STEVE AND KAVUS’ UTOPIAN SOUNDS
Snooker champion-cum-DJ and Gong vocalist announce experimental album.
Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi have teamed up with Guapo’s Michael J York for a project called The Utopia Strong. And they release their self-titled debut on September 13 via Rocket Recordings.
“Because we love hanging out, we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to make some music together? Mike recorded it, although we didn’t know he was doing it to begin with, and when we listened back to it all we went, ‘This is amazing!’ We thought we could make it into something relevant instead of just three blokes messing around,” Davis tells
Prog. “We’ve had so much fun making this album. The funny thing is as the tracks unfolded, we kept on saying, ‘I’d buy this! This is great!’”
The nine-track is mostly instrumental and contains the snooker star’s debut recordings on modular synthesiser. It also includes vocals from Mediaeval Baebes leader Katharine Blake, who lends her ethereal tones to Moonchild.
“It’s a wonderful track. When Katharine opens her mouth, beauty just flows out,” adds Davis, “The album is very psychedelic but also very welcoming and has a really good flow to it; it’s not a hard listen. Some people have said it harks back to krautrock-style bands like Cluster. [But] at no time during making it has there been any conscious effort to make it sound like anything else. One track [Brain Surgeons] has turned into quite a banging dance tune and [Kavus and I] have slotted it into our DJ sets. On some nights it got the best reaction of any track we’d played. People were trying to Shazam it and nothing was coming up!”
The project name acknowledges the strength of the trio’s friendship and combines it with the otherworldly sounds they create together. And Davis is quick to point out that this has brought out the very best of their creativity.
“We’ve had a really good interactive process to make the improvisations into album tracks. It’s been an eye-opener to watch it all unfold and it’s been great watching [Mike and Kavus] at work, and they’ve taken on board some of the things I’ve said too.”
The Utopia Strong will perform a series of improvised sets to coincide with the album launch. One of these will be with Teeth Of The Sea at London’s Oslo on September 5.
“It’s just going to be so fun,” says Davis. NRS
“As the tracks unfolded, we kept on saying, ‘I’d buy this! This is great!’”