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By: Anoop Bhat
Torpor are a heavy sludge/hardcore/doom outfit coming from Brighton and London. Their latest release From Nothing Comes Everything is an amazing piece of work, which is getting very positive reviews from all over the place. Anoop Bhat reviewed it for Echoes and Dust (read his review here) and he was so impressed that he asked bassist Lauren Mason and singer Nats Spada a bunch of questions.
(((o))): Hi guys. You recently played your album launch gig at Camden along with Caïna. How did that go? How has the general response been for the music among the local circle?
Lauren: The album launch was really great, we were stunned to see so many people turning up, even some pretty disastrous gear failure in the middle of the set didn’t seem to affect the response! I was really happy with the line-up we put together that night too, those bands are all people that I have 100% respect for, and it was great that they could be a part of it!
As far as our local circle goes, we’ve been overwhelmed with the level of support people have shown. It does feel like people were patiently waiting for us to put this record out, they believed in us and we hope we’ve lived up to their expectations!
Nats: One of the best things on the album launch night was seeing so many of our friends from the local circle. The guys from Dead Existence, Ghold and Human Future all came down, also Tan from Heavy Ritual Records, Jill from Hate Fuck and Dysteria and one of my friends Darran, who runs Art Failure in Brighton and sings in Charlotte Light and Dark travelled up to London as well. Chris from JØTNARR is one of my favourite people, so having them on the lineup was special as well.
(((o))): Where did it all begin for the band?
Lauren: This was something Simon [Mason; drums] and I had been talking about doing for years – something really heavy and honest and ours. We’d both been involved in other projects which maybe weren’t 100% what we wanted to be doing, so when they ended we were finally able to commit to making this happen! We were really lucky to find Jon [Taylor; guitar, vocals] through an online ad, he completely got where we were coming from and the musical chemistry was instant, plus we’re very similar as people and became close friends quite quickly.
We found Nats online too, I remember Simon playing me her recording over the phone and I immediately knew she was perfect. There’s something about her voice that is so powerful, it’s raw and visceral and heavy in the true sense of the word, she has that rare ability to make you feel something. Some vocalists can make all the right sounds, but it ends up being pastiche because there’s no feeling behind it, there’s nothing to connect to.
(((o))): If there’s one thing that’s evident right from the first listen, it would be the band’s grip on dynamics. From Nothing Comes Everything is never dull. Is this shape-shifting nature of the music something the band as a group deliberates or is it just an honest extension of the narrative?
Lauren: I think it’s because some of us have quite short attention spans! We’re not the kind of people who are content playing the same riff for 10 minutes so we’ll always change things to keep it interesting for ourselves, to that extent the shape-shifting nature you mentioned is a natural result of our creative process. There’s also a secondary, more deliberate process that happens further down the line, where we’ll listen back to practice room recordings and hear sections that sound boring or flat, then think about how we can lift them or rework them into something more interesting.
Nats: I would definitely say that it’s an honest extension for us initially, less on the narrative and more on feeling. I think it’s almost too easy playing the same riff or at the same tempo or volume for a vast amount of time. Dynamic and shape-shifting music is so much more interesting and feels like a natural process for us. I would definitely say that the ebb and flow acts as a means of catharsis for us as a band.
(((o))): I for one absolutely loved the album, this sort of purposeful writing is what is rare to find these days. What do you think brings this coherence in vision?
Lauren: Thank you! It’s interesting, because musical taste is definitely not a uniting factor between us! The only principle of our shared vision is to create heavy and honest music, if anything we’re probably more aligned in what we don’t want to sound like than what we do! For me there’s nothing worse than feeling like we’ve just recycled someone else’s music – as soon as one of us says “do you think that sounds too much like ____?” I want to change it so it no longer reminds me of that! Sometimes when you hit a creative wall there’s the urge to think about what another band would do to get around it, but Jon and I are both really turned off by that….we’d rather just wait and see what occurs naturally than consciously use someone else’s musical vocabulary. We’ll never kid ourselves that we’re doing anything unique or original as I doubt that’s possible, but we’re all definitely driven by trying to make music, which is authentically us, rather than trying to sound like someone else.
(((o))): The album is a smörgåsbord of musical influences, if I could say so myself, with an unmistakable disposition to all things doom and sludge. Who is bringing what to the table?
Nats: Really pleased you can hear so many influences in there. We’re all into completely varied things, which is constantly changing so it’s hard to say who is bringing what exactly. I would say that common ground for us is honest and heavy music, which comes back to what we wanted to create musically with the band. Jon has said that I bring the hardcore element to the band – it has been a big influence on me the past few years. I tend to get obsessed with one record for a couple of months at a time – it’s currently the latest album from Pianos Become The Teeth.
(((o))): What does the creative process look like for Torpor? What various stages does an idea have to run through before it attains its final form and place in an album/EP?
