You’d think after 20 years of composing seemingly endless sagas of sounds, Explosions in the Sky would have explored every corner and crevice of the sonic palette. Yet after taking a hiatus since their last release The Wilderness in 2016, the Austin-based instrumental rock band are back in the swing of things and ready to hit the road again doing what they do best: performing their complex and beautifully layered compositions.
The often-lengthy results, or “mini symphonies” as they’ve been called, are victorious and cinematic, full of flooding crescendos and expansive melodies.
“In the most basic form, somebody makes up a riff. It has to start somewhere,” says guitarist Mark Smith of the song-birthing process. “Then the rest of us start playing around that riff, adding a melody, drumbeat or part that will follow the original riff.”
These epic instrumental tracks encompass certain experiences, abstract ideas or emotions – take a look at any of their song titles, like ‘The Birth and Death of a Day’ from 2007’s All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone and ‘First Breath After Coma’ off of their 2003 release The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, and you’ll instantly find yourself transported.
With their ability to paint vivid scenes, it’s no wonder then that the ambitious quartet, which also includes drummer Chris Hrasky and guitarists Michael James and Munaf Rayani, have written soundtracks for TV shows and movies such as Lone Survivorin 2013. Though Smith admits that writing soundtracks is a much different game.
“For a soundtrack you have a very narrow direction – you end up focusing on one main instrument and one main melody to be the focal point,” he says.
“With writing our albums it is so much more about the way we work together. It’s more organic and ambiguous. Sometimes we know we are responding to something emotionally, but we don’t even know why or how to describe it.
Their most recent record, The Wilderness, is somewhat of a watershed in their musical career. The album is all about discovering the unknown – and not just within the natural world as the title might suggest.
“We don’t mean a bunch of trees in the forest – we wanted to do something grander and broader than that,” Smith explains. “By now, we’ve mapped our planet, so the other uncharted territories that are available for us to explore are those beyond our planet, in outer space, and inside our own minds and our psyches. It is far more expansive and just extremely unknown. It’s very much a wilderness.”
Aside from the listener, the project was very much an exploration for the band as well, in terms of creation: “We definitely wanted to try to change the direction of the wind as much as we could and head down newer roads with newer approaches,” guitarist Munaf Rayani says. “With this album, unlike any of the other ones, it’s happening much quicker.”
Indeed, long gone are the vast 7-minute numbers that we’ve come to expect from the masterful post-rock aficionados, replaced by a more unpacked sound and shorter unconventional compositions.
“I think we were much more OK with saying ‘This song is three minutes long. It’s fine. It got the job done. It doesn’t need to be nine minutes.’”
“They’re kind of purposefully incomplete thoughts,” Rayani says, elaborating on the shorter track lengths. “They just evaporate into the air or walk off of a cliff without a fall occurring. We wanted to obviously still have the melodies and the movement and the feeling and the charge — the stuff that grabs you immediately – but once it had you, it took you to places that hopefully you didn’t expect to go.”
The album’s especially haunting singles ‘Logic of a Dream’ and ‘Disintegration Anxiety’ are boundless and atmospheric, experimenting more with negative space rather than filling the silence. The songs are rooted in the band’s fascination with the inner workings of the mind – an endless inward land that mirrors the infinity of outer space, as Smith describes.
“With each record, we’d always felt like, man, we took a giant leap or a giant left turn. Then a few years later, you listen to the same record and think, eh, it wasn’t really all that. We kind of followed our default settings a lot,” drummer Chris Hrasky adds.
“This was definitely a record where we wanted to do away with that as much as possible. I think we were much more OK with saying ‘This song is three minutes long. It’s fine. It got the job done. It doesn’t need to be nine minutes.’”
After traveling the deep dark playgrounds of psyches and outer space, the band finds themselves grounded and on tour again.
They’re kicking off their 20th anniversary tour in Shanghai this month with a stop in the capital as well. This isn’t their first time in the mainland, as a previous tour brought them over back in 2014, though Smith admits – aside from the Great Wall – they didn’t get as much sightseeing in as they’d hoped.
“We can’t wait to see more,” he says. “Unfortunately, on this trip we don’t have a lot of free time either, but we’ll try to see as much as we can. Even though we also live in a pretty huge country, China seems so massive and sprawling.”
The group is content in the present moment, traveling and playing their transcendent compositions for audiences around the globe – though there’s always the lingering possibility of new material.
“The band has been going ten years now, and there’s a couple of songs in the sets we’ve been playing for just as long,” Smith says. “We’re really trying to give it to you every time we step up on that stage, and fresh music helps to make that experience even greater than it is.”
“We all have the desire to make a new album,” he reassures us. “We’ll get there.”
Shanghai: Thu May 9, 8.30pm; Bandai Namco Shanghai Base, see event listing.
Beijing: Fri May 10, 8.30pm; RMB360 (advance), RMB420
(door); Tango, see event listing.
0 User Comments