Hogs in space

>> Are Toronto's Sianspheric too heavy to blast off?

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Not recommended: listening to the latest Sianspheric album while watching CNN on mute. That's heavy shit, squared. With moody, distorted psych-rock in skewed slow-motion and splatterings of half-buried vocals, The Sound of the Colour of the Sun is hardly as bright as its title implies. Tellingly, this third proper album by this Toronto-based quartet was born of three years of hard work and turbulent times, seeing the addition of Locksley Taylor and original guitarist Paul Sinclair and the painful departure of troubled bassist/vocalist Steve Peruzzi. Taking a break from his "resident computer geek" day job (at the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants!), guitarist Sean Ramsay cheered up the Mirror with talk of Rock Star, writing and looking at shoes.



Mirror: With families and day jobs and all, I can see why you guys don't tour often. What should we expect from this rare live appearance?

Sean Ramsay: The same way that the new record has extremes, from really quiet to really chaotic noisiness, our live show does as well, possibly more so. The sounds on the new record are close to what we accomplish on stage, but we never went crazy with overdubs anyway. We try to keep things reasonable so we can present something to the audience that isn't underwhelming.

M: I can imagine projected imagery working really well with your music.

SR: Some friends of ours have a lighting company called Visual Chaos, but they won't be coming with us up there. We wish they would because we're not Sloan or Danko Jones on stage. We're not the most visually eye-catching group, that's why we get lumped in with shoegazer. I guess we do look at our shoes.

M: Musically, does "shoegazer" play a significant role for you?

SR: Not as much as it may have when we wrote Somnium [1995]. We've been listening to more jazz and minimalist classical composers like Steve Reich. From what I've read, a lot of the '90s shoegazer people were in turn influenced by those guys, so we're getting to the root of the whole thing.

M: How have your recent line-up changes affected your music and the way you work?

SR: You'd think that it would have completely rearranged how we write, like just one of us would be writing all the songs, but it's not the case at all. No matter who's been involved, we've been really lucky to have like-minded people who want to take part in the writing process. Have you seen the movie Rock Star?

M: No, not yet.

SR: Okay, well, towards the end of the film Mark Wahlberg comes in with songs he wants to play for this skid-rock band and they say, "You don't write the songs, we write the songs and lyrics, you just sing them." It's not like that at all. I've never understood a group like the Smashing Pumpkins, for example, where Billy Corgan takes all the credit. I don't know, would his songs have been the same without whoever playing drums? In my opinion, the song is not the melody, the song is the song.

With Fridge at Casa del Popolo on Saturday, Oct. 13, 9pm, $10