Who said that sense of wonder can be found only in books? The New Caledonia is a rock band from New Zealand: a combo
og five people, Timon on Guitar and keyboards, Fagan on guitar,synths,harmonica and sax, Mike on bass, Stan on drums
and percussions. Why do I introduce them to you? Because they have picked up the flag og King Crimson and all the prog rock
that crosses Germany with Tangerine Dream and Amon Duul and reaches the Cardiacs; a music that in time best represented a sort of "space-sound", where the different
bands tried to reach something peculiar by mixing the genres, using electronica and their own inspiration. Timon has accepted
to answer to my question about his band The New Caledonia now that they're just finished with their first, amazing album,
Lotus.
How does The New Caledonia project start? How did you find
yourselves, all of you, inside of this adventure?
Mike and Fagan had been playing music together since they were 14
years old in the city of Hamilton, New Zealand. I met them in 2002
and joined the group that they were performing with at the time called
Stadium, which was a rock/pop band. Eventually that band dissolved
and we decided to change our direction in music, and pursue a more
experimental sound. We were listening to a lot of progressive music
at the time; bands such as The Mars Volta and Mr Bungle, so this
influenced our style greatly in our formative years. We discovered
Stan playing in a Tool covers band, and were very impressed by his
drumming skills so recruited him for our new band which we named The
New Caledonia. We practiced and wrote songs for around a year and a
half, and spent much time trying to find a vocalist to complete the
lineup, eventually settling on local musician called Carl Watkins.
Our first show as The New Caledonia was in January 2005, but by March
we had realised that Carl wasn't right for the band so we parted ways,
and decided to take up vocal duties between the four of us. Since
then, we've played many shows around New Zealand and recorded our
album. We engineered, mixed, mastered and produced the album
ourselves at Mike's own studio, Dudley Studios. With virtually
limitless studio time available to us we were able to relax and create
the album that we could hear in our heads. We released Lotus in
February 2007 and played shows to support it, before relocating to
Melbourne, Australia in March. Currently we're working on songs for
our second album, and have added our good friend Greg Cooper to the
band as our keyboards player. Stan is still living in NZ so we're
waiting for him to arrive so that we can begin playing live again and
mid next year we'll record our second album.
Your music seem to find its roots in the progressive genre. On the
other hand you say you play without thinking so much of belonging to
this style or that. Would you explain what's your music like?
Our music is most definitely "progressive" in the sense that it is
different and unique compared to most modern popular music. However
our music was not originally inspired by "prog rock" as such, we only
discovered bands such as King Crimson and Yes after people had
compared them to us. Originally, our idea was to write music that was
very bright and melodic but with an unusual rhythmic approach, as we
had never heard anything like that before. We found the band
Meshuggah's rhythm ideas very exciting, so we decided to combine that
approach with our melodic ideas, which were influenced by artists such
as Jeff Buckley. We spent a lot of time on the songs, and re-wrote
and refined them many times. Over the years our music has evolved
into its own sound without us really trying for a particular style, so
that's why we feel it doesn't fit into any specific genre. These days
we are enjoying the music of The Beatles and Miles Davis's 70s albums,
so as such our new music is reflecting that change.
How do you make music? I mean, do you write any partiture or you
just create your songs on the very moment?
We write music using a few different ways. Generally, Fagan and I
will write some parts or a semi complete song at home and use that as
a basis to take to the rest of the band. Once at band practice, we
jam the parts out and experiment with different ideas and
arrangements, at which point the song inevitably changes due to Mike,
Stan and Greg's influence. So the song always ends up sounding quite
different in the end compared to its original state.
Other times we just start jamming and see what comes out, an
improvised idea can become a fully realised part. Quite a bit of the
material on Lotus was done in this fashion, and there are a few
sections on the album where we improvised as we were recording it.
However, for the most part Lotus is a very structured album, we
thought about all the parts and arrangements very carefully and spent
a lot of time working on the structure of the songs.
