On Drawing Inspiration From Antarctic Explorers

The brand new album from Australia's favourite exponents of instrumental post-rock majesty Sleepmakeswaves is almost upon us. That means anticipation and celebration for most, however for the band's guitar player Otto Wicks-Green, and the other three members of the band, it means facing that strange dichotomy of emotion that many musicians go through in that slightly awkward phase between a new album's physical completion and actual release.

"I saw this thing online once, about art. This Venn diagram where one side is narcissism and the other is crippling self-doubt!" he laughs. "All art is like that, especially something like this, which for me at least has been the most personal record to date and dealt with some of the heavier aspects of this thing called life."

Another emotion he is feeling in the lead-up to the unleashing of Made Of Breath Only is just pure relief. "I'm over the intensity and trauma of recording," he admits, "where you have to sign off on everything, make all the decisions and then there's no turning back. It is traumatic because we're such perfectionists and so obsessive, recording is always a bit… stressful. But now that it's done and I have the artwork and I can see it and hold it all in my hand, I feel mighty proud of it and excited about what people are going to think of it."

"I'm over the intensity and trauma of recording."

Even though a band like this operates without the use of expressive vocals and image-laden lyrics, Made Of Breath Only manages to project incredibly dark yet vibrant and exciting imagery through instrumentation alone, and Wicks-Green is more than happy to provide some insight into some of the non-musical inspirations that helped shape the way the record sounds.

"The track Edge Of Everything especially was very demanding in terms of its technicality and ambition," he recalls. "The working title of that song was 'Mawson', to take a step back. The record started as this conceptual thing where we wanted to look at the Antarctic and the Arctic. As part of that I looked at these explorers. I got particularly interested in Mawson, he set out from Hobart on an incredibly ill-fated expedition to Antarctica. I just found his story so amazing, it was such a triumph of human endurance... that he made it back alive and survived.

"That's kind of where the sound of that song came from, the slide guitar in some parts; I was trying to evoke the howling of the huskies and the wind, and just the overall sense of journey and the sense of redemption at the end. I'm really proud of the way that song turned out."

There were some very specific musical influences that made their mark on this record's sound and vibe too, stemming from some of the rather extensive touring the band has done over the past few years. "We wanted to create something that was darker and heavier in scope, and more ambitious in terms of technicality," he explains. "We had been playing a lot of these amazing metal bands and, although we didn't want to actually imitate them, it is pretty inspiring to be around these kinds of bands, like The Contortionist, Monuments, Entheos, Karnivool and so on."

And that is set to continue, as the band prepare to head off on a massive bout of touring, including a trip to China, the album tour when they go out with fellow Aussie progressive heavy music legends Caligula's Horse, then a run with the mighty Devin Townsend. "Oh man, how about that?!" he enthuses, regarding the great Canadian genius. "We're so fuckin' excited, I can't even tell you. What a bloody hero! And I'm really stoked that we've just got this more ambitious technical stuff out so that we can at least get into his world."

That all takes the band up to around half way through the year, at which time they actually get a couple of months break, but then things will heat up again as they head off for far-flung lands to play with more legends of progressive and heavy music.

"We've just been confirmed for the main stage of ArcTanGent Festival in August," he announces, "which is fricken awesome because it's an amazing line-up — Explosions In The Sky, Tesseract, Converge — on the bill. So we're heading over to England in August and we're going to try and build a tour around that in England and in Europe. Then we'll probably go back again for a proper European tour towards the end of the year, and we'll do another Australian headline tour at the end of the year.

"And who knows what else will pop up? But at the moment it's looking reassuringly busy."