Gardens Music Band
Out of the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Gardens Music Band have been making a name for themselves and have just blown away everyone with their debut album “Gardens” released on the 4th of December. It's jam packed with hits and a must listen to! - Stream here. Hazy Days Music would like to thank Jack and Mark for taking the time out and having a chat.
Gardens Music Band has been a band for several years now, could you tell us a brief history of the band and meeting Mark and David and when they joined the band?
Firstly, we would like to start off by stating that we are on Biripi Country and acknowledge the traditional owners of the land.
Gardens Music Band formed up here in the mid-north coast of New South Wales, in a little town called Bobin, Jack - "mine and Mark's home town". The band formed about 7 years ago and it's taken a few shakes to get it to where we are now. A lot of trial and error to get the recording down packed, but eventually, we got there.
We met Mark Goats back in 2011 who plays keys in the band, He was playing the guitar around a campfire up in the mountains in this little town called Death Valley, and we've kept hanging out with him since then. He does all the recording, producing and mixing for the band, it's unbelievable how talented he is. David Craige plays the guitar in the band, and joined back in 2017, he is also amazing at recording and has really helped us out a lot at developing our sound. We work really well together, and it's made Gardens Music Band a dream since these guys joined the band.
Since then we have been on a few tours and played endless shows up and down the east coast, the Side Stare Music group in Melbourne have really looked after us with shows.
Ever since my first listen to your debut album "Gardens" released on the 4th of December, I have been obsessed, "Mine Control'' is the perfect opener! Could you tell us the story behind this song? What was the recording process like and where did you record this album?
When Waspy [Mark] sent through the final mix of the "Mine Control" we were blown away!
We play a lot of gigs in Newcastle, and the coal industry is big there, it's crazy what mining and the coal industry does for/to the rest of the country. When I was talking to Mark after the first time he flew to Newcastle from Perth, you sort of see all that stuff when you are up in the air, you see this beautiful indigenous country that we live on, and it is getting absolutely pillage by the mining industry, and it's pretty much past the point of no return. When you are up in Newcastle, you can sit on the headlands and just count the ships coming in and out each day and the millions of dollars they are making.
That sort of summarizes the meaning behind what the song is about, talking about Australia's love for mining, hence “Mine Control”.
Mark - "I have always imagined some sort of large machinery with giant hands leaning over you giving you the devil horns, that’s the vibe I get off the song. Jack - "I picture it as a giant termite eating away at rocks".
We recorded all the sound effects on the song. Jack - "I have this old troop carrier, we would go outside and put microphones underneath it and open up the bonnet putting mics next to the manifold, trying to get as much of that industrial sound out of it. We would record it driving passed and revving hard and the bits of metal hitting each other we record, giving that sound of pickaxes digging deep in a mineshaft, and all that laughing."
It is an intense song with a pretty server meaning behind it.
We record everything ourselves at home. We grew up in this beautiful little house out in the bush and have been very lucky to live there a very very long time. We pretty much have no neighbours and would stay up late and start early in the morning recording and learning how to record music. Mark Goats is self-taught when it comes to recording, producing and mixing, and he has been monumental as a teacher to us, passing on all this incredible information.
The house sort of has one foot on the grid and one foot off the grid, it doesn’t have a lot of powerpoints to run everything off when it comes to recording haha. But we couldn't ask for a better place to play, make and record music.
It's one of the benefits of recording at home compared to being in a studio, having no time limit, not feeling rushed and having that time to explore ideas and do whatever we like and recording at our own leisure. Not really having any close neighbours is great for when we like to stay up late or start really early in the morning to record, you do have to put up with the cicadas in summer though haha.
A lot of all the little sound effects on the album we have recorded ourselves, we do a lot of that stuff “Fieldwork” I guess you could call it. Recording random little noises of quiet streets and out in the fields, it fits really well into our sound and makes it fun for us to experiment and see how creative we can get, it just makes it a bit more special to us adding that in.
With everything that has gone on this year, did that delay the release date for the album at all? Releasing your first single "Philadelphia" well over a year ago now and second single "2" not that long after, could you tell us a bit about the story behind those songs and why on the album "2" is an extended version?
