Muso’s Guide presents headliners Spiral Beach: “we can’t wait to be back!”
Muso's Guide presents... Canadian Blast
Spiral Beach are sonic rebels unafraid of breaking all the rules and having a party in the process! The band’s love of exploring different sounds and song structures is offset by their sophisticated sense of melody and elaborate vocal harmonies. And what’s more, we’re putting them in two weeks today! Spiral Beach are headlining our London Queen of Hoxton show on Tuesday November 24, playing alongside Hey Rosetta!, The Argument And How It Started and Redbluegreen.
The band has spent the last three years touring across the the United States and Canada with bands like the Hidden Cameras, The Go! Team and Tokyo Police Club, as well as performing in the UK in 2008 to celebrate the release of the ‘Voodoo’ single. They have also gained a devoted following in their hometown of Toronto thanks to their innovative live performances, putting on DIY all-ages shows in unusual venues such as art galleries, theatres, loft spaces and outdoor parks, which often feature audience participation and interactive visual projections.
The band has released two albums on Sparks Music in North America, 2007’s Ball (recorded by ex-Hidden Cameras and Arcade Fire member Michael Olsen) and their most recent album The Only Really Thing.
Are you looking forward to returning to the UK?
Yes of course!! It’s been over a year since we were in London, we can’t wait to be back!
Your wildly audacious songs seem to have got even bolder and grander three albums down the line. How do you contain yourselves in the studio?
For The Only Really Thing we put a lot more time into working in the studio – our last album Ball was recorded live off the floor in a barn over just a couple of weekends. This time around we spent pretty much the whole winter holed up in Mike Olsen’s basement experimenting with different sounds, sampling, overdubbing etc… we ended up building a lot of the sound effects from scratch and them sampling our own record when it came to playing it live! It’s very important to us that the band be able to reproduce all the sounds you hear on the album.
The influences in your music seem wide-ranging. You described Ball as “Frankenstein on ecstasy”, and The Only Really Thing as Frankenstein on ecstasy in a Bollywood movie from 1968″. How would you describe the live show and what can we expect?
We’ve always really loved the sound of those Bollywood compilations from the 60s and 70s… there’s something about the multi-textured collage kind of feel that kind of connected with what we were doing anyway, so we made a conscious decision to use those records as a direct reference for recording the album – we thought it would be interesting since most of those artists were emulating western psychedelic bands originally, and here were are these kids from Toronto kind of reversing it, like a ping-pong effect.
What music are you guys all into?
We listen to pretty much everything that’s out there, my iTunes is on shuffle all the time… right now there’s some really great bands coming out of Toronto who we’ve gotten to play with, like DD/MM/YYYY and Slim Twig, definitely gotta check them out…
From the clips we’ve seen of your frantic, exciting performances, it’s going to be some spectacular. But do you write for performance?
We’ve always thought of us as being a visual band, so we try to make each show as exciting as possible for the audience… because of the logistics involved we can’t bring our projectionist over to the UK, but you can check out some of his work here.
Canada’s definitely produced some gems over the past few years. Were you Hidden Cameras fans before Mike Olsen became your producer?
We’ve actually gone on tour with the Hidden Cameras three times now across Canada and the US… they’re definitely one of our favourite bands, me and my brother Airick ended up playing with them almost every show! I think it’s both amazing and hilarious that people are starting to recognize Canada as a country where everyone plays in an awesome indie band… living in downtown Toronto it actually kind of feels like that sometimes…
What are your greatest influences? Where did the fascination with Bollywood come from? And what happens next?
We’ve played in this band almost seven years now with the same four members, so we’ve discovered all kinds of music together… we’re working on a couple of different projects right now that we’re really excited about; I’m writing insane techno-punk songs with Karoline Lebrun in montreal (she’s the one who originally introduced us to all this Bollywood craziness) and Airick is actually bringing over some cassettes to the London show of his solo stuff that he’s just finished – ask him about them! It’s incredible stuff, sounds like Throbbing Gristle covering Syd Barrett or something.
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