New York’s Savu Sea have readied their debut LP, The River Light, which boasts a repertoire of highs and lows graced with a subdued Eastern psychedelic air underscored by singer Hiro Williams’ deep, sonorous voice.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Williams to chat about the band, their controversial track “Baghdad Love Hotel” and whales…
Who is Savu Sea?
The four of us—Cliff, Colin, Judson, and Hiro—are the core members of the band. We write and perform all the recorded music, and then bring additional musicians to actualize it live.
How did you guys get together?
The seeds of the band were planted when Colin [guitars, bass, percussion] and Judson [guitars, bass, keyboards, percussion] left their metal and punk backgrounds and started creating trippy, progressive rock compositions. Cliff [drums, keyboards, percussion, guitars, bass, banjo] joined soon after, completing the basic foundation of the band sound. After months of auditioning singers, Hiro [vocals, lyrics] was asked to round out the band.
How would you classify your sound?
Fans usually consider us either psychedelic or progressive, though we somewhat hesitate to use either term.
Who are your three biggest influences?
Everyone assumes that we’re heavily influenced by Pink Floyd, The Doors, and Led Zeppelin, but each of us comes from a very different musical perspective. We could rattle off a hundred names of jazz, metal, orchestral, literary, or rock influences, but it would probably be hard to get us to agree on a few primary ones.
Tell us about the new album and recording process.
We recorded and produced The River Light in late 2006 and early 2007. The album has its own sonic signature that’s a bit difficult to describe. It’s intensely layered, which gives it a sort of lush drone, and the song structures and lengths are unusual, which make it sound simultaneously erratic and highly orchestrated. The whole thing runs almost an hour and there are very few breaks between tracks. It sounds sort of pretentious to use the term, but it’s a concept album.
Tell us more about the track “Baghdad Love Hotel” and its meaning.
When we started releasing songs from the album, “Baghdad Love Hotel” garnered the most immediate attention, partly due to its overt anti-war content. There are political sentiments throughout the album, but none are the simple “war sucks” variety. The lyrics on the album are not so much statements and positions as they are semi-abstract portraits of the Bush era. In that respect, we’re more photojournalists than activists.
“Baghdad Love Hotel” is obviously about our country’s invasion of Iraq. Before the military campaign began, our leaders insisted that we would be welcomed with open arms by the people we were bombing. I [Hiro] wanted something that would illustrate the absurdity of that rhetoric. In Japan, a love hotel is a fantasy brothel, and I chose that metaphor because the idea of bombing people into loving you is pure fantasy. Also, the anonymity and alienation that a soldier must feel around those civilians, and vice-versa, is kind of like being in a hotel, where every person, place, and thing seems nameless.
If Savu Sea was an animal, what would it be?
When you listen to our music, you aren’t so much captivated by any element as you are pulled by the whole. So the feeling is more like entering a place than encountering an animal. We tend to think of our creative environment more as an ecosystem than an organism, because each of us, our equipment, the venue, and the audience are all elements of the environment, and everything contributes to the sound.
Well, you have a song called “Whale Watchers,” therefore you are a whale. Have any of you actually been to Indonesia and the sea of your band’s namesake?
Hiro has traveled in Southeast Asia and Colin is part Indonesian, but none of us have been to the Savu Sea. If any of us had actually been there, we probably never would have named the band after it, because there wouldn’t be that mystique of the unknown. That feeling of mystique, of otherness and strangeness, is kind of central to what we do.
