Meet – Asylums
1. For those unfamiliar with your history, can you tell us why you decided to give this whole
music thing a shot?
Towards the end of 2013 I reached out to the other guys because I’d been demoing some music on my 8 track and wanted to try developing it in a band, we had all been good friends for a long time but had yet to fully collaborate on something together. We had literally no expectations, it was just another way to be expressive and have fun…..to our surprise the four of us had great natural chemistry and our four musical personalities were perfect for the music. We booked a recording session with our mate Thomas Mitchener at the start of 2014 and recorded ‘The Death Of Television’, after a few months we also decided to start a record label and arts collective called ‘Cool Thing Records’ to facilitate our releases and creative ideas. Its been building nicely ever since.
2. Who would you list as your musical influence?
I don’t think we have a specific musical influence, we love all sorts of stuff and are huge record collectors. We were listening to lots of old Dischord Records releases at the start, mixing it with surreal stuff like Captin Beefheart and being influenced by great contemporary songwriters like The Magnetic Fields and Kurt Vile melodically. I’d say Asylums draw heavily on a variety of influences outside of music, unique stuff from advertising, tv commericals, and film.
3. whats the coolest thing that’s happened to you as a band since you started up?
I got to play the bicycle horn onstage with The Vaseline’s during Mollys Lips when we toured with them in 2014. After that cool things started happening all the time, earlier this month for instance BBC6 music made our album ‘Killer Brain Waves’ their album of the day……that was amazing!
4. what are your hopes and dreams as a band for the next few years.
Stick to our original ethos of making art for fun, expand our sound and audience, release more Asylums records and play bigger shows, stay loose, stay spontaneous. We also have some other awesome other bands releasing music on our label.
5. what are some of your favorite albums from the past few years?
So many to choose from, I’ll forget loads, but here are a few that come to mind:
1. So Pitted – NEO
2. METZ – II
3. The War On Drugs – Lost In The Dream
4. Shopping – Why Choose
5. Primitive Parts – Parts Primitive
6. Ariel Pink – Pom Pom
7. Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks – Wig Out At Jagbags
6. Do you see any real use for social media , or is it all just a pain in the ass to keep with?
I have mixed feelings personally, we didn’t have any social media for the first three Asylums singles and it didn’t hold us back really, we had plenty of radio and press exposure for example. At the time we enjoyed creating our own web pages for each release……as we progressed though we felt that we wanted to use Social Networking, it had a lot of potential for expanding what we did visually and it allowed us to say thank you to people directly, which is lovely.
7. Do you pay attention to reviews or comments from people about your music or do you just turn that noise off.
Some days you take a look at what people are saying and other days if your feeling a bit fragile you might not, in general its cool for us to just keep seeking out new music for our own listening pleasure and reading about other bands rather than our own, its good to stay inspired and grounded. We really do appreciate anyone who takes the time to either write about us or read about us, we have a small operation at Cool Thing / Asylums and word of mouth is huge for us.
8. If you could tour anywhere in the world , where would you want to go.
Japan.
9. Can music save the mortal soul or is just a good backbeat to your life.
I think it can do both.
10. Any last thoughts for your fans
We have a record called ‘Killer Brain Waves’ out now, its out on our own label ‘Cool Thing’ and we have been building both projects for 2.5 years, if you have the cash and like the band then cop a Ltd Edition 180 gram Pink Vinyl now!
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