When we first spoke to Sydney instrumental rock outfit sleepmakeswaves two years ago, they were a lot like many other bands playing in local music venues and the occasional national tour. Underneath the water though, the duck legs were paddling away madly and as their album was getting appreciated by fans over the world and a loyal local following had been established, management was busy getting them a support for Karnivool and spots at dunk!festival and South by South West. We caught up with them again at the end of the 2012.
The year had provided both useful experience and an opportunity to support (((o))) favourites 65daysofstatic on their first tour in Australia early 2013. Sleepmakeswaves toured Australia again as headline, this time playing a stack of new songs and some dates next to each other in the same city with a different set each of the two nights. Then it was back to Europe, this time including the UK as they again played support to 65dos, the tour ending in November.
For our third annual catch up I spoke with Alex Wilson who plays bass and laptop, and in part one of this two part interview we talk about why they make music, connecting with fans, the new album, talking at gigs, and how ducks have corkscrew genitals.
One thing that struck me was the way Alex appeared to have slipped back into the real world so smoothly after the tour without signs of that port-euphoria depression we all tend to get to some degree after some big event. He explained that he'd stayed on in Europe for a while after the others (drummer Tim and guitarists Kid and Otto) had left, that he'd got back on a Wednesday and was back at work the next Monday. And when I say “work” I mean the day job:
“But I'm pretty buzzed, you know it was a great trip,in many ways the tour was absolutely rad and I land here and it's summer. Just before I left the weather was starting to turn to shit, so it was pretty amazing.”
When I've seen him at gigs Alex has always struck me as a pretty serious guy when it comes to the band, and as someone who strongly feels you only get success through applying yourself and through hard work:
“Yeah, I think if anything me personally, I probably take it too seriously. One of the big things I learnt on this big tour with 65 was that sometimes playing a show is just like going to the office and sometimes you have a shit day at the office because of reasons outside of your control, and normally you don't really take that all to heart because you don't really care about it and you go home and have three or four glasses of wine and try to forget about it. But you know it's actually the same when you're on a really long tour as well, there are going to be shows where things don't go so well from your perspective and because you do really care about what you're doing it will be like a real disconnect that you feel when you've performed really badly and you've got fans who have been waiting to see you and they come up to you and say it was great, and you feel like a bit of a fraud because you're thinking 'shit, to me that was like a 5/10 show and you're trying to tell me how great I am?' You know it's weird and I think part of that, those are the moments when you shouldn't take it too seriously you know, because you can get really caught up in this serious workflow perfectionist musician kind of thing but at the end of the day it's not actually about that for the fans. Your seriousness should all be in aid of enabling a greater experience for other people and if you end up just getting really worked up over a process of being perfect merely for the sake of it, it's not too productive.
“I think we have always really valued hard work from the perspective of nothing is ever going to get handed to us and even more than that we're going to have to work twice as hard as most other bands in order to get the same opportunities and I mean from the get go we never expected that this would amount to anything so it's always kind of like this idea we've succeeded against the odds and I suppose we really like it too. I know it sounds dumb but for me the rock and roll dream is less about you know snorting lines off groupies' backs, although that would be nice (laughs), and more about the Ian MacKaye from Fugazi thing of loading your own gear and amps and putting your own show on and being 100% behind it in every conceivable way and being a totally different kind of badass in that way, you know what I mean? Like there's integrity and respect from being able to run a show on your own terms than like other bands might need a whole swag of teamsters to it pull off. So yeah, there's your rambling answer to that one.”
Although Alex never expected much he still always wanted something from his music and he feels that every musician who writes songs and gets them out there harbours some kind of ambition. For him, part of that is working hard to try to master his “understanding of the language of music”, and part is gaining recognition for doing that well. Above all though is the desire to connect with others:
“I've always said that I wanted to make records and music that mean as much to other people as my favourite records meant to me. Because like a lot of people I found certain parts of growing up quite difficult and I found good music was a way of feeling you could get a bit of a hug from the universe. The fact that sleepmakeswaves has become for a handful of people that kind of band is incredibly moving to me and I find myself at a loss for words when they come and they have a tattoo of our logo or say that a particular song has helped them through a difficult time in their life or something like that.”
Alex recognises the importance of remaining respectful in responding to this kind of fan adoration and “remembering your roots and where you came from and why you were trying to get there in the first place.”
But not all musicians want to connect with others through their music – many talk about doing it just for themselves and that they don't give a fuck if anyone likes their stuff, which is sometimes true but often bullshit. Alex cites UK solo jazz fusion bassist Squarepusher as someone who genuinely doesn't take an active interest in how well his music sells or what is written about it, but also points out that he himself has so many unfinished demos that only he has heard and it allows him to indulge in other aspects of his compositional output. (We talk about this in more detail in part two of the interview)
To Alex it's when you start spending so much of your money on making music that you start to ask yourself why, and it's clear to him that the reason he does it is to communicate and be respected as a good speaker in his medium, and that this is what most musicians feel. He suggests the reason many musicians say they are doing it only for themselves may be a form of defence mechanism that comes from a fear of being criticised. It took Alex a long time before he felt comfortable with the idea of telling people he's a musician, even for a couple of years after they had played their first shows and it's interesting to hear him talk about that realisation he had become part of the very thing that had given him so much in the past – the gift of music from to other people to make them feel good and get a bit of enjoyment from life.
In any case he feels that they have become confident in trusting their musical instincts in creating music that connects with their audience, and the response to the new material tells them that path they are heading in is the right one. “In the end (he says with a laugh) everyone wants to be liked, and if I didn't I'd probably play black metal or something like that.”
