No Sleep Til'

Sleepmakeswaves

Whether you call it crescendo-core or post-rock, one thing can be agreed on: Sydney instrumental four-piece sleepmakeswaves are absolutely dominating the Australian instrumental music scene. All in the space of a year, their debut album, ...and so we destroyed everything, has taken the boys overseas, scored them an ARIA nomination and seen them play at industry conference SXSW and Belgium's dunk!festival in amongst a few massive tours alongside Karnivool, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and experimental UK heavyweights 65daysofstatic. At some point during that whirlwind of a year, the outfit released an album comprised entirely of tracks from their debut remixed by a handful of contributors. Opening the cheekily titled ...and then they remixed everything is a glitched-out rendition of Our Time Is Short But Your Watch Is Slow, contributed by none other than tour buddies 65daysofstatic. 

“When we co-headlined with them at dunk!festival in Zottegem, that was the first time we'd all seen 65daysofstatic play live and I have to say, it was probably the most energetic and inspiring live show we have ever seen,” guitarist Jonathan “Kid” Khor warmly reflects on touring and working with the British bigshots. “They mentioned they wanted to go to Australia and we knew that would go down well with all the people in Australia. It was just a surprise them coming down – we asked them if they'd be interested in remixing one of our songs and we weren't expecting them to say yes, but they said yes. It turned out really well; it's probably one of my favourite tracks on the remix album.”

With 65daysofstatic joining sleepmakeswaves in Australia and the increasingly positive reception that both the debut album and the remix album have received, Australia's response to post-rock and instrumental music began to appear more inflated, as Khor illustrates: “Instrumental music is in Australia and it has always been around, but it definitely does feel like Australia lags behind by a few years in taking up instrumental music or post-rock/post-metal music. You definitely see the difference when you go over to Europe, for example. I'm hoping that Australia does follow suit and it's really looking that way. You look at recent slew of bands that have come out here, like This Will Destroy You, Explosions In The Sky and Mogwai – it's just been getting bigger and bigger and people are getting more and more into it.” 

So after they destroyed everything, they remixed everything. The next logical step? To play everything. As 2012 inched into the new year and all the touring petered into its last legs, the boys spent their time working on some new material. With this new material on the cards, sleepmakeswaves are getting ready to close the curtain on ...and so we destroyed everything by giving the album its final live hurrah in their first and only headline tour for this year. More than just marking the end of an era, the tour is a chance for the band to roadtest the new tracks.

“We've been working on pre-production for our next release and we haven't really shown that to anyone in a live setting yet, so the Aussie audiences are going to be the first to see these songs being performed live and it's going to be a bit of a test to see what the crowd's reaction and people's response to it is like. There have been some songs that we've written that hadn't made it to the live stage because they were primarily designed in the studio. They may have involved five different guitars and five different tunings that wasn't possible to replicate up on stage, but we've been working really hard to make it work and I think we have now, so what people are going to hear is almost everything – and a whole lot of our catalogue that has never, ever been played live before”

In what already promises to be their most epic tour to date, the band is raising the stakes by honing in on the aesthetics of their stage shows. “I guess with our type of music, since we're instrumental and there's no lead singer to focus on for the live show, we're always trying to focus on how we can make the live show visually pleasing as well.” As Khor goes on to explain, at every venue there'll be a different light show in order to enhance the live experience and keep each set unique. “It's something we've always talked about, but we just never knew the best way to implement it. There are a lot of instrumental bands out there; you know, they bring along their projector and they project some video footage and stuff like that... We've never really totally connected with that. If you're going to do a video projection, it's gotta be good, it's gotta be meaningful and it's gotta relate to the music without being tacky. That's always been in the back of our minds – 'How can we create a live show with visuals that's not going to take away from the show, that's really genuinely going to add to it?' And so we've been experimenting with different lights and how we can use that with the music.” 

For the Sydney post-rockers, experimentation seems to be at the forefront of their focus. Khor outlines a shift in the band's approach to songwriting. “There's been a few things changing with the songwriting process in the band and I think the most major one is that our drummer, Tim Adderley, we haven't really released anything on record with his songwriting, so all the stuff we've been working on is the first time we've showcased all his drumming. He brings a totally new aspect to rhythm and subsequently to the new material that we're writing, so I think you could say the new material is more complex rhythmically and we're now kind of changing the perspective of designing the songs so that they work well for a live show instead of the other way around. When we're writing music, we're always thinking, 'Is this going to work live? If it's not, then let's move on, or let's work on it until it does work really well live first and then we'll go record it.' I think that's the biggest change to our early material that you'll hear with these new songs on the tour is that they're very loud, very live songs.”

Then Khor offers up one last surprise. “Whenever we were in Melbourne, Tim Charles, the violinist from the band Ne Obliviscaris, would come in and join us in a few tracks on stage, but this time around it's a secret – you're going to have to come to a show to see who appears on stage.”