We had all intentions to release this album last year in 2019, but our little town Bobin was pretty savagely smashed by the bush fires last year. So that took all our focus, and we were preoccupied with helping out our community, we didn’t get to quite finish it last year, so we postponed it till we got the time to work on it again this year.
"Philadelphia'' - Around the time we were happy to put something out with the plan to release the album back in 2019. I got the idea while watching a Louis Theroux doco on the Philadelphia Police Unit, and that’s where writing about Philadelphia came from. It’s a really nice poppy song and fun to play live. That was around the first time we attempted to make our own instruments. We started making midi synthesisers from scratch, some of the bass lines in "Philadelphia'' are from a frequency oscillator, picking a band of frequencies that fitted in with the song and had fun playing around with it. Jack - "That was a really new experience for me. We record the guitar's outside, sitting the amp under the veranda, and playing at full ball. Sitting a few microphones really far away in the field, which gave it that natural reverb and big sound towards the end of the song.
For song "2" Mark - “I collect a lot of old organs, like Hammonds, really old kooky church organs and double-decker ones that have drum machines built-in and all that. The first one I ever got was from my grandmother. A lot of our songs, and demos for our songs, I write them on that organ she gave me. Those organs that are made for churches actually make some of the best dance music I’ve ever heard, "2" was written off that organ, we used the drum sound, and the keys sound off that. It's very old and just a nice way to write music on there.”
The song idea of “2 3 1” Mark - "A lot of our songs are made up stories in a way, and this is a good one haha. Some people go out on a weekend, and there are two of them, and sometimes they mess it up, sometimes they meet a third person, but often you mess it up and end up alone as one, yourself. So that’s the idea, you start off with two, and things get complicated, then a third gets involved, and you end up by yourself alone. We actually have only played "2" live once before we always play "3" and "1". We are keen to play the album in full next time we can play a show. We like the idea of writing songs that flow into each other easily, and I think "2 3 1" works really well like that.
Being in a band for seven years is a very long time, do you remember the early days and important events that have helped develop your sound as a band to where you are today? How important have they been to making your sound for this album?
When we first started playing as a band, it was all surfy psychedelic rock. Lots of toppy guitars, lots of feedback, delay pedals, and long hair haha.
As we got better at producing our own music, we progressed as musicians. Over the seven years everyone's influences change a lot, we started getting into disco/electro-pop music a lot more, and it was nice to figure out how to add/combine it into our own music. Disco/electro-pop was a huge influence with us starting to change our sound. Mark - "I definitely love the old lazy days though haha". Jack - "When we first started experimenting with “fieldwork” and sounds recordings, recording whatever we could in our backyard, every afternoon we would have a barbeque because that was the only cooking facility I had. We would end up recording the bbq a lot haha, different foods for different sounds it was kind of rhythmic, one song was largely portioned off for barbeque sounds.
We have the album that we just released “Gardens”, then we have this secret album we made that is hidden all over our website - http://gardensmusicband.com/. We make a lot of these little 2-minute beat tapes, little kooky beat tapes. We mess around with this all the time, we have probably made hundreds of these little songs. It’s more of a 3/4 am job. It's all a bit of fun haha.
How did the band celebrate the release of your first album? What does Gardens Music Band have planned for the start 2021, can we catch you guys playing anywhere soon?
We were all separate and just messaged each other on the day the album came out. Waspy and his partner Maddy have a 6-month-old bub, and they were cruising around catching up with family. Jack - "I was just hanging out in the bush, and Dave was down in Newcastle". Mark - "I just had a pretty quiet day, I streamed the album in the morning and pretended like I was hearing it for the first time. That's the funny thing with albums when they finally get distributed, you have already listened to each song thousands of times. The whole band has been blown away with the response from everyone on the album''.
For shows, we are going to wait till the new year when restrictions are hopefully a bit better before we organise anything. Something that we have been working on over the lockdown period is the visual aspect of our performance. We reached out to a few friends that do visual displays and got their help with some stuff for our live shows. It's turning out great and going to be amazing when we get to play live again.
Jack - "One thing I’ve been looking forward to is the start of the tour when you rock up to the car park for the first time, and you see all the other bands that you are playing with, that time just before you unload all the gear. I miss that part when you get to meet the new bands and catch up with old mates and chat all the dribble talk."
Stay up to date with Gardens Music Band on Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.