What inspired you to first start making music? And how did you come to be in your current incarnation? Or if you prefer, a brief bio about you.
90’s Grunge music made me want to buy a guitar and make noise with it but it wasn’t until I heard The Cure’s album Disintegration that I wanted to make the kind of music that I make today. When I got that album it changed everything for me musically. It was so watery and dreamy sounding and It had this depth to it that I had never heard in music before. Years later a friend gave me a burned CD copy of “Just for a Day” by Slowdive. In a similar way that album seemed to tap into some of the same elements that I loved about Disintegration. When I looked into the band further I found the album “Souvlaki” which I fell in love with it on an even deeper level. I was so excited about this sound that I went looking for anything and everything that sounded remotely like it, which led me to MBV, Ride, Catherine Wheel, Pale Saints, Chapterhouse, Swervedriver and all the rest but by the time I was getting really into this stuff I realized that all these bands had broken up or were no longer making this kind of music. That started my search for individuals that would help me make this kind of music and from this objective The Daysleepers were born. When we finished our first EP we didn’t really think there was an audience for what we were doing but as we started posting it around the web, the 500 CD’s we printed were sold in no time. We were shocked.
The latest incarnation of the band is different because we live farther apart now. That means we write and record songs very different from how we did in the past. We have a good system for recording now, even though we can’t always record in the same space, we seem to get the results that we want. There are advantages and disadvantages to this method but the best thing is that we can do all of this from the comfort of our homes, so we can take our time, experiment and get things sounding exactly the way we want to rather than paying by the hour for studio time. We produce all of our own music now, so we do everything from start to finish except for mastering.
Provide us with some info about your latest release…
“Creation” is really a culmination of 10 years of ideas finally realized. It didn’t take that long to make the album but over that decade we experimented with many things until we found a formula that worked well enough for us to put a full length album together with our changing circumstances. “Creation” is the first album that I have ever produced 100% on my own. I had a concept for it, I drew up a loose structure for the album, wrote the songs and then we started recording it. I took more initiative to direct the music to ensure the sounds matched the story I was trying to tell. Scott and Mario were very patient and accommodating to let me do that. They are my best friends so they trusted me and wanted to help me achieve the vision I had for it.
“Creation” was mostly made in my small home studio in Western New York, but the trick was getting it to sound like it was recorded in a humongous warehouse or arena. I was able to achieve that sound using all kinds of delay and reverb pedals and plug-ins, but that gets tricky. If you use too much of that stuff everything just sounds muddy. If you don’t use enough everything sounds small, so to walk that line was probably the most challenging thing to do while making the album. This album is all about feeling and atmosphere, that was the most important thing to me to achieve with it.
Which ones would you consider your main influences both music-wise & non-music-wise?
We are all huge fans of The Cure, The Chameleons, Slowdive, Catherine Wheel, Elliott, Sunny Day Real Estate, The Mary Onettes, Wild Nothing, Sigur Ros & Cocteau Twins to name a few. As a collective group those are some bands that serve as major inspiration for this project but individually we veer in so many other directions with what music we like. Other things that inspire us are nature/creation.
In what way does your sound differ from the rest genre-related artists/bands and why should we listen to your music? In other words, how would you describe your sound?
I think our sound is pretty unique in the genre because we try to vary the style of songs quite a bit on each release. If you take our latest album for example, we have some big, noisy, dark songs like “Creation” and Sundiver” but then we’ll throw a few tracks in like “Arclights” and “Tropics” that lighten the mood with a more upbeat tempo. Then we’ll slow it down and chill out for a bit with songs like “The Memorymaker” or “This Dark Universe”. We never want an album to feel like a drag or sound like one big song. That’s also why we keep our albums fairly short. We don’t like to overstay our welcome. We’d rather leave you wanting more.
Please name your 3 desert islands albums, movies & books…
For me personally it would be:
Movies:
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey
2. Jaws
3. Gattaca
Albums:
1. The Cure – Disintegration
2. Slowdive – Souvlaki
3. Sade – love Deluxe
Do you prefer studio or performing live and why?
This project has always been primarily a Studio project. More than anything we love making music that we can listen to. We like producing a final product. A record or physical representation of our art.
Live performance is a bit tricky for us because in order to produce this sound accurately live, we’d need to add at least one guitar player and probably a keyboard player, but we’ve only ever been a 4 piece and we are all very close friends/family. To add other individuals in, basically studio musicians, would sort of change the dynamics of the band. I’m not saying we couldn’t do it, but it’s just something we’re not focused on. Plus other responsibilities making touring impossible and playing live very difficult. This project isn’t a career for any of us. It’s just our passion project and hobby. We have fun doing it and we never want it to feel like work.
Is there any funny-unique story you would like to share with us, always in relation to your music ‘career’?
Can’t really think of one off the top of my head. We’re all a bunch of goofballs and we’re always laughing uncontrollably when we are together but I can’t think of a specific incident.
Which track of your own would you point out as the most unique and why?
Hmmm…The most unique I would have to say is “Dream within a Dream World”. Our drummer Mario wrote most the music for that one which is unique because normally we write the music together or I have the basic foundation for a song that I bring to everyone else. Also it is our most New Wave track…very 80’s inspired.
Would you like to share with our readers your future plans?
Sure! After “Creation” was finished I didn’t want to think about writing any more music for a while, but only a few months later I suddenly got an amazing idea for where I feel like the band needs to go next and felt re-energized to start working on new material. I have a concept for it that I am very excited about and I have been testing some new guitar pedals to take our sound into new territory. As of now we have 2 new tracks we are working on and we love how they are progressing so far! We have no hard deadline for this one, just want it to take shape naturally but at the rate its going I’d love to have it out sometime in 2020. We’ll see how it progresses. I also hope to get our older EP “The Soft Attack” finally pressed to vinyl sometime in 2019 if possible.
Free question!!! (Ask yourself a question) you wish to answer and haven’t been given the opportunity…
What equipment do you think was essential in making the sounds of “Creation”?
The Strymon Dig Dual Delay and blueSky Reverberator pedals are on every song to some degree. Strymon makes some amazing pedals that really get into some serious ambient territory if you know how to mix the settings to achieve it. I had to play with them a lot to get the sounds I was hearing in my head. No other pedals that I tried got close. I used a vintage BOSS CE-2 Chorus which was new for this album, and my 2 Jazzmasters are always essential. All of these were pretty integral to the atmosphere of the album, at least from a guitar perspective.
Curated by: Christos Doukakis
Recommended listening:
Connect with The Daysleepers:
https://thedaysleepers.bandcamp.com
https://twitter.com/The_Daysleepers
https://www.instagram.com/the_daysleepers
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1geEJC0mAf9bjfmYCffS9F?si=eDtv2oAIQMCDpxipM98p3Q