Perihelion - An Interview with Spectral Gates

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Sydney 2 piece, Spectral Gates, embark on the post-pandemic journey of reinvention with a new album Perihelion. Lush, hooky and at times pure pop, but NO vocalist. I asked members Dan Arena and Steve Allison to get on a mic and here's what they sound like - in print.

Dan, describe Steve in 5 words (one must be a type of vehicle)?

Plays drums like hybrid octopus/bulldozer

Steve, describe Dan in 5 words (one must be indigenous fauna)?

A relentless post rock wallaby

So, with album titles like Holocene, Lunar and now Perihelion, do you think Stephen Hawking could have been your frontman?

There is a distinct lack of Nobel Prize winners fronting experimental rock bands and we're happy to support anything that would improve that situation.

Why the continued usage of space themes?

Our last 3 albums were mostly written at the same time, so we wanted a common theme. Grouping the songs into 3 different moods (earth, moon and sun) seemed to make sense and the idea for the artworks stemmed from there. I guess we'll do something different for album 5.

You have each been in generic band formats previously, why instrumental this time and have vocals ever been considered?

It wasn't really planned like that, mostly we just wanted to set up all of our equipment at once and make a terrifying distorted racket but we accidentally got a listenable album out of it and everything flowed from there. Lyrics are a lot of work and you'd barely hear them over the machines anyway.

Is touring Spectral Gates more or less work than previous bands?

Well, so far touring has not been an option but I imagine that taking Spectral Gates on the road would be fairly stress-free.

Both being Sydney stalwarts, give us the 6 degrees of separation (figuratively of course) of you finally working together?

Bands we've been in have shared stages back to high school (although we didn't realise it until a bit later). We first properly played together in a synth-rock band (go/no-go) about ten years ago, but the musical family tree has weird branching all over it and it'd take a dedicated scholar to figure out all the loops.

Keys or Guitars?

Yes.

Perihelion is album number 3 in a trilogy, beyond the space-themed titles, is there a common thread?

Steve: Just that all the songs were made in the same period and in the same way: sending audio back and forth between our home recording set-ups.

Dan: It was also a weird time - we'd just released our first album and were getting a great response to it when everything shut down. So we had all this creative energy that would normally go into performances and we turned it inwards towards recording.

You seem to have a renewed fire in your collective bellies about playing live, what situation do you think suits Spectral Gates best in terms of audience and venue?

I like to think we're fairly versatile as a live act. So far we've only had the opportunity to play smaller venues where our moody atmospheric tracks work well, but we've also got a bunch of upbeat tunes to get the dancefloor going.

Current single Sparkler is enjoying airplay everywhere now, new album Perihelion available for purchase from 14 February, 2022.

Website // Bandcamp // Spotify

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