A Chat with Spurious Transients (25.07.2020)

OSR: Was there a person or experience that inspired you to become a musician?

GLW: Aside from a brief spell of wanting to play the flute at an early age (something I never got to try) I found myself enamoured by the guitar, especially the exotic-looking electric variant. I’d take every opportunity to watch TV shows like The Monkees, Top Of The Pops and all those dreadful light entertainment shows (Lulu, Cliff Richard, etc) just to get a glimpse of an electric guitar.

Showing my age here, I remember in particular two television performances that really made me sit up and take notice. One was the now legendary appearance of David Bowie on Top Of The Pops performing ‘Starman’, with red spiky hair and looking like some kind of alien playing his metallic blue 12-string guitar, and putting his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulder while singing the chorus. Apparently there was a lot of controversy about that, I’ve read since that people at the time thought it was homo-erotic. I knew nothing about that sort of thing, it just looked like a nice friendly brotherly gesture to me.

The other performance, also on Top Of The Pops, was T Rex playing ‘Metal Guru’. It wasn’t even a song I particularly liked, but it was the whole image, the glam rock thing, the TV studio set, the glitter, the outfits, the studio lights, the electric guitars. I remember going outside and playing in the little lane behind our house, picking up a stick fallen from the oak tree there and pretending it was a guitar.

Actually, thinking back to those days, as a very young child I used to get confused by the words “musician” and “magician” and would be very disappointed on watching a TV show when they’d announce the next act saying, “Now we have a very talented musician coming on…” and instead of someone pulling rabbits out of hats and sawing people in half, there’d be someone playing the trumpet or violin or whatever.

OSR: The Internal Inferno of The Nocturnal Mock Turtle is your first full album since 2014, why the long gap?

GLW: Although we have played a smattering of gigs, Spurious Transients was always intended first and foremost to be a recording project. However, around about 2014/2015 I became involved in playing live with various bands. To begin with, Pete Bingham of psychedelic spacerockers Sendelica, who I had once interviewed for a magazine, asked me if I could play a handful of gigs with them, filling in for their bass player who was unavailable at the time. I didn’t have a bass guitar then, other than a Fender VI (a six-string bass, it’s more of a “guitar tuned down an octave” than a traditional “bass”), so I bought a “normal” bass and learnt the songs. To my surprise I actually found I preferred playing the bass rather than guitar. Then people on the local music scene were saying to me, “Oh, I didn’t know you played bass” and I got asked to play in other bands. At one point I think I was playing with five separate acts at the same time, although most of these turned out to be short-lived. It was like the old joke about the kid who starts taking lessons to learn the bass guitar but doesn’t turn up for his second lesson because he’s got a gig.

Then there followed a couple of years playing bass in a local punk band Red and The Hogweeds, who played some very memorable gigs and got to record a mini-album in the fantastic residential Foel Studios in Powys in mid-Wales, which was a brilliant experience. That album I am still very proud of, it’s such a pity that we hardly sold any copies. However, the band was too dysfunctional for someone with my OCD tendencies and I got terribly disenchanted with the whole business of gigging for very little reward, and then after sustaining neck injuries through hefting heavy bass cabinets around, I decided enough was enough. I returned to what I enjoyed best, namely recording, and this I wanted to do with a more electronic-based sound, rather than the usual vocals, guitar, bass, drums thing.

In 2019, with Gail Storr on vocals and other instruments and Andrew Lemmon on sax and clarinet, Spurious Transients then recorded the double-A-side single ‘Vergesslichkeit/Remembering’ released as a limited edition lathe cut 7” vinyl record and we played a set at The 17th Dream Of Dr Sardonicus in Cardigan here in Wales, a festival organised by the cult psychedelic record label Fruits De Mer Records.

The songs that went on to become The Internal Inferno of The Nocturnal Mock Turtle came about when I decided that I had to put my Luddite tendencies behind me and learn to make music on the computer rather than using stand-alone gear, and so the first songs were created as I was teaching myself how to use Ableton Live.

---

---

OSR: Is there a theme or backstory to the new album?

GLW: I’d love to be able to say yes, but really it’s a collection of disparate pieces all recorded during an intense period of creativity between October 2019 and February 2020. There is no central theme but the tracks all seem to fit together well as a whole. For those who like themes that run throughout the duration of an album, we’re saving that for the next album.

OSR: Do you have a favourite and least favourite track on the album?

GLW: I love them all really, but if you held a gun to my head I’d answer that ‘Geranium’ is probably my favourite. It was the final piece recorded of the tracks that ended up on the album and I think I had a much better idea of what I could do in Ableton by this point. I was really pleased with the melody and the nice little backwards section in the middle eight.

Also, I really like how the instrumentation fitted together. It’s the only track on the album that doesn’t have synthesisers or sounds made from samples, other than some programmed drums. Otherwise, it’s all kalimba (a thumb piano I built from a cheap kit I bought on eBay), a set of chime bars, and electric mandocello. I like using mandocello because the tuning forces me to create different sounding pieces than I would come up with if I was using a regular guitar. I love chime bars because they make the very simplest of melodies sound amazing.

Least favourite track: this is a much harder choice. At one point I would have said ‘Resplendent Sublimity’ because that was the first track I recorded when I was still finding my feet with my new recording process. Having said that, it probably has the best thought-out chord progressions and melodies of all the songs on the album. I definitely had “soundtrack” in my mind when I composed that piece; I envisaged it being the theme for a “Nordic Noir” crime drama.

Maybe my least favourite actually would be ‘Time For A Break With Coffee and Cake’, which I hasten to add I do really like, but in a way it was a compromise in that it was a challenge given to me to create a piece using sounds I had personally sampled in the kitchen at home. It is made of samples derived from striking pots, pans, a cheesegrater, baking trays, the sound of a microwave oven going “bing”, me blowing across the top of a vinegar bottle, etc. There are also a couple of synths used and a bass guitar, but 90% of the sounds are kitchen samples. But it had constraints, and I really prefer to work without any rules.

