Chapter 2 - Pisces (Interview with Sea of Tranquility)

"Lying down on a tranquil prairie/ look up the brittle sky/ I have been staring and dazing hard/ I long to reach your grace/ Can you feel my pain?/ Can you feel the rain?/ Can't you feel my pain?/ Can't you feel the rain of stars just faded away?/ I can't pretend/ there's nothing going on, there's something going on/ You are so "Pisces" to ignore, ignore what had happened"

—Sea of Tranquility “Pisces”

There is a sense of longing for an idyllic past and could-have-been in Pisces. The song nudges lightly at the contours of a memory, before it reels you into montages of running your fingertips across strands of grass, children frisking through pastures, sweat trickling, a spectacle of speckled sunlight. In the latter half, the camera points inwards at yourself: disoriented by swishing waves of reverberations and muffled guitars, grasping onto an attraction that is pulling away. The song is indulgently forlorn like Drop Nineteens is with their unabashed teen angst in its subject matter, while the music recalls cosmic reverberations of Slowdive.

“We were all at the age of emo-posting (叫春的年紀), or what you call ‘chūnibyō syndrome’. And what better way to express these raging hormones than in our songs.” That is what Sam, guitarist of Sea of Tranquility (SOT), unabashedly shared about the band’s creative impulse.

“This was my favourite song. When I was studying in the UK, listening to this made walking alone at night a hazy trip, where there were no streetlights and only a skyline to look upon.” Sean, the band’s new guitarist, said of his first encounter with the band as a listener.

Consider the following through a Lomography camera filter. This was the early 2010s, a period many indieheads deemed as the “golden era of bands.” Such ecology begins at the early levels of adolescent minds and campus grounds. The coming together of SOT ties in serendipitously with HKU’s Music Club. While looking to start a band, Yan (bass) was an ex-co member of the Club and was introduced to Sam, David Boring’s group mate (組仔) at the university orientation . Tommy (drums) was a succeeding ex-co member, when one day he passed by the Club’s band practise room. The band had been stood up by their first drummer, so Tommy became their stand-in, and soon enough, their bandmate.

“Band-jamming was always a go-to pastime for students, if you were ever asked [about what you were doing] and wanted to hint you had a personality. I feel that this phenomena goes hand-in-hand with the prevalence of music clubs and band societies. They hosted a lot of band shows, and invited a large variety of bands, whether they were iconic and experienced, or amateurish and experimental,”

Sam said.“Hence, there were countless shows to go to. And I’m talking about multiple shows clashing concurrently one weekend night, that was the norm. Big and small shows alike. I guess it was because they had less venue restrictions back then. A school venue could host a small scale show of about 50-100 person-capacity. Naturally, there were more opportunities for band scene newbies and amateurs. There was a stage for every style of music, and every size of audience.” Yan added. Talk about long tail theory.

At this juncture of the interview, the members went off about memories of hosting inter-school shows: wrapping coloured cellophane paper over white bulbs because the school had no show-appropriate stage lights, setting up a desk in a lecture hall and calling it a rising platform; and where there was no single trained person to live sound mixing, you had to resort to the nearest available 上莊 who has no clue how a panel works.

If this scrappy DIY ethos was an indication of anything, it would be dedication. The band recalled all sorts of methods used to support their artistry, going so far as to becoming “bedroom producers” for the band.

“I don’t even know what it was with bands and their obsessions of releasing demos. But as broke university kids who wanted to do the same, we would take it upon ourselves to execute everything from instrumentation to recording to mixing. We also self-learnt Logic and other interfaces. We were all pushing as far as we could go,” Tommy said.

“Some of us lived in halls, so we just recorded all our bass guitar tracks in the dorm. Our floormates don’t really mind though, because we try to play as quietly and as close to the mics as we can,” Sam said.

And so their first demo Pisces was recorded: a very rough-around-the-edges number that reflected their very spontaneous, instinctive attitude.

“We wish to interject the melodic blends of vocals and instruments into our songwriting. Some of our songs do not have lyrics, but we ask our vocalist to ‘laaa’ the tunes out,” said Sam.

In the song Interstellar, the vocal track is shattered by smashing drums and disseminated outwards across the track like space debris, layered over with a delayed acoustical shock. The structure departs from shoegaze’s wall of sound; rather, it follows an anecdotal progression of “noise-quiet-noise-quiet.”

Sure, the band came together over their shared love for shoegaze—their big A1 poster of Slowdive, framed and hung on the studio wall like a portrait of their spiritual leader—but their influences go a lot broader and proximate to the surrounding community. If you happened to be around the early half of the 2010s, you might remember a distinctive band sound: a mish-mash of feedback noises, effect pedals, taciturn build-ups, a cross-pollination of shoegaze elements with other genres. These influences include the more far-flung Sleep Party People, Tokyo Shoegazer, We Lost The Sea, and, closer to home, Downer (丹娜樂團), Forsaken Autumn. Despite spanning different genres and eras, these bands share an inherent quality of looking inwards.[1] Like a seed of thought sedimented at the bottom in a vortex, you only go deeper and deeper, into a stillness that is amidst the chaos. SOT observed the same within their peers.

“It was hard to separate showgoers of shoegaze or post-rock honestly. There were different show promoters and venues (Fringe Club, Hangout 蒲吧) that churned out shows. Frequenting shows meant seeing the same group of people, meaning friendships!”

Sam remembered befriending the guitarist of local shoegaze/psychedelic pop band TUX, at one of the many shows he visited. “We would always hang out and goof around in their band room, until eventually, we even shared a band room. Oh, and don’t forget the hang-out room at HA 3.0 (2012–2016). These occasions for hanging out brought about many interesting encounters with people you didn’t think you would cross paths with,” said Sam.

When a venue (space) organically develops into a community (a place with cultural memory), [2] it becomes the basis for creative nourishment and endeavours. With a shared band room, SOT and TUX were able to share insights on music production and methods of recording, and they would borrow each other’s pedals to play with and experiment. This process of inter-influence and availability / presence of communal space would continually give birth to and inspire the coming generations of musicians.

Since their debut performance in 2014, the band has played in live houses and outdoor festivals locally, and across Japan and Taiwan, garnering a devout base of shoegazers. Returning after their hiatus in 2018, the band feels as old as they are new: new bandmates from neighbouring bands —Jamie (vocals) previously from Happy Friday, Sean from ngaiman (蟻民)—and the return of a former bandmate (Tommy returns from his music masters, and is a part of instrumental band Uchu Yurei (宇宙幽靈) and ngaiman).

The title “Sea of Tranquility” is a poetic disposition that is at once calm and turbulent, reminiscent of a subdued, introspective era. The band’s exploration only begins from there, embodying the Sea of Tranquility that marked human’s first steps on the moon; they continually venture out for new songs, in search of a Souvlaki Space Station.

[1] If music nearing the turn of the decade (2020s) are marked by a harder, more lairy kind of sound with the re-introduction of dance music elements, then half a decade ago, music gravitated towards the more subdued and introspective with the re-emergence of slowcore, post rock, and other indie genres.

[2] In anthropology and architectural studies, a space is location, alluding to physical space and physical geography, while a place is a space that contains social identity and cultural memory.

Illustration by Clara Wong