An Interview with Tempesst
Words by Sarah Morrison
Tempesst has remerged from the waves to unleash the beauty that is their debut LP ‘Must Be A Dream’ out via Pony Recordings; a label the band has been working on along-side running their own recording studio. Dipping in and out of very personal and heavier themes, the band have found a way of expressing others emotional experiences through their own eyes.
We sat down with Toma and Kane ahead of the albums release to talk about growing up in a reserved community, their education on music history, moving to London, starting a studio, and writing others stories through their own lens.
I understand that the band initially started with Toma & Andy, but the group of you actually all met in Church back in Noosa, Australia. You’ve mentioned it was a quite sheltered community, and I’m curious as someone who’s not come from a Church background, what sort of music were you allowed to be exposed to as children? How reserved were you from learning about music history?
Toma: I guess, in my family, it wasn’t that we weren’t allowed to listen to music, it was just that we weren’t exposed to much. It’s not like my parents stopped us from listening to the radio, they would just always be playing Christian music. My dad plays guitar, and my mum sings, and so they would perform Christian songs and you’d be immersed in it.
Not all of us but Kane, Andy [my brother], and I were the ones that grew up in church together. Eric [our guitarist], we didn’t actually meet him till we moved to London, UK, and Blake [our bassist], is five years younger than us, so it was really just the three of us who played together since we were twelve/thirteen years old. Every weekend we were just playing in the Church band, it was pretty intense.
Breaking out and moving to New York, was a critical/defining step that would ultimately shape your musical avenues. At what point while living there did you delve into this sort of forbidden music? What was the first act that you heard that made you question the type of music you wanted to produce?
Toma: We were living in Williamsburg, NY, back in 2010. A neighbour would critique the music I was writing and introduced me to tons of artists. We’d stay up to the early hours of the morning and he’d introduce to me stuff like the Beat Poets and heaps of random stuff that most people learned about when they were fourteen. (Laughs) At twenty-one, I got my education from my neighbour Todd.
What was one act that make you question the music you were writing or that resonated with you and lead you off into this area of music?
Toma: I’d say Yeasayer is an act that was pretty important to me at the time. And then just all the classic indie bands around at the time like Beach House!
New York has a very special DIY music scene and ethos. How quickly were you able to get involved? What were some of the things you noticed that helped encourage you to test out DIY methods of creation?
Toma: It didn’t last very long one of our key members sort of bailed on us. He just thought ‘I can’t do this, we’re too far from home’ and he booked a ticket back home and left within a week. We sort of pivoted from playing shows and trying to be a band in the New York scene, to me spending a lot of my time writing. We set up our first DIY home studio and went down to a music store and bought some recording gear and microphones and stuff. It was more pivotal for me in terms of my recording/production path that I’ve taken rather than as an act or as a band playing shows or being apart of the scene because we weren’t really apart of the scene.
We did play a bunch of shows and a few really great nights but it was really more the recording stuff that kickstarted this bedroom production thing.
After about a year, Toma & Andy headed to Hackney, London, and reconnected with Kane and Blake, as well as recruited Eric. Were any of you working on music projects when the brothers made the move over?
Toma: After New York, we went back to Australia for a couple of months, got some money together, and then Kane, as well as my brother and I, moved over to London. That was with all of the new songs and that is when we started again with a new group. That’s even gone through multiple incarnations and eventually we landed on the group that’s here now.
London is a very hard city to live and grow in as individuals. When did the city finally feel like a canvas you got to comfortably explore rather than feeling the grind?
Kane: I think it was 2012, we moved into this huge house, all of us. That was a big turning point for me, where we could all just hangout. Through that, it opened us up to all these new friends that we didn’t have before.
The idea to start your studio space [Pony Studios] was sort of an accident. When it came to pursuing this idea further, what was the dealbreaker moment? What set the tone to really give it a go?
Toma: We were meant to go rent a studio in Dalston and it fell through. We had already set our hearts on a space we could record and rehearse in, we decided to keep looking until we found something. There really wasn’t anything available and then we came across this four-thousand square warehouse. For us, it’s about collecting gear and being able to make records every year without needed big budgets from record labels.
What sort of doors has opening the studio given you that you might have had a harder time achieving or experimenting with, without having started the studio?
