How does one improve on God? Well, you get five gods together, set them alight, fill them with the music of the world, and you watch them go on their magnificently psychedelic way. Which is exactly what came to be when Flamingods was born, and the world looked up their glowing deities and thought it good.
Yeah, so anyway, you may recall we Cultured Vultures introduced you to Flamingods a wee while back, in a ye olde edition of PULSE (which is overdue a fresh invasion into your life – Watch. This. Space.). Well, as if that wasn’t enough, we’ve only gone and grabbed hold of them and coaxed some fine answers, to some less than questions, out of them. So, that’s enough of me prattling on. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Flamingods, with some R&R and some Qs & As.
Firstly, an introductory hello, and how are you?
Hello! Good thanks. We’re busy figuring out the future right now.
I recently described your sound as ‘a truly internationally psychedelic experience’, how does that compare to how you’d describe your music in your own words? Do you prefer to avoid labels?
That’s a pretty nice description you’ve come up with! To be fair, we’ve gone around labelling ourselves as ‘psychedelic ethnic pop’ for the first couple of years as a band in an attempt to describe what we do in a relatively simple way. Its only when people say something like ‘hipster music’ when it feels that a label can become dismissive or damaging.
Your Facebook page points out that you ‘like to make noise with instruments collected from around the world’. Do you make a habit of going far and wide to find interesting instruments to make noise with? What do you have in your collection, and where from?
If any one of us is travelling somewhere, it naturally occurs to us to have a look around and see what one can find however we can’t afford to make a habit of travelling itself. We’ve picked up random drums all about the place like, we know a shop in Bahrain that we can rely on if we need a new darbuka or to re-skin one as well. Its proved very useful because the darbuka is important in our arsenal. Some things we’ve picked up in far away places include a Harmonium from Nepal and Tablas from Turkey (Tablas from Turkey has a certain ring to it, could be a future song name so look out for that). Sometimes you can find something exotic in an ordinary place. I picked up a zither in snoopers paradise which featured on our first album Sun a lot for example. It was truly one of a kind as it couldn’t be tuned and once I broke a string, its gone forever. To be fair I kinda beat on that thing a bit which may be just one of my problems. I’ve snapped strings on Kamal’s Taishōgoto two times this tour! He’s never snapped one in the whole time that he’s owned it. He’s much more gentle than me.
The band initially began life as a solo project, how did it develop to the five piece of today?
Its one of those things where we’ve all jammed together and recorded music in different bands and just for fun so when Kamal had the opportunity to play a gig he had some friends to call on for help. I was the last to officially join the band (which happens to be the same point that Flamingods became cool) so I can be hazy on the details before I joined. I just know that Sam, Charles and Karthik weren’t the only other people to play in Flamingods. Different friends came in and out before I was asked to come play with them for a show or two. It was around the time of those shows that we kinda decided we like this line-up and now we could really start to evolve in sound together.
You don’t tend to record together in the, sort of, traditional meet-up-and-jam-manner. How do you usually go about it, and do you feel this a more beneficial technique for the music you make?
We’ve certainly explored a lot of different ways to write and record before and I wouldn’t say that there’s a way in which we usually go about it. Like with our studio album Sun for example, some of those songs had gone through different versions, having appeared on a bedroom recorded tape and growing into a much grander versions of themselves before being recorded in one go in the same room. Then there are the songs that were made somewhat on the spot with which we did the more standard ‘record this bit, then record that bit over it’ thing. We record so much of what we do using whoever’s Macbook is handy so that we’ve ended up with a lot of ideas (and sometimes a whole song) that just kind of ‘happened’. Hyperborea on the other hand was more meticulous in a way in that we’d send over an idea and the next person would have a think of what to do and there’d be some trial and error, some back and forth. At the same time we wouldn’t let ourselves plan it out too much or even use a metronome or whatever to make sure everything is rigid. We’re kinda carefree in that respect. Its more about rhythm, experiments and ideas than strict time keeping on the albums.
You recently released your second album, Hyperborea, how’s the raction been to it? And how are you finding being on a label run by a kindred spirit in Islet’s Mark Thomas?
