EIS: How are you? How’s the Sine Waves and Mirrors tour going?
MH: We are great!! Tour is going amazingly! We just finished playing our Adelaide show at the Thebarton Theatre to a fantastic 1400 odd people.
The Australian Tours always amaze us at how many people really dig the new stuff as well as the older albums, selling out the size rooms we are playing around Australia is humbling to say the least! and the respect the people that come have for the music is really amazing to see.
EIS: You recently released the Set Fire to the Hive EP digitally to American audiences to get them acclimated to the band before you release Sound Awake in the states. Are you promoting a big push for the album in the US?
MH: From the responses we have received from the digital EP and the two month tour we did there back in 2007, we are amazed at what exposure we have in the United States from the little work we have done so far, so we know the step up is going to be something akin to climbing a volcano! But we back our work ethic and we are very confident in our live show so we are extremely excited about releasing Sound Awake in the US and touring our collective arses off over there. Nothing we do is smash and grab, we are a long tern band with a long term project so we are prepared to tour as often as we physically can in support of the album which we are pretty proud of so it's going to be an exciting year!!
EIS: Speaking of the US… you’re already confirmed for next year’s SXSW festival, which will draw massive industry interest. Do you have plans to tour the entire country while here?
MH: We do. I'm not sure exactly how much I can say at this point but SXSW will be the first date of a few dates whilst we're over there which will get us a fair way around the country before we have to go and tackle other territories, but we have definitely made a commitment to the American release and to the people who have contacted us thru the website and other sources wanting us to tour there and say hello. Hopefully we are coming to a city near you, and if we're not, we promise we will be before too long!
EIS: Going back to the Set Fire to the Hive EP, "Roquefort" (with Empire Horns) is an incredible take on the original. The horns add a vibrant texture, what was it like to play with a brass section? Do you have plans /would you like to do it again?
MH: The horns on "Roquefort" were always part of the original idea for the song. Roquefort, its a cheesy rock song with a twist and we had originally written horns for the song but simply ran out of time whilst recording Themata in Australia. We're lucky enough to be great friends with another Australian band called The Cat Empire, and we wanted them to record on the horns version, they were amazing, coming into the studio and blowing a bunch of tracks and we spliced and mixed it all together, taking some parts that we had originally wanted and some improv work that they did on the day! Its a great sound and we have often got guest horn players to play it live including the Cat lads when we're in Melbourne! Its great fun.
EIS: As for the live version of "Deadman," the track really portrays how great the songs come across live, for many people who have never had the opportunity to see the band. How would you describe the live show in comparison to the records?
MH: We are all about the live show. We are all such huge lovers of music in every form and have all seen a thousand live shows and love comparing what was the best thing about each and every show. We take that out on the road with us and try to create more of an experience live than a collection of songs. Music is something that should lift you into a state that is different from your own and take you places that exercise your minds love of rhythm and melody, we love challenging ourselves to perform beyond ourselves and beyond the band collective and love growing the live show every time we play, its so much fun!
EIS: How set in stone is the setlist for each concert? Do you change the songs often or is there a fairly standard setlist?
MH: No we change it a lot depending on mood and crowd. Our lighting guy hates us. He's always the one along with our whole crew really asking us for the setlist and trying to get it off us more than ten minutes before we go on stage. We love changing things up and we love letting the set react to the crowd or the room on a night, it's exhilarating.
EIS: Are there any plans to release a live album/DVD?
MH: There are! Live album may happen but we have boxes full of HDV cassettes and other various footage from tours in the US, Europe and Australia / New Zealand. We've documented so much but still haven't had a chance to edit thru it all and make a package out of it, with three full production film clips and more to come its only a matter of time, but as with the music, we will wait until its something more than a moderately good DVD release so that it reflects exactly what we want it to reflect of our touring shenanigans and live performance as well as studio takes etc etc.. its coming!
EIS: Sound Awake is an ambitious release that really seals you in with the prog rock elite over the past twenty years. What has the reaction been like to the album from the fans/press? Were people surprised by the growth from Themata to Sound Awake?
MH: The media reaction and critical reaction to Sound Awake has been mind bending. We never really thought about how people would take to the album which may sound strange but it really just wasn't a concern to us. We had a lot of 'stuff' to get out of ourselves and Sound Awake was always that vehicle for us, it started of as being what we wanted Themata to be and then took a dramatic tangent into a completely different album that was in many ways more than we had hoped would fall out of us, but at no point did we ever say (perhaps this is a little self indulgent) I wonder what the people who liked Themata will think of this? It just wasn't a concern, music is personal, I think once you start writing to an agenda you should stop.
EIS: With so much critical acclaim, are you nervous about recording the follow-up to what many are considering a masterpiece? How quickly do you begin working on the next release? Have you begun demoing any new material?
MH: No, we are amazed at how excited we are to get back into the studio already. We thought in the mixing stages of Sound Awake when we were all truly exhausted mentally and physically that the thought of picking up a guitar made us feel quite sick. But since it's release we've already discussed direction for the new album and where we are going personally and as an entity. It's really exciting how positive we are about a new album, we know what we can do better and where we can take music... its going to be an exciting work.
