo. He’s been responsible for the explosion of interest in the Sydney progressive and instrumental scene that we’ve benefited so much from. We recently took him on as our manager and he just keeps on delivering the goods.
You have a busy year ahead – touring Australia then performing at SXSW in Texas, Dunk! festival in Belgium and other European shows. What has been involved in setting this up, and what do you hope to get out of it?
We applied for SXSW on a whim, thinking we had nothing to lose but not really expecting to make it over. We were gobsmacked when we got invited to showcase and to be able to have it match up so closely with our European tour is too good to be true. I’m pretty much still pinching myself.
Setting this kind of stuff up involves a lot of unsexy behind-the-scenes stuff. Emailing people for help and advice, sorting visas, working out itineraries, budgeting money and convincing employers to let you take the time off. We’ve been lucky in that we were contacted by a good promoter in Europe, Marv from Always Forever and have also been helped out by the fine folks at dunk!festival. If we hadn’t had this initial support I don’t think we could have managed it.
We hope to go over there and play awesome shows for the people who come out to see us; I want to meet the expectations of people that have been waiting a long time for our show and I want to win some new folks over into our family. Then I want to drink foreign beers with them. If all goes well on these tours then we can come back for bigger ones further down the track. Growing the band in that way is the long-term plan.
You adapt a couple of the songs on your latest record when playing live as a four-piece, either using EBow or shortening the song. Is there any chance of adding violin and trumpet on the stage with you this year for those songs?
We have done so in the past and we plan on bringing out some cool guests onstage with us for some of the shows coming up in Australia. It’s harder to do overseas but we have some sneaky plans for the UK and US that may come off. Hopefully one day we make enough money in this post-rock racket to pay a gaggle of session musicians to follow us around.
What will be the first thing you do when you get home from overseas?
Drink a Cooper’s Pale Ale and eat Vegemite on toast. Then sleeeeeep.
What one fact about the band do you most want to share with the world?
Tim owns, like, seven Donkey Kong t-shirts. Because he’s a total boss.
