Listening to Sea Moya‘s music is like looking through a kaleidoscope: you get lost in a harmonic but ever changing world that’s so intriguing you can’t get enough. And even their sound is as trippy as their visual counterpart: a mix of Krautrock, Psychedelic, Electronic and Afro-Beat melts together to songs that are calm without being boring, that are emotional without being gooey and that are rich of details without being hard to listen. However, give yourself a try and listen to the German trio here or here.
What’s the best part about being a band?
We’ve been touring with Vessels from Leeds recently and their incredible merch guy told us one night, ’I’d rather be broke and happy because that’s what it is all about. To be happy.’ Being a band and play our music to people, travel around, meet interesting people like him, record and write music, we love all of that and it makes us happy. To pinpoint one best part is quite hard, as a great live experience feels totally different than a studio day when you finally get the picture of a song down. Diversity could actually be the best part of being a band.
To which musician/band would you like to be compared to?
We try to find our own way and do what feels natural. I guess there are people around like Chaz Bundick aka Toro Y Moi aka Les Sins, Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet and Dan Snaith aka Caribou aka Daphni that are definitely musicians we’d happily been compared to as they’re doing their thing already.
In which decade would you have liked to live?
The 70s would have been amazing. So very different and interesting things started growing. This huge and technique driven Psychedelic Rock as the likes of Pink Floyd on the one hand side, then Disco more in the late 70s. In Western Germany a whole new movement came up with Krautrock, the vibe of revolution came to Western Africa and Afro-Rock and Afro-Beat evolved out of the urge of emancipation and freedom. It feels like everywhere on the planet people were going crazy and tried out completely different things. And to hear all those synthesizer sounds for the very first time… That must have been insane!
Your band was just found in the beginning of the year – was it love at first accord?
We know each other for a longer time but the decision to start a band in this three piece constellation took part in summer last year. It’s been quite a process to figure out where to go musically. But as we wrote some songs together and got into a good workflow everything went super fast. Our first show was in March 15, actually this feels like a year ago!
What was your best moment as a band so far?
We’ve been to the Baltic states this summer, writing and recording out there in the woods and by the beach. Driving around with an old Volkswagen van we had an external power supply so we could set up our tiny studio everywhere we wanted to. At one of the most beautiful spots, Elias got one of the two synths wired up we had with us. He just wanted to mess around a little bit because he had that Roland JX-8P quite new. Stuck in one harmony change Iven joined him with a nice bass line. The sun went down purple red and the waves were crushing some meters away against the miles long beach. They still did the same thing over and over again adding sampled drumloops and some weird sounds. Then David joined and layed down a vocal line and the song was done in about two hours by the beach whilst the sun was going down. That evening out there was extraordinary beautiful.
If your music would be an animal – which would it be?
It’d probably be the Babel fish of ’The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. An explanation according to ’The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Fit the First BBC Radio 4 program, broadcast 8 March 1978’: ’The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix.’ We hope that people in Asia or Africa can dance to our music as well as listeners in Europe or somewhere else. There are no borders for music.
What’s your favorite dish on tour?
We’re all up for some mid-east vegetarian dishes like mixed plates with Falafel, fried Aubergines, Rice, Salad, etc. The thing is, being on tour means that you have no choice than to stop by some gas stations and truck stops to get food and drinks. So you always end up with oil soaked plastic junk food. To have something fresh and healthy in between is highly appreciated.
Listen to Sea Moya’s exclusive feelin’-like-on-LSD-mixtape here!
By Marieke Fischer
