Sydney’s
WAWAWOW
unleash a chaotic beast
with new studio album
PINK ELEPHANT
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5 Things
You Didn’t Know About
WAWAWOW
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Praise for WAWAWOW
“Absolute madmen, the lot of you.” – Triple J Unearthed, Tommy Faith
“Stick the computerised punk energy of Regurgitator in a blender with a few riffs out of the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets handbook and you’ll start to paint an appropriate picture.” – Happy Magazine
“Nine Inch Nails, Plastic Bertrand, and the soundtrack to the weirdest dystopian anime you can imagine collide head-on here like trucks and meteors.” – The Underground Stage
“A high-octane psych-rock odyssey that spits in the face of sterility…” – Clipped.TV
“A shattered self-deprecating tone marching through odd time signatures taking cues from somewhere between the B-52s and Royal Blood.” – AMNplify
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Continuing to stamp their way through the early months of 2020, Sydney’s WAWAWOW present a brand new set of off the rails material in their new album, Pink Elephant. Energetic and charged up, the record is the band at their fiery best. Warping and manipulating sounds and influences from across an array of genres at each turn, the four-piece demonstrates flair and a skill for distilling this broad range of influences into a sound completely their own.
Sitting at 13 tracks strong, the band flexes their creative muscle stronger than ever before, fusing indie and electro with a great dash of psych-craziness (‘Rat Porridge’, ‘Elephant Bird’). Recent single, ‘The Big Cookoff’, was an early example of the madness WAWAWOW executed on record. Yet as Pink Elephant continues to roll out, the listener gets a more defined perspective of the band’s vision.
Over various studio and jam sessions, the album came together organically as the band riffed off each other’s energy and ideas. Capturing the essence of WAWAWOW as naturally as possible remained key to the process. “We wanted to find a way to capture the very first jams that we cut together and use them, rather than try later and fail to get the spark.” WAWAWOW
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‘Pink Elephant’ is released Friday, February 14th.
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Applying the same attitude to their visuals, the music video for ‘The Big Cookoff’ brings animation courtesy of Shaun Allen together with band and location footage in Sydney, sizing up brilliantly with the batshit nature of the song itself. “This track is our love/hate letter to Sydney in a lot of ways, so we wanted to get in as much of the city as possible. We then used stop motion animation to create the dark but cartoonish version of the city that matched the ridiculousness of the music.” WAWAWOW
With their new music ready and raring to go, fans will be able to catch WAWAWOW performing through NSW this February. Time to join this crazy circus, WAWAWOW have got one helluva new show to deliver. “There’s something about the trance we put ourselves in, as we play without stopping, that has a slight tunnel vision effect. There’s no pauses to have a sip or fix up a pedal, so you kind of learn to exist on that plane.” WAWAWOW
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WAWAWOW
TOUR DATES
Saturday, February 1st
Sneaky Possum Sydney
RF-Fest with Florange, BALKO and Band of Covers
Friday, February 7th
The Loft @ UTS Sydney
The Band’s Next Door 2SER
with Stressless and Birthday Girl
Saturday, February 15th
Dicey Riley’s Hotel Wollongong
Album Launch
with Tuff Mustard, Naughty Boys and Tombeau
Saturday, February 22nd
Town Hall Hotel Newtown
Album Launch
with Pyjama Sundayz, Cakewalk
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Follow WAWAWOW
Official Website | Facebook | Instagram
YouTube | Twitter
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5 Things
You Didn’t Know About
WAWAWOW
1. Nonstop live sets
Coming from a group of instrumentalists, It’s no secret that our psuedo-frontman Wade has pretty terrible on stage banter. Add this to our janky working song titles and enjoyment of organic jams, transitions and indulgent effects solos, we came up with the perfect solution – the one-song-set.
Something about the start/stop nature of the 5-7 song set, and allowing an audience to digest whatever you had to offer in manageable, bite-size chunks didn’t appeal anymore. The sensory overload of never allowing a listener to stop and think made us feel like crowds were more likely to be trapped in a feedback loop of riffage and effects, to the point where people would ask “So what, you only have 1 song?”
Obviously it isn’t an entirely original idea, but it gave us a defining point which we took into our album and every live show we’ve played in the last 3 years, a point that Shaun our drummer has to contend with every time – the rust on his drums and the sweat dripping from his sodden t-shirt attesting to the work he puts into keeping everyone else in line throughout a non-stop set.