Absolutely everything has surpassed our expectations when it comes to Hyperborea. I think one amazing thing is that people really took it in the way we thought we could only hope for. The fact that people really get it gives us warm fuzzy feelings all over. Mark Thomas is a wonderful man and to have someone we’ve known for a while. To take us on and to do so with such conviction and hardiness showed us how much faith he had in us and his support gave us a lot of confidence in what we were doing. Up until releasing Hyper and getting a reaction we had no idea how it would come across so our kindred spirit, Mr Thomas, really had a massive impact on things for us. May the Universe bless him. I feel at this point I must give a massive shout out to Anthony Chalmers, the man of impeccable taste who’s been recently managing us. He’s really helped things come together and run smoothly as well, so a blessing from the Universe I request for him too.
Speaking of Hyperborea, would you care to give us a little bit of the back story to that?
I’d love to but Ill try keep it (relatively) brief cause the full story is longer than Ben- Hur. So, one thing is that growing up as expats, some of us have lived with that feeling of being a tourist in your ‘home’ country and, in my opinion, the main themes of Hyperborea (alienation, dreaming of distant/mythical lands) resonate within each of us for these reasons. The story of this album however really kicks off around the time that Kamal got booted out of the UK. In the past we had released these super lo-fi tapes and Hyperborea was going to be one of those. We started working on new ideas when Kamal went to Dubai. There were a lot of ideas. Kamal was the main guy constantly throwing out loops and ideas onto a shared dropbox folder, some of the ideas were more fleshed out than others and we just threw most of these ideas back and forth. We had over a hundred ideas to work with but obviously they weren’t all winners haha. There wasn’t any plan to give the album a deeper meaning at that point but as time went on and the scope changed it started to build into something that meant a lot to us and really reflected Kamal’s current feelings. He wrote the lyrics and in retrospect I think it was a great way for him to meditate on some of his troubles in an expressive way (as opposed to just dealing and living with them as you do). There’s many ways to come to terms with something but this was a very positive method to do so. I won’t know what it’s like to grow up in a country that’s supposedly my home (like Kamal had done) but I also don’t know what its like to not be allowed to stay somewhere I want to be because of the cards I’m dealt (also like Kamal) so we get vastly different experiences from the nationalities we’re born into despite growing up in the same place. However, being in Flamingods, and more specifically working on Hyperborea, gives us this sense of unity and relation on a higher plane; while we can have pride in our respective cultures, we’ve long forgotten national identity and are more interested in the final frontiers – space and hyperborea.
You’ve been touring pretty extensively this summer, how’s the tour been? Going into hibernation for the winter?
The tour was amazing in many ways. We met so many lovely people, made a lot of friends, discovered loads of good music and best of all we explored places we didn’t know about before! Touring Europe was like going on some kind of intense holiday where you gotta do brutal drives every so often (for which we had our guy Kaci, the worlds most beastliest van driver). Hopefully we can put out some kind of documentation of the tour in the form of a video or something cause a lot happened. And noooope, so sleep for us. We have plans but they’re just being sorted now. I can’t say much about whether we’ll play shows but its too soon to tell right now.
Are there any contemporaries out there you feel our readers should look into? Or perhaps some of your influences, as I think it’s fair to say your music tastes as a band are pretty far reaching.
Yeah, we aren’t really able to pin point any influences anymore. We used to just throw out Animal Collective and Boredoms because there were obvious parallels but I think we’re past a point where we should even bother! Not to say there isn’t a lot that inspires us though. As for contemporaries, sure thing – Shinamo Moki, AK/DK, Death Shanties, Beaty Heart, Terminal Cheesecake, Physics House Band, The Comet is Coming, Hypnotized, My Panda Shall Fly, Herb Diamente, Cosmic Dead, Guardian Alien, Bewilderbeast… Ill stop there.
Finally, and most seriously, if you had a particularly cultured pet vulture what would you call it? Or would you prefer a god-like flamingo?
The cultured vulture sounds kinda charming actually.. I like it! While carrying a god-like flamingo around with us might encourage people to pronounce our name the way we originally intended (as opposed to Flaming Gods hehe), I can’t but feel it would be a little stuck up. What with the whole god like thing, always standing on one foot and showing off its backwards knees. Im not sure I speak for any of the others but I’d like to be serious and call the vulture something nice like Rama Vrai, something that has an exotic ring to it and starts to melt into one more interesting sounding word as you say it smoother and faster. Or Chantelle. Chantelle is also good.
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.
