Your Victorian tour is fast approaching. What are you most looking forward to regarding this short tour?
Getting a chance to step into the power of It’s All a Beautiful Noise find the spirit of the music in the live experience. It’s a chance for the band to really expand its connection. It’s one thing to record new music, and find the spirit of each song in a studio. I love that, and I love how a song evolves differently live and how important it is to play and play and play new songs in new environments to new audiences.
Your performances in Vic will include some exciting additions to the stage, such as motion graphics and 3D mapping. Any other surprises fans can expect?
Actually, the 3D mapping and the fully developed production with installations and hats/masks come together in our February/March tour. These four dates are a way for us to keep playing a connecting in with the spirit of the new music and this time. Our theme: We are all pollinators, what we buy we grow. Our evening honours the littlest angels that keep our world alive and thriving.
With the production of your most recent release, Citizens Of The Planet, you’ve emphasised the concept of sound imagery. What was your goal with this work?
To be perfectly clear, Citizens of the Planet has not been officially released yet. It will be released officially the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016. This depends on site development. The album is only available as a part of our crowd-funding online campaigns and will be available at the up-coming shows.
Why did you decide to end your collaboration with record labels and venture out on your own as an independent artist?
I didn’t decide, life decided it for me. In 1997, I was diagnosed with Graves Disease. Graves stopped my life, and when I recovered years later, the record industry changed and I didn’t mean much to the major record companies. This caused me to grow and connect with myself in a deeper way, and trust what I really believed: that we create our reality and allow myself to stretch and explore the possibility of crowd-funding. I found that I can continue to make music the way I have always made music and continue to grow as an artist.
TONI CHILDS will appear at Substation on Saturday November 1.