Lauren: The journey from practice room to recording tends to be a long one for us as we have quite a slow rate of work. We’ve settled into a writing style now where we’ll jam things out for a few months and see what evolves, keeping ourselves open to new ideas as and when they occur. We tend to record all our practices so we can capture those creative accidents that might otherwise get forgotten, but it also enables us to listen back and reflect more objectively on how the song works dynamically. We tend to spend quite a long time reworking and arranging songs until we’re all happy with the final form. We’ve never been able to afford long studio sessions, so we put a lot of time and energy into the pre-production, making sure we’ll all be able to lay our tracks down in a couple of takes and not waste any time!
(((o))): It is often difficult to intuit the songwriting process of a band based on the music alone. The songs on From Nothing Comes Everything share an unremitting undertone of resistance. This ‘resistance’, I believe, extends further lyrically. Do the lyrics in any way provide a creative impetus for the band’s music or is it the other way round?
Nats: I think initially the music is the creative impetus for the lyrics as the vocals are created when we have a rough structure of a song (although we may occasionally shift a structure around to work with a vocal pattern I have). The heaviness of the music definitely allows me to channel a lot of what I’m feeling emotionally. We wrote these songs over quite a long period of time, so lyrically, I was covering a lot of personal ground. The heaviness of the music may come across with an undertone of ‘resistance’, but I would definitely say it was more about surrendering to transitions and emotions. I sometimes forget how personal some of the lyrics are, it tends to hit me when we’re playing live to a room full of people and it feels like I’m completely opening myself up and my stomach turns with nerves.
(((o))): While 2012’s Bled Dry EP showed a lot promise, the band seems to have got everything right with this release (in my opinion, of course). Tighter sound, tighter writing, tighter everything. What changed?
Nats: In all honesty, it was such a natural process for us, we didn’t think about it too much. We definitely had more time to write and record the new songs and we were playing live a lot more. I think we were conscious of wanting it to sound like a step up from Bled Dry, but that’s about it. We hadn’t even planned to release an album initially. It’s only when Adam from Head of Crom suggested releasing an album instead of an EP that we went back into Bear Bites Horse Studio to record a few more tracks. I have a feeling that writing for the next release might be very different.
(((o))): One of the most prominent, identifiable attributes of Torpor’s music has to be its guitar tone – that massy, all-encompassing, thundering sound. How did the band arrive on this sound? At what point in time did this sound become Torpor’s?
Lauren: Jon and I are both pretty uninterested in gear, I tend to see all that chat about whose rig is bigger than who’s as a lot of competitive (and dare I say it, macho) bullshit, so we stay out of it! We recorded the Bled Dry EP with whatever gear we could afford at the time – Jon had this Death Metal pedal and this Laney head with camo tolex and hilariously bad tattoo decals which we covered up so as not to offend our eyes! When we went to record at Bear Bites with Wayne Adams he basically said (but probably much more politely) “Hmm yeah I’m sure that sounds OK live but it’ll sound shit on record…this is what I think you’re trying to sound like?!” He basically understood how to create the sound we were trying to get but didn’t have the gear for. Since then we’ve invested in a HiWatt head, but to be honest we don’t have the money to upgrade much else right now. I supposed we always hope the power of the riffs will shine through whatever gear we’re using…having a ton of expensive backline doesn’t make you a better band anyway!
Nats: Talking about the latest album specifically and tone, we were lucky enough to use a custom built head by Dutton Thermionic that Wayne had in the studio. It was the loudest and gnarliest guitar head we’ve ever heard!
(((o))): How important do you think it is to remain relevant in this age of the Internet? Do you, as a band, deliberate on bringing something “different” in order to stand out?
Nats: I think people (and bands) can get too obsessed with the Internet and social media. I think they are powerful tools – especially in reaching a global audience, but I think it will always come back to creating honest music that people can feel a connection with in some way. I’ve always looked up to bands that are instantly recognisable in the way that they sound and for me, that makes them stand out.
(((o))): What does the rest of the year look like for the band?
Lauren: The album was released on CD on Monday 30th March via a new label called Prismatik, run by Jack Burley who is a really talented designer (and also plays drums for Earthmass) and which focuses on collectible handmade sleeves. For this release he’s teamed up with an artist called Andrew Walter who lino cut printed all the covers, it looks really beautiful and each one is slightly different because of the nature of the printing process! It’s been a fantastic experience working with them, and I think it’s really cool that the CD artwork is completely different to the vinyl and cassette and manages to incorporate such a traditional hands-on technique. The album is also coming out on cassette via Black Bow Records (run by Jon Davis of Conan), they should be available online in the next few weeks too.
Nats: We have a couple of great support slots coming up including Primitive Man in March, Obliterations in May and Conan in June. We’re also playing the When Planets Collide Summer Sizzler in London in July and then planning to head over to Europe in September. There are a few more exciting Brighton dates in the works as well – which should hopefully include a house show in October which will be fun! Writing for the next release is also underway.
From Nothing Comes Everything is out now on milky clear vinyl plus download on Head of Crom.