On the topic of the new material the plan is to record in the first few months of 2014 and get the album out in the second half of the year, and the aim is to be able to play it faithfully live which means we are unlikely to hear strings or other instruments. Although those instruments/additional tracks can of course be added live with laptop, Alex explained that; “it would feel very weird to us to put a track that another human being we know played and felt and put that on a backing track and sort of have it played every night at the press of a button when the rest of us are kind of rediscovering those parts and the emotions that go with them every night on stage. It would stick out like a sore thumb – at least to us while we're playing.”
One of the great strengths of instrumental music is the scope it allows you the listener to respond in your own way and also to improvise melodies and other lines in your head as you listen – far more so than for songs with words. One day a record or song can be uplifting, the next melancholic, and another beautifully tragic. Does Alex see a potential market for sleepmakeswaves make-your-own-lyrics-up karaoke?
“I think that's called youtube man” he laughs. “There's a bunch of kids, god bless 'em too, like I think it's really cool, but they've taken a couple of our songs here and they've just been 'I love this song so much that I've written a bunch of vocals over the top', and to me it's really touching and heartfelt – they were never meant to be like that – and at the end of the day those sort of things are really amazing to us.”
To Alex the communication between the band and the listener is not one of active and passive. When you listen to their music he expects you to bring something to it – your imagination.
“I love the idea that someone is taking a song that is meant to be instrumental and coming up with their own melody in their own head and it's one of the most incredibly personal relationships to music that you can have that are inexplicable to other people and are some of the most special, and I suppose one of the big motivating factors behind our band and probably any of the sort of instrumental bands that we share influences with, is the idea that you're trying to connect with people with that aspect of music that's unspoken and unspeakable: those feeling you have that defy rational thought. To me it's the biggest kick that someone can come up to me and talk with me about a song that we wrote that was also a really emotional experience for me to write and with a very particular kind of character to it and it was a very emotional experience for them to listen to it. It was probably a totally different kind of character and we can try to have a conversation about that and get some of the way to understanding each other but we never will. There's always going to be a mystery there, a personal aspect to it that will remain singular to that person, and I don't know why that excites me so much but it really does.”
I don't know about you, the reader, but when I see progressive bands that use dynamics I actually want to hear them, and I've had a couple of shows ruined by the amount of talking going on while bands are playing. Surely people can shut the fuck up for 30-60 minutes? We've learnt not to smoke like chimneys in venues. I was pleasantly surprised when I last saw sleepmakeswaves play at the Evelyn in Melbourne that the crowd fell almost completely silent during the quiet fading outro to '...and so we destroyed everything'. I know it's an unfair topic to talk to bands about, but what's the solution to the problem of chatter?
“Yeah it sucks for everyone doesn't it and it's a real dilemma isn't it because there's no acceptable solution. I'm the guy with the mic and if if I got up and told someone to shut up I could totally ruin the vibe in my own way, maybe call out a dude whose being a little annoying but he's just enjoying the show in his own way and everything like that. I think the only thing you can try and do is try and be good enough that people can't help but shut up when they listen to you. One of the coolest things about the shows we've been doing recently is we felt like we're beginning to get that and they're really special moments for us on stage too. They don't happen all the time and you kinda have to earn them by being really on your game, but when everything's fading down and you've stopped moving, just being able to experience that stillness is pretty amazing, so I suppose we just try and create the environment where that happens rather than try and call people out. Whatever comes, we just want people to feel comfortable appreciating it however they like.”
The way Alex talks about it does give me a new perspective and once again he's focusing on the importance to the band of allowing the punter to respond in their own way, whether its banging your head up the front, standing still up the back, or dancing around as a bunch of kids did once at Byron Bay – something that doesn't happen very often. Post rock can be overly serious and they want to be a band that is serious in their approach to making music but without taking themselves too seriously. He talks about a time they played at Crowbar in Brisbane:
“During a really chill bit in 'gaze' there was this real ocker guy and he came right up to the front and goes 'Fucking sen-sational boys. Sen-fucking-sational', (laughs) and it was a totally red herring kind of moment but one that we're really fond of. He, in a way, didn't know the rules about how you're supposed to listen to that music but got into it in his own way, and we think that was totally cool and still talk about it to this day”.
If Alex was an animal, what would he be?
“OK, see this is an interesting question, because for a long time I wanted to be a duck in the sense that I went to Sydney uni and there's this very awesome pond where all these ducks would hang out and they were all so happy as they would waddle round. They seemed to have just very pleasant lives in the water just eating and floating around except, Gilbert, then I saw this video when I was on holiday this guy makes these films called true facts about animals and I saw “True Facts About The Duck”, and did you know, Gilbert, ducks have corkscrew shaped penises and that duck vaginas are corkscrew but in reverse of the shape of the male duck's penis and the duck vagina has all these false passages in there because male ducks are pretty much like completely incurable rapists. Not only do they have corkscrew dicks but after the mating season finishes the corkscrew dick falls off and it grows back each year in size proportionate to the amount of male competition it has, and after that I was just like 'Fuck! I don't know what I want to be any more, what am I gonna do!' So this question of what animal I want to be opens up this yawning existential bleed, this void that I'm staring into where once there was certainty it's now just crumbling to dust in my hands.”
Needless to say once corkscrew cocks were mentioned there much laughter had. You can see True Facts About The Duck here.
In part two of our interview next week, Alex talks about touring with 65daysofstatic, drinking, fans (again), the future of music, who's the sleepmakeswaves boss of Magic The Gathering, and reveals who is the most impossible member of the band to tour with. Plus plenty more.
In the meantime, you can see the band support Karnivool once again during their Australian tour. Dates on their Facebook page.
