Q&A

Tom Rowlands “The music is a moment we’re capturing”

What was the fundamental purpose of Surrender?

We didn’t start with a defined purpose. We generally find the purpose in the making of the record. After Dig Your Own Hole, we knew we’d taken a certain sound and feeling to the furthest point we could. Surrender had to be something very different. I think their respective covers signify something: Dig… was monochrome and focused, Kate Gibb’s Surrender artwork was a kaleidoscopic explosion of ideas. It feels representative of a widescreen/technicolor sound, a release. Maybe each of our records has aimed for the same kind of feeling – we’re just looking for different ways to express it.

If you could rewind, is there anything you’d do differently?

No. The music is a moment we’re capturing, expressing something we feel at the time.

What’s the deal with the “secret psychedelic” mixes?

These were made in ’98/’99 and they came out of live jams with our engineer Steve Dub. We set the mixing desk and the studio up like an instrument and connected processors, then deconstructed and reconstructed the songs in a live, amorphous style.