“It was one of the most gratifying things we’ve ever done,” bassist and general spokesperson for the band, Alex Wilson says. “When we started working seriously our manager asked us what Australian band we would most like to play with and we thought Karnivool would be fantastic. Then when they actually asked us to do it, well, it was a pretty incredible thing. On the one hand, we feel happy to be asked to do the tour as a relatively unknown band but we also feel pretty chuffed because we’ve worked our asses off for the past twelve months and to go on that tour we had the great experience of that experience on the back of all that we’d done. Karnivool and Redcoats were wonderful to us and their crew were amazing but we also got a lot more love than we expected to from the fans…There were a few guys who came up to me and they were like ‘it’d be sick if ya had some vocals, hey,’ but generally people were actually surprisingly receptive to us. We expected to be playing to fairly empty rooms and that the people who came would be far more hostile but the complete opposite happened. The Karnivool fans came out in droves to support us and Redcoats.”
With their own national tour about to begin, punctuated by a set as part of the Darebin Music Feast, it’s easy to assume that some of the recently converted might reappear in the audience for this headline tour. “We haven’t played any capital city shows yet but we’re hoping that might happen,” he says humbly. “It’d be great to see a few new faces come down who had seen us do the supports for Karnivool but I suppose we’re trying not to think about it that way. I don’t think we can ever delude ourselves into feeling entitled to those kinds of crowds yet. We just need to keep plugging away as the slightly weird and obscure instrumental band and maintain our hard core fans.”
SXSW can be either an expensive and wasted exercise or a sure-fire rocket into the American music market and while Sleepmakeswaves had a solid response to their release, …and so we destroyed everything, on the CMJ Top 200, touring is still very much at the whiteboard stage. “Any headway we can make into the US would be fantastic but that all depends on what kind of attention these future releases get and what kind of tour offers we can manage,” he says. “There’s nothing solid, as far as touring, we’re focusing on what we can achieve with this Australian tour and then focusing on getting some new material down. At the moment, with the Australian tour, we’re doing it to give the people who saw us earlier in the year or on the Karnivool tour one more opportunity to see us before the year’s out but also to road test some of the new material as a nice treat for the people who have come out to see us.”
Road testing material is an ambiguous notion and while some bands will dump the songs that get the least applause, sleepmakeswaves hardly seem like that sort of band. “I think our fans are fairly open-minded, that’s one of the benefits of being a slightly oddball group, the fans are along for the journey and they expect us to try new things and spread our wings,” he says. “To be honest, when we’re playing new songs and ‘road testing’ them, we’re deciding for ourselves which songs we really want to go with. It comes down to which songs really get us going and excited and which songs get all of us firing on all cylinders. It’s searching for that moment when there’s an element to the performance that goes beyond the individual performers and beyond the song itself. That feeling is something that we want to bring to the next record; that energy that you get during a really good gig. So for us, it’s about going on that project of self-discovery and hopefully the audience will find some great riffs and awesome melodies and they’ll be able to enjoy the passion we have discovering that.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