Toma: Creatively, we’ve got no time limit and can just work on things until we’re satisfied. The hardest thing for a band when you’ve got five people is making sure everybody can contribute and feel like they’ve had a touch on a track. If you’re in the studio and you’re paying by the day, sometimes you’re rushing so much that it just becomes about finishing supposed to workshopping a song to the point that everyone’s proud of it.
Having this space gives us the freedom to write whenever we want to and keep working on stuff until we really through with it.
Kane: You can’t really schedule when you want to create something, so having this space here for us lets us hang around and have a jam.
When did it become apparent that you would expand things further to start your own label?
Toma: It was the logical next thing for us to do. Where most bands don’t have a studio, they have to find someone who going to pay to record somewhere. We sort of did it the other way around.
We also want to be able to put out friends records and be able to do things on our own terms. We want to be able to have a long career and be in control of it.
So you do have other artists you plan to release with in the next year or so?
Toma: We’ve got one full record coming out this year, which will be the second record out on the label, and then we have a single and an EP with another artist. The hope is that in a few years we’ll have more artists that we’re working with and be able to do it in a bigger way.
Delving into more of the themes compressed into the album, you’ve definitely honed in on some heavier topics. As artists, there is a sense of peace that comes from writing and displaying emotions through your music. Were you able to overcome any of the emotional weight that was being carried prior?
Toma: I guess I never really thought of it like that. There’s something very interesting in taking another perspective and almost levitating it above your life and your situation and writing about it objectively. I find that whole process, I wouldn’t say therapeutic but I find it interesting. Sometimes when you disassociate yourself, then you’re able to be more honest.
The other thing for me, in terms of the writing style, is that I’ll often take a first-person perspective but it’s not actually my story. I tell somebody else’s story through the first person because I feel like I can articulate it clearly. Which again, maybe it allows me to be more honest about someone else’s situation than they are about it themselves or maybe they’re not even aware of some of the things that might show up in someone else’s perspective? The really heavy ones that I’m thinking about on the record are mostly somebody else’s story, they’re not mine.
It’s a combination of the two; when you’re telling a story with somebody else in mind, you’re inevitably weaving in your own experience and emotion because you do it subconsciously. I don’t want to absolve myself from all responsibly or connection to the tracks that were inspired by somebody else. At the end of the day there was something important that I felt like I needed to say which is why I committed to exploring those themes. That’s the luxury as a creative, that you can live in that fluid state where the truth is malleable.
Your first single ‘On The Run’ is a fairly interesting story; the disappearance of a friend who would later return a decade later as someone completely different. Is this an on-going trauma within your life? Does it relate to all of you?
Toma: The big theme that inspired the song was the idea that sometimes you can’t recover; sometimes you are on the run and there’s no coming back from it. In their case, that is their reality. It’s an irrecoverable situation.
With “High On Our Own” you talk about that relationship with your old hometown and the structure of life that is sort of set up for you or expected of you. Is it ever hard to look back at what might have been? Did any of you ever expect to be exploring what is deemed as a non-traditional career?
Toma & Kane: Probably not.
Kane: We’d be playing music but not pursuing it like we are now.
Toma: In Australia, it feels like there is an established middle class of musicians but in Europe, there are stages you can move through in your career and build over time.
Kane: We were talking about this yesterday at the pub and the idea of coming to peace with how that’s their choice and neither one is better or worse. It’s just a different choice of life. I don’t think I could comprehend the quiet life.
The album undeniably has a 70s West-Coast American feel to it. Why is it that you feel so drawn to that era?
Toma: The west-coast thing is because we grew up on the beach. That easy-going, slinky, summery, west-coast music is what we would listen to when we go back to the beach. It feels right for where we come from. It’s out of place here in London but I guess subconsciously some of the bands that we love and reference now, I didn’t get into until my early twenties and it feels like home. Australia has a real west-coast/psych kind of scene and there are a lot of artists doing that sort of thing.
Kane: I agree, it feels quite natural, always has! Never really been drawn to that heavier side.
Out of my own curiosity, have you always worked with Claudius Mittendorfer? If not, what was it like to bring him on to help give life to the album?
Toma: Claudius is amazing and his work is really great.
When we got the reference mixes back we just thought ‘Far out!’ we’ve never sounded so good!