pider Vomit have a great band name, get around in matching tie dye and have a tendency to take too much acid. They’re also one of the strangest, most exciting bands to pop out of Melbourne in recent months. With the approach of their first release we thought we’d try to find out what they're all about. As it goes our scheduled interviewer called in pill sick at the last minute but luckily the ever resourceful Spider Vomit agreed to interview themselves.
Hannah: What do we want people to know about us?
Jim: Who we are and what we stand for.
Hannah: Who do you think we are Jim?
Jim: I think we’re a group having a universal conversation.
Hannah: What do you think we sound like?
Gill: Psyunge.
John: What is that?
Hannah: Psychedelic Grunge.
John: I think it’s more séance music.
Gill: We sound like five people with pretty different tastes in music playing together in a room on acid.
John: Sometimes it sounds like cult music, which is how it should be. Some of the newer songs reach further back into our past to hidden memories. They’re becoming darker and at the same time the edge is becoming sharper.
Craig: Why did we call the EP Widows Walk?
Gill: I think it describes how we’re evolving as a band. It’s the sound of where we’re going to as opposed to where we’re coming from.
Hannah: The songs on the EP are all pretty different. They’re the ideas that we had when we first played together.
Gill: The point of the EP was to lay those tracks down so we could move on. I’d rather evolve than sit in a bedroom for ten years and practice and practice and eventually put out this perfect thing when I’m 30. People aren’t interested in perfection. They want to see evolution.
Hannah: Yeah, then you learn from your mistakes as you go. Like with the EP photo shoot. Instead of generically lining up against a wall, we decided to take two car-loads of people to an undecided location. We dragged all the equipment over about two kilometers of sand dunes because it was a spot we couldn’t drive to. Then we kind of got dressed up in crazy, psychedelic gothic outfits. We were in the middle of all these sand dunes and then we took a bunch of acid.
Craig: It was a full moon and the tide came in and we got stuck there.
Gill: We had one tent but we had to put the camera equipment in there. It was more important than us. The whole thing really damaged us.
Craig: That’s right, a lot of sand got in the stereo and we had to resort to listening to Gill do Nirvana covers.
Hannah: Yep, we’re learning as we go. We’re learning when too much acid is too much acid.
John: Do people ever look confused when you say your band's called Spider Vomit?
Craig: Hell yeah. They say, “oh, you play music?” and I say “yeah”. And they say “what’s the name of your band” and I say “Spider Vomit” and they say “oh, so you don’t play in a real band then”. Yeah—it’s a real band; we’re really serious about it. I’ve got to think of a fake name I can tell people so they don’t think I’m playing in a shit band.
TO BE CONTINUED
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