Interview with Hour of the Shipwreck

Who is Hour of the Shipwreck?
Hour of the Shipwreck is: Richie Kohan – composer, guitar, lead vocals, Marcel Camargo – guitars, glockenspiel, vocals, Barbara Gruska – Drums, vocals, Aaron Arntz – Keyboards, vocals. We have a rotating bassist.

How did you guys get together?
Most of us are ex-jazz musicians (some still play jazz). We met in a Los Angeles music community of post music school-ites who wanted to go in a different direction from where our academic environments had been attempting to siphon us. There are a lot of incestuous bands among us, almost all the same musicians but each led by a different one of us. We grew out of that circle.

Who are your influences?
Our influences are rooted deeply in both music and film. Musically they range from Radiohead, Bjork, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, to classical composers and film scorers such as Prokofiev, Bach, John Williams, and Danny Elfman, and we all grew up on 80’s pop so if you listen closely you can hear some Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, A-Ha, and the like. We are also trying to create a world with our music in the way J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson did in Lord of the Rings books and films. Many films have given us great inspiration from Hayoa Miyazaki’s entire catalog to Spielberg’s earlier films to the physical manifestation that is Disneyland.

I’ve really been digging your new album, The Hour is Upon Us. It has a large number of diverse elements in it. Definitely not a half-assed pop album. Tell me about it.
In making The Hour is Upon Us we sought to create a world. We wanted each piece to take the listener on a journey, and the album as a whole to be the culmination of each of those journeys into one big journey. Using some symphonic elements in the arrangements such as choir, strings, and horns, helped evoke the cinematic/picturesque mood we were aiming for. The compositions are long and through composed, rarely using more common verse/chorus forms. The pieces often begin somewhere and go through many different sections, some delicate and serene, others epic and climactic, but all with a function of creating sonic imagery that takes the listener somewhere.

What was the recording process like?
Recording this album was a long and tricky process. We had an extremely small budget for the goals we had in mind. Most of the album was recorded at Joe Napolitano’s (our engineer) house using one microphone we liked with one preamp we liked. We went into a studio to record drums. There was no budget for a choir so we compiled one on our own using some of the band members, friends, friends of friends, fans, and occasionally people we met on the street. We ended up with 30 choir members, and we were fortunate to be able to record it in the choral studio of the high school I went to, Oakwood School. We couldn’t get headphones for everyone so only seven or eight people could actually hear the music we were singing to. Once all of the basic tracking was complete we spent months adding and changing parts, strings, piano, autoharp, lots of extra guitars and keyboards, trying this and that until we were satisfied with the density of the sound. Because we used so many tracks on each song (over 130 on “Unclouded Eyes”), and because we employed instrumentations and arrangements that are rarely used together, the album was not easy to mix. It took us quite a long time to mix, and a great amount of expertise from our mixing engineer, Bryan Cook, but eventually we reached a result we were all happy with.

Tell me about the track “The Chandelier Suite.”
“The Chandelier Suite” is about the struggle of realizing an artistic vision. It was inspired by the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. In the film, the main character, Roy, has a close encounter, and from then on has uncontrollable urges to paint and sculpt a vision he has in his mind. He struggles to create it, he can’t see it clearly, but slowly it begins to develop. What eats him up inside though is that he doesn’t understand why he has the vision, what it means. At the end of the film he finds out what the vision is and sees what the purpose of it is. The Chandelier Suite is about the fantasy of discovering meaning behind artistic inspiration, an end, a reason for its creation.

Where can people get the album?
MySpace (in the band members section) or our Web site.