Why A Strong Community Is Everything

"It’s really changed a lot since we started out, and what we’ve tried to do is never abandon that grassroots thing, just integrate it in different ways,” begins Alex Wilson from a hotel room in Wuhan, China, where sleepmakeswaves are in the midst of a debut visit. The four-piece took Australian instrumental rock to #31 on the ARIA charts with last year’s second longplayer, Love Of Cartography, and have been steadily opening up international opportunities for themselves while never forgetting the underlying ethos that built them back in 2006.

“When we started out we released everything for free and we’d sink all our money into making a record, and then we’d get approached by these little websites called netlabels and they’d be like, ‘We love your music, can we just put it up here?’ And we’d be like, ‘Sure.’ And so it was using the power of the internet to get the music out there to begin with in a very unpretentious, hands-off kind of way,” says Wilson, who thoroughly got a kick out of recently meeting up with the European pianist who transformed the entirety of Love Of Cartography on his YouTube channel, at a time where rights management issues would in many cases inhibit that connection. 

And that’s precisely the point; it’s this active encouragement of meaningful fan interaction that’s grown a self-perpetuating community around sleepmakeswaves, allowing them to keep gaining the next new town, the next new country. As they journey home from their European and Asian dates, Wilson’s thoughts are on their biggest Australian tour to date.

“What I like about the Australian tours is that we get a big mix of things; we go and play a show in Port Macquarie which is quite a small show, but very passionate and very real and very close, and on the other side of the spectrum we’re looking at our biggest-ever Sydney hometown show at The Metro Theatre – that’s gonna be something we never thought that we’d do. Having that diversity is great and obviously the Australian crowd is pretty special, and on some level there’s always going to be a connection that is really unique. You know, we put Sydney on the cover of [Love Of Cartography], and the Australian landscape on the cover of the other one. [In Australia], we kind of love our bands to be successful. When they saw that the little guys were doing well, then that seemed to make an even bigger impact.”