Sleepmakeswaves

NEVER ONES TO REST ON THEIR LAURELS, INSTRUMENTAL POST-ROCKERS SLEEPMAKESWAVES ARE REINVENTING THEMSELVES THRICE OVER WITH A TRILOGY OF EXPERIMENTAL EPS, EACH TAKING THEM TO SPECTACULAR NEW HEIGHTS.

If the name Alex Wilson sounds particularly familiar, it may be due to the fact he’s been a valued contributor to Australian Guitar since long before I even started interning here (and now I run the show!) – or, perhaps, because you’re into cerebral, sizzling instrumental post-rock, and you’ve found yourself deep in the rabbithole of sizzling riffs and sprawling soundscapes that only Sleepmakeswaves can offer. Wilson is the dude noodling on the bass in this Sydney-native trio of transcendence, and as of late, he’s also stepped into the role of taking their inspired ideas from the mind to the masses as a producer and engineer.

The band’s first full-scale project with Wilson at the helm is perhaps their most ambitious yet: three EPs, each with its own thematic framework and series of unique concepts, trickled out across 2020 and forming one intensely momentous era for Sleepmakeswaves. Collectively dubbed These Are Not Your Dreams, the trilogy–comprising No Safe Place, Out Of Hours and Not An Exit – has slowly come together with the band writing, recording and releasing its material in chunks alongside their fans’ interactions, rather than cobble the whole project together at once and merely throwing them out on a schedule.

Unfortunately, due to that little “worldwide viral pandemic” thing you may or may not have heard about, the project hasn’t exactly gone according to plan – the band have been struck by tedious delays and creative setbacks aplenty, including the cancellation of their biggest national headline tour to date. Still, they’re remaining optimistic, with Wilson declaring that no matter the setbacks, Sleepmakeswaves will continue to chase the dream and get Dreams back on track sooner than later.

For the minute, Wilson is excited to dive into the story behind These Are Not Your Dreams–from writing our content, to becoming it!

Where did the concept come from to split These Are Not Your Dreams into three separate records?

I think there are three main reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing at the moment. The first one was that we found ourselves with some leftover material that hadn’t fit on other records, that we wanted to get out into the world in some way, shape or form. There wasn’t enough to make a release of its own, so we sort of cobbled that stuff up together – it was probably about 20 minutes worth of material that we had laying around from other recording sessions, songs that we wanted to revisit and things like that.

And then around the same time that we found ourselves in that position, we went through a bit of a change in how we approached the band – everyone at that point had clocked over into their 30s and we all decided that we no longer wanted to be road-dogging it as hard, and that led us to a different way of looking at the band. We wanted to try and focus on doing things differently from a creative standpoint, and experiment with a few different approaches that we’d always wanted to try out. We thought that the EP format might be a better way to explore some of those things, as opposed to the traditional album formula.

I suppose the last note also ties in with the fact that I’ve been personally working on the production and mixing side of things for a while – I’m really passionate about that, so we saw an opportunity where we could both explore a different kind of creative process and run a tighter ship, business-wise, if we brought all of our production in-house. Because recording and engineering in Sleepmakeswaves is a pretty massive job… The analogy I’ve used elsewhere is that rather than taking one big bite of a peach, we’re taking three small bites of a cherry – we would ease ourselves into this mode of self-production.

And so ultimately – having given you the reasons for why we’ve decided to take this particular approach – we wanted to try to present it all in a unified way, and in a way that a fan would still be excited about. The idea of creating three EPs that exist together felt like a more respectful and exciting way to deliver this material to the fans, rather than just going with a sort of lackadaisical DIY approach and releasing these songs in drips and drabs.

When you announced this project, you said that each song was “an experiment in how far we can push ourselves creatively and sonically.” How exactly did you push yourselves with this project, and what were you keen to do, as songwriters, to really challenge what it is you’ve established as the “Sleepmakeswaves formula”?

On the second EP, to give you an example, there’s a song on there where Otto [Wicks-Green, guitars] is laying some vocals straight on top, and it ends up sounding a little bit like that mixture of post-rock and indie-rock that you might find in The Appleseed Cast or something like that. And that’s an example of something we probably wouldn’t have had the ability or courage to do in the past, but has been lurking in the back of our minds, creatively, for some time.

And y’know, every band – unless they’re fortunate enough to be, say, Radiohead – is working within a fairly defined set of expectations. I’m not trying to say that we’re particularly hard done by or anything like that – just alluding to the fact that we’re using this project as an opportunity to try and continue what we like to do, which is innovate around the perimeters of post-rock, and try to find our own little ways to bust out of those perimeters. Because that’s when things are the most exciting.

On the second EP, at least for me personally, I took that as a real opportunity to explore two passions of mine, which are the kind of guitar sounds of ‘90s rock production, for lack of a better term – more mid-range-y, fuzzed-out, crunchy kind of tones – and also more of an influence from ‘70s progressive rock as well; you’ll find that there are more acoustic guitars coexisting with the electrics, and a harmonic or melodic feel that reminds me of bands like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull.

And then for the third EP, we wanted to focus more on the electronic and ambient side of things – we’ve put a rule in place that there are no big riffs and no bombastic climaxes. Because we haven’t really – for a while, at least – allowed ourselves the opportunity to explore making stuff that has an emotional intensity without relying on volume or pummelling instruments.

So if you look at These Are Not Your Dreams as one self-contained chapter in the Sleepmakeswaves story, how do these three EPs gel together and exist in the same bubble, as opposed to just being three standalone releases of their own volition?

I guess what unifies them will be the moment in time that they were created, and the mentality that brought them together. If I could use an analogy from one of my favourite artists of all time, you know The Smashing Pumpkins, right? If you look at albums like Siamese Dream or Adore, you’ll see that they’re very clearly exploring a single idea across one album – 40 to 60 minutes, or however long they are. But then you have Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, which is this big, sprawling double-album that has everything but the kitchen sink on it – you have songs like “We Only Come Out At Night” alongside “F*** You”.

So I guess I would like to suggest to the fans that they listen to the three EPs in a similar sort of way to that. We’re presenting a bunch of material that we’re interested in and that we enjoy, in a semi-thematic kind of way, and just seeing where the chips fall for the listeners. I’ve always been a big believer that people bring their own meaning to the music, and particularly as an instrumental band that’s never really relied on lyrics to convey meaning, we’re trusting a great deal that the audience will go on their own journey with what we put out there.

And so in that way, we’ve made the effort to pull these things together, give them some unified artwork and a unified presentation, because for us, they come from a certain moment in time and a certain feeling we had around the band. It’ll be really interesting to see what the listeners think about that. I suspect that people will just enjoy the diversity of what’s there, and the music for what it is. Hopefully, the people that have been listening to us for a long time will appreciate the opportunity to hear a bunch of different sides of Sleepmakeswaves in one go.