I love me some Secrets of the Sky. I loved their album To Sail Black Waters when I first heard (half of) it last year. I loved it more when the other half made it to the Soundcloudosphere (beyond the stratosphere, just underneath the Bandcamposphere). I love it now that it’s being released by Kolony Records.
How much do I love it? If you’re a subscriber, it’s possible you already know how much. If not… well, I’m not entirely comfortable being so candid with the non-paying public (at least one member of which thinks I actually don’t know or idolize Kurt Ballou).
In a week, SotS and other cool Californian band In the Silence embark on a tour for you left-coasters (see dates at the end of this post) which promises to wet the panties of slick gloomy-prog lovers who can get out to the shows. Not sure if you’re into it? Scroll down. Press play. Commence the love.
There are only four songs on To Sail Black Waters, and I believe that all of them have been accessible somewhere on the web at some point in the last few months. Now, though, Decibel gives you the whole tomato, the whole ball of bread dough, the whole nine cheese sticks (none of which are actual sayings, all of which are making me hungry). Beneath the music player, stick around for the follow-up interview, a video for their song “Decline”, and a complete listing of the coming tour dates.
Can you talk a little about the label process? How did you start looking for people to release your stuff, and how did you happen to get shuffled from one to another so quickly?
This has been a point of confusion for a lot of people, but basically we finished recording the album I guess around the end of 2012. We spent four months waiting on press work via Gravedancer, who were supposed to issue the digital version, but long story short is the dude who ran that label burned us pretty hard. He got us for some money, but what is worse was he continually lied about the release and eventually stopped responding about 2 weeks before the digital was supposed to come out. So that left us in a huge bind and around March we reached out to a few people to see if we could salvage the situation. Ken Golden from Sensory Records put us in touch with several labels who were interested, and ultimately we decided on Kolony based on their eagerness to work with us and the high level of communication they gave us. All in all, it worked out perfectly and we have been really happy with Kolony.
Do you think the band is still very attached to these songs, or have members moved on to new ideas yet?
It’s true, we have been working this record for a long time… but it’s just now getting a lot of attention and that makes it feel new all over again. We are still happy with it… and the fact that it has seemed to resonate with people is humbling and exciting to us. We do have the majority of a new album written given the amount of time we have had since recording To Sail Black Waters, though it probably won’t be recorded for a while. We are focusing on touring more extensively in the first half of 2014 and then we will probably hit the studio to lay down the next installment.
What music is exciting you these days?
We are all into different types of music, not just heavy stuff but a sampling of our playlist would look like this:
Chris- Gojira, Garett- Watain, Clayton- Alcest, Andy- Baroness, Lance- Goatwhore, Ryan- Kiss