EIS: Has Ian’s [Kenny] work with Birds of Tokyo influenced/contributed at all to Karnivool’s sound?
MH: I don't think so. There were a few times when people would say 'that sounds a bit birds', and we would assess it and decide whether that needed to be taken on board, but usually as with any other source of external influence there's not a lot you can do about it, music is music... we would write the music and Kenny would sing the melody lines that pop out of his head over the top. We all have such different backgrounds in music and we all influence the piece, Kenny has always had that 'pop' influence on the band, whilst the rest of us stretch and drag it in deeper weirder directions.
EIS: The xylophone introduction on “Simple Boy” is gorgeous as the albums opener. What inspired its use? Was it always planned during the writing stages of the song?
MH: As per usual with our music our songs take on 1001 forms before finding their final resting place in structure, tempo and feel. I think from memory that the xylophone piece started in the middle section of the song and then as we do we cultivate themes thru the songs and its introduction to the start of the song really encapsulated its later recurrence which is something you may notice in a lot of our songs. You just know sometimes when you try something somewhere and it feels 'right'
EIS: What inspired the overall vision of Sound Awake? What was the writing/recording process like?
MH: The overall vision of Sound Awake about half way thru the writing process became about a study of vibrations called Cymatics. We researched and found that a lot of the themes and thoughts and memes we had already contributed to the album all seemed to stem from this amazing process. The best representation would be the pattern creations of sand on a vibratory surface, as a resonant frequency is oscillated up and down the spectrum it creates various patterns that are sacred geometry at heart but obviously sharing relations to chaos theory and Fibonacci and other such mathematical patterns, its just something that makes you think about so many different things, and that's what we felt from the music, or music in general from the start! We wrote everywhere, hired houses in the woods, up mountains, in industrial areas, out of garages... we put pieces together in jam rooms, on computers, recorded melody ideas into mobile phones, emailed principles and thoughts and directions to each other and just kept gathering hard drives full of music that we worked on over the whole process, then tediously searched thru it for things we loved and things that correlated together and held itself together. A long amazing process that drained us immensely but left us excited about what it would become.
EIS: The band hails from Perth, Australia… said to be the most secluded major city in the world. What kind of impact did this have on the band early on?
MH: A lot. I first moved to Perth to join the band six years ago whilst we were writing Themata. Coming from Melbourne, Perth was a quiet town, to me it was a perfect place to work because there weren't as many distractions as other cities. And the music scene here is large, in relation to its population its crazy, and really self supportive which was amazing. It's a great place to write music and live.
EIS: It seems there is a strong community of progressive/alt rock bands in Australia with you guys, Cog, The Butterfly Effect, Dead Letter Circus, and more. What do you think brought on this surge of progressive leaning bands? Is it a close “family” between you guys?
MH: It is a tight family. We're all friends with each other and keep in touch. It's hard to pinpoint why... Australia is a great breeding ground for progressive and lateral thought, and perhaps just the way the music industry works over here and the influential musicians that were filtering into Australia from the US and Europe led an entire generation of musicians to love a specific style of music that was progressive and thought provoking. It is strange that it's had so much success whilst being from such different areas within Australia, it was a movement that had a big influence on people over here that's for sure.
EIS: For us American fans who may not be too familiar with independent Australian rock bands, what bands would you suggest foreign fans of your band get familiar with?
MH: There are a lot of great bands here in Australia, we are lucky enough to be able to pick our own supports here and I'll say that we love the bands that tour with us, we chose them on what we are all into at the time, the last two bands Sugar Army, and Coerce are prime examples... both different and both great musical entities.
EIS: With wide spread success at home, does it feel humbling to play more intimate clubs on other continents? It must feel refreshing to find fans that know all the words and love the music half way across the world…
MH: It is truly amazing. The last run we did in the United States was at the end of 2007 and we had people front row singing along to every song!!!?? We would ask them how they heard about us and they would always say the internet, or friends from Australia, or they didn't know but it was always amazing how into the band they were. The first headlining show we did in the US was amazing, people bringing us presents and buying us drinks and keeping in touch with us ever since! It is extremely humbling, and playing the small clubs is amazing for us, it reminds us of where we started in Australia and makes for some amazing intimate moments that we haven't experienced for some time... its truly an amazing thing.
EIS: You’ve worked real hard to get where you are today, so with the European takeover already in progress, and America on the horizon, do you feel a sense of worldwide success approaching? [laughs] Does promoting the music on a global scale change anything for the band?
MH: The principle of world wide release is quite odd to us. We always felt I think that the music had a wider audience, perhaps because we were originally inspired by so many musicians from beyond Australia's borders, but for it to become a reality like it has is amazing. Truth is fact. Reality is perception. Seeing with our own eyes how far the music has gone has made us better people, and just getting reactions from people so far removed from our own local surroundings gives you confidence in the medium of music and what it can do for humanity.
EIS: Thanks so much, and I know myself and many others are highly anticipating your return to American soil.
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