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2. We make music for Podcasts
With the sheer volume of jams we’ve recorded, it was an unexpected turn to find a good use for them. Our drummer Shaun combined all our most ridiculous moments with his podcast In Brackets creating this sort of zany tapestry around conversations with musicians and a few bigger names like Jeremy Neale and Novak from Polish Club.
For the last 12 months, we’ve been turning these into new word-of-the-week theme songs as part of the Oink Time podcast. Coming up in 2020, we’ll be doing the theme for a podcast about the Cats musical, because Andrew Lloyd Webber was unavailable.
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3. Sampling
After some experimentation with the podcast, and not content with just recording everything we’ve ever jammed, our vocalist Wade and drummer Shaun fell in love with recording all the interesting noises we hear around the place. We’ve been layering these all through the tracks on the album to help simulate the environment and feeling we’re trying to convey. The album opens with the dusk bugs and kookaburras in country Victoria, and throughout we’ve got noises of cats, horses, elephants,airport announcements, showers, fireworks, german radio, concert crowds, trains, storms, ocean waves, aerosol cans, sewage pipes and drunken discussions following a New Year’s Eve party. Every time we felt the track got a little sterile, adding in some organic ambience or sound effects really helped draw the listener (us) into the song a little more. We’d also like to thank our partners for their patience as we all walked around with recorders and headphones on.
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4. Recording Process
Throughout various experiences with our first 3 singles and multiple demo tracks, we discovered that we couldn’t successfully go into a studio and record our tracks within a set time. Nor could we manage to relinquish creative control to various sound engineers, artists and mixers. Ultimately we realised that we would only be happy if we handled the lion’s share of the recording and pre-mixing ourselves. Our genius album mixologist Dane Burge will attest to receiving an alarming amount of obsessive questions, input and feedback in the form of multi-tab spreadsheets throughout the recording and mixing process of Pink Elephant.
Our drummer Shaun set out to build a DIY studio made of velcro and duct tape in his garage, and finally we were set to spend the next year recording and re-recording a broad and over-zealous amount of audio content to cram into an albums’ worth of songs. Initially, we tried to capture those spontaneous moments from previously recorded jams, and found that nothing we could do could replicate “that one track from rehearsal 2 years ago”. This naturally led into recording every jam, every week to make sure that when the magic happened, the red light was on. It was a pretty difficult few months, with everyone blasting through their own headphones late at night, but we managed to get some true highlights out of a few of them. The entire track of The Pot and Margaret Snowpants were completely on the fly, and most of the original takes are still in it. The start of The Big Cookoff was actually a mistake that was too funny to remove. Pinwheel was a magical moment we managed to capture, and when we tried and failed to recreate it, we accidentally ended up with the first half of Elephant. An exhausting and admittedly over-the-top way of doing things, but we loved the result and would likely use the same process to record future releases!
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5. Democracy
Lacking an egotistical leader or charismatic front man/woman/person was both a blessing and a curse – similar to the political shitfight we find ourselves in today. With no one to jam ideas down our throats or write entire songs alone, we found ourselves in a situation where only a majority vote could work. Egos were left at the door, and lively debates were a centrepoint when writing new material. All ideas were allowed on the table, and we were commonly “trading” policies, such as “I hate that part, but ill let it slide if you let me have that part YOU hate” and conducting votes to decide on anything from the tiniest nuance to dropping entire songs to discussing whether to write an album or not.
As in politics, this sometimes led to a much lengthier process in deciding on the best option, but unlike in politics we all came out the other side satisfied with the result.
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AMNPLIFY – DB
My nickname is “The Amnplifier”. Why? Because around here my focus is on being a conduit for providing greater outcomes that people come here for. My day to day “work” is living in the moment, and I love helping others concentrate on finding their connection to themselves through their experiences.
Why start a music environment? The truth is I love music, I love writing, and I love life. I work with musicians every day, and I feel certain that I will be until they put me in the ground. I have been managing people in businesses of some sort for over thirty five years so along the way I have developed some “wisdom” from my regular and constant “observations”.
Amnplify your experience. That is what we want you to do here, and if you want to let me know why you do, or don’t, shoot me a message on Facebook.
Hope you enjoy yourself here and find something that hits you somewhere.
