My name is Peter Gilliver. I am in a London based band called Wondergeist, along with my bandmates Sam Stretch and Sam Lott. We released our first album as a three-piece this year called ‘The Gulf.’ This is how we got there.
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I Went To The Desert And Held Out My Thirst
The different settings for my latest album, Desert Cities – Part One, span from Denver to Seoul. Track three, Brooklyn, is a love song for the gritty and enigmatic Bushwick neighborhood and track four, Coming Home, rides the metro north to Midtown where home is not a place but a person (and a lovely oasis at that). Track two, Lost in Seoul, reflects on the foreign shores of South Korea, “the crowded streets, the angry East Sea, don’t mind if I belong here for a while.”
Only track one, Hold out Thirst, mentions a dry, barren, lifeless, sandy desert. Its brief and stark first refrain, “I went to the desert and held out my thirst,” captured something much bigger in me when I first listened back to the completed album. The desert, in this case, is where one goes to reflect deeply, to test themselves against the elements, physically and emotionally and to experience thirst as a fundamental sensation of life, to feel acutely alive. The remainder of the album (part two included, TBR Fall 2019) is born of this same desire.
Strange Ways: my follow up to my descent into psychdelic dream pop, from a history of ambient instrumental.
by Daniel Hammond / Impossible Machines
This is the 7th album I’ve released – the follow up to its twin, On The Way. I’ve largely made ambient, electronic-esque music. My first 5 releases were instrumental. On The Way and As A Kite mark a shift towards pop songwriting for me. I would love to talk at length about what I’ve learned about music from making it and recording at home in my laundry room over the years, but I think for brevity’s sake it would be best to keep the conversation to this one album. I hope if you like what you hear that you will explore my older works as well, and find some value in my story and my music, and I hope I can reciprocate something for you. That’s all this is about in the end anyway, isn’t it?