As I am an old fellow, I can hear in your debut album a lot of marks
from the past. First of all the King Crimson. Then, Soft Machine,
Nucleus and Caravan, without forgetting some funk pearldrops, like
Primus. What do you think of such historical bands?
Like I said earlier, we had not heard of these bands until people
began comparing us to them, so it was a nice surprise to find music
that seemed so alive with creativity such as King Crimson. I can't
speak for the other guys, but Fagan and I have always enjoyed King
Crimson since we first heard them, especially Robert Fripp's amazing
guitar playing.
We've heard a little bit of Soft Machine but not enough to know what
we think of it, and we haven't heard Nucleus and Caravan at all. As
for Primus, they're ok but not great, of course Les Claypool is a
great bass player. As far as funk goes, the Red Hot Chili Pepper's
album Blood Sugar Sex Magik was a big one for us, along with classics
like James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone.
Another band I can hear you must have listened to is the Cardiacs.
Am I wrong?
I have listened to the Cardiacs a little bit, but once again they are
a band that I heard for the first time 2 years ago, when we had
already developed our own sound. So while I did quite enjoy their
music, they haven't had any sort of influence on us. I'm pretty sure
i can hear the similarities that you're hearing
You come from New Zealand. How's the rock scene in Oceania at the moment?
New Zealand is a great place, but the music scene is pretty small over
there. There's only 4 million people in the country, and as such any
kind of music scene will end up being relatively small. Rock music is
pretty popular over there at the moment, bands such as The Mint
Chicks, So So Modern and Cut Off Your Hands are doing well both in NZ
and internationally, so that's great to see. Indie music and 80's
revival seems to be the most popular at the moment.
We found that our music received mostly positive reactions in NZ, we
had some fairly fanatical responses to our music and gained an
underground following, however some other people found us to be a bit
too confusing! Melbourne is a much better city for our type of music,
from what we've seen there's much more support and enthusiasm for
experimental music over here, so we can't wait to start playing live
again in February next year and bring our music to a new audience.
You decided to let people download your entire album on the
internet. Why did you do this?
Well, firstly we realized the limitations of self-releasing an album -
since we have no major label to distribute our album yet, no one
overseas was going to get a chance to hear our album unless we did it
through touring, which isn't going to happen until next year, or the
internet. We decided to upload the whole album for free because the
primary goal was to get as many people to hear the album as possible,
we felt that what we've created is good music and has artistic value
and needs to be heard. If we had actually charged money to download
the album, then of course far less people would have downloaded it, so
we just put it up for free and everyone seemed to appreciate that.
And the other reason is that we all download huge amounts of other
artist's music so its only fair!
Did you ever listen to any Italian rock?
No, I personally haven't and I don't think the others have either. I
have an album by Ephel Duath who I think are Italian, is that right?
They're a very interesting and talented band. Otherwise, Greg was
living in London up until July and said that he saw an Italian band
there, but can't remember the name. He said they were a 2 piece band,
guitar and drums, and played crazy, ear splitting loud rock with huge
discordant chords. Sound familiar? We'd love to hear more Italian
bands, we hear you have a great scene over there.
Radiorock.to is an Italian unique experiment of pod radio. We record
compliations that cand be downloaded by our site. At the moment, The
New Caledonia and its Lotus are very popular here. What would you like
to say to your Italian fans?
We'd just like to say thanks for listening, we're really happy that
our album is being enjoyed by people on the other side of the world,
and if you like us spread the love around Italy!
Will you ever come and play in Italy?
Yes. We are planning a world tour for either late next year or early
2009, sooner if possible. We are aiming to play Australia, NZ, the
U.S and then all of Europe, so Italy will be a definite stop along the
way, especially if we have lots of Italian fans! We will have our
second album released by then, and expect to see an extended lineup
with an extra saxophonist/vocalist added, making us a 6 piece band.
We hope to see you all there at the show, grazie tanto!