OSR: What is your creative process?

GLW: Generally I will start with creating some beats, working on a drum pattern, then I will work out a chord progression, lay down the chords on whatever instrument, add a bassline and then keep building from there. I don’t necessarily create a complete song in one go. I might just have a section, a verse part, say, and I’ll work on that. Then I can see how that inspires me to create the next section, maybe a chorus part, or a middle eight. It’s not unusual to leave, say, the intro until the very end. Probably both the intro and the outro are the last bits that get done. Some songs might start differently if I have a bassline that I’ve been kicking around for a while and want to see how I can build upon it, or maybe I’ll have a sample that suggests a certain rhythm and I’ll build the whole piece around that. An example is ‘Taking The Mickey’, a bonus track on the CD version of the album.

OSR: What do you feel makes your music unique?

GLW: I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to claim that it is totally unique, sometimes people tell me it reminds them of bands I’ve never heard of, but I listen to very little music when I am composing as I don’t want to be overly influenced by anything else. Hopefully, any uniqueness comes straight from my brain, my own thought processes, sense of humour, etc.

Artistically I find I enjoy the surreal, whether it’s TV shows like The Mighty Boosh or the plays of N.F. Simpson, the guy behind the “theatre of the absurd”.

For example, on ‘Successful Party Tips’ I enjoyed juxtaposing dialogue samples from an archive public information film about what to do when the bomb drops against those from another film telling kids how to behave at a party. The vocal delivery of the narrator of each film was the same despite the gravity of the subject in one film and the mundanity of the subject matter in the other.

---

---

OSR: How did you choose the title for the album?

GLW: Put simply, I just liked the sound of it. I can’t remember what the conversation was about now or how we arrived at it, but speaking to my parents one day, my Dad came out with “Nockturnal Mock Turtle”. I made a mental note of it as I liked the cadence of it, and I later added the “Internal Inferno” part myself. I imagine it referring to the whirling myriad thoughts and dreams of this strange creature, the nocturnal mock turtle. Maybe it’s some kind of space turtle like the Great A’Tuin who carries the Discworld on its back in the books by Terry Pratchett.

OSR: If you were not making music, what would you be doing right now?

GLW: I expect I’d be doing something else artistic, possibly in the publishing line. In the late 1990s, I was involved in the small press scene, which was much more vibrant in those days before internet dominance in all things, and I edited and published a Science Fiction magazine called Really Quite Cosmic, a.k.a. RQC. We used to publish stories from a very talented bunch of writers, several I am still in contact with, some of whom have faded away into obscurity, and others have gone on to greater things, having books published. RQC was the first ever to publish a short story by the author Philip Reeve, who is now an award-winning writer of children’s books including “Mortal Engines” and its sequels. “Mortal Engines” itself spawned a Hollywood film. I was hoping it would turn into the next huge “Harry Potter”-like franchise and then I would auction off some original artwork I had by the author for an obscene sum.

OSR: If your music was a colour, what would it be and why?

GLW: I’ll resist any obvious temptations to say blue just because the cover artwork is so blue. That would be too literal, and besides, I don’t hold “the blues” in any particularly high regard and would argue against those oft-repeated arrogant claims that the blues is the root of all music.

I think I’ll say yellow because it is a colour that I have always had an affinity with. It’s bright and bold and it makes a statement. It’s not a safe colour, and may be an unusual choice in many circumstances. I think it fits in with our music as it’s a little bit quirky, a little bit “out there”. When we released the ‘Planet Cantaloupe’ single several years ago and decided to get it pressed on colour vinyl, yellow was the obvious choice.

OSR: What are your plans for the next 12 months?

GLW: Okay, we have a couple of things lined up already. Another song I recorded at around the same time as The Internal Inferno Of The Nocturnal Mock Turtle album was a cover version of Kraftwerk’s ‘Autobahn’. All going to plan, this will be released later in 2020 by Fruits De Mer Records as part of a double LP set of krautrock cover versions. It’s not the full 22-minute long version, before you ask.

It actually focuses on the “pastoral” melodic section that starts about three minutes in on the album version of the original. I am a huge Kraftwerk fan but was irritated that the “pastoral” section of ‘Autobahn’ would be abbreviated on, for example, the version on The Mix album and in subsequent live performances. That was always my favourite bit. The version I produced (from memory, I’d like to add, with no referring to the original!), uses real instruments alongside the synths, including guitars, bass, mandocello, chimes, sleigh bells, and a weird Japanese instrument called a taishokoto which to look at you’d think it was the love child of a lap steel guitar and a typewriter.

We have already recorded the follow-up album to Nocturnal Mock Turtle. As I mentioned earlier, this next album will have a theme running right through it. Called Something Strange Came Out Of The Skies, it is a concept album telling the allegedly true story of UFO and alien encounters during the “Welsh Triangle” incidents of 1977. This album was recorded in lockdown during the Coronavirus COVID19 pandemic and is a collaborative work with 15 people involved in its making, everyone working remotely from their respective homes whilst in isolation. It features quite a lot of spoken word content, hence all the contributors, as well as a couple of tracks with more traditional vocals, and musically it takes in elements of Indian music, dub reggae, hip hop and ambient soundtrack. I’m currently hoping to release this album in early 2021.

In the meantime I’m continuing to compose and record music, I have plans to record versions of a couple of classic TV themes, and have been kicking ideas around with Gail about some possible future live appearances.

---

Thanks to Gavin Lloyd Wilson for chatting with us! You can find more about Spurious Transients on their website, Facebook and Spotify.