We will be covering SleepMakesWaves on September 8, 2012 at the Cambridge Hotel in Newcastle, NSW but until then, check out this interview we did through email with bassist, Alex Wilson
Amy Brinkley: Tell us about your music, how would you describe it? How is it different than the other bands out there today?
Alex Wilson: sleepmakeswaves is about contrasts; we want to you to groove and chill in a headspace of beautiful guitars and ambient electronics before we rip your face off with the loudest riffs we can muster up. Our songs are pretty long, they are more about the journey than the hook and we don’t have vocals. I suppose those things make us pretty different to lots of bands.
AB: The Now We Rise and We Are Everywhere tour will be your second Australian tour for the year, why another so soon?
AW: I guess we just love touring! We’ve been doing supports for some awesome bigger bands (Boris, Karnivool and now Tortoise coming up) but we still wanted to give our fans one more chance to catch us live at cheaper club shows before the year’s out. It’s also a longer headline set that includes some fresh material and we’re selling new merch, so it’s something a bit different to what we had on our last national tour back in February.
AW: Highlights: Playing three great shows in Philadelphia, Houston and Austin within 50 hours on no sleep for our SXSW tour. Opening up our European tour at dunk!festival in the Belgian countryside, getting bloated on free Belgian brews and wonderfully stodgy Dutch cooking; walking out to about 800 people for the first Sydney show of the Karnivool tour and feeling the love like we’d never felt in our hometown before. Lowlights: the aforementioned 50 hours of no sleep and some guy in Slovenia projectile-vomiting all over our merch table. The many tedious hours spent in a van on European highways.
AW: It’s like two different worlds. Karnivool was our first ‘big’ tour, and about as good as it may get in Australia for us. We learnt so much about how a pro operation runs with a great crew and world-class equipment. Even as the first opener, we played to big and appreciative crowds and got to hang with Karnivool and Redcoats; top-shelf guys. Our headline shows are more low-key; we have to work harder to make the night happen. The plus side is you get flexibility; we can choose to play for 70 minutes rather than 30 and can have a nice big soundcheck to get our mix tuned for maximum face-meltage.
AW: We haven’t written as much as we’d like this year. Balancing the step up in our touring commitments and everyday life has cut a big slice out of the time we would ordinarily have for writing collaboratively. We’ve got around this by demoing songs individually and then learning and tweaking them as a band. But we’re excited about the new stuff we’re playing on these shows. Our new drummer Tim has expanded the possibilities of what we can do rhythmically and we’re now trying to focus on integrating a different kind of groove and momentum without losing that melodic epicness we’re known for.
