Releasing their brand new split EP with Post Rock kings Mono, The Ocean have been fairly busy in the year of 2015. Attending this year’s Damnation, along with the absolutely fantastic live performance we were able to speak to the band’s mastermind Robin Staps. Enlightening us about how the split came to be, how it was recorded and what made the bands decide on an EP together we find out more about The Quiet Observer along with some more tantalising news of a new album. Outlining the current process of writing for their new album, with the artist single handedly crafting their brilliant Pelagial the band opt for a more dynamic approach this time round. Listen to the full interview in our Soundcloud file below the excerpt of the interview.
Speaking of moving onto new things you’ve got five tracks written is that right?
Five or six tracks something like that yes and our other guitarist also has three or four tracks written which are also really cool so this next record will be a bit more of a collaborative effort. I wrote Pelagial all by myself basically, now Damo our other guitar player has some really cool song ideas that I really like and think fit into the context and the vibe of The Ocean. He’s going to contribute to the writing process and also Paul our new drummer, well not that new anymore, he’s been in the band since 2013, he’s also going to be a lot more involved with writing his own drum parts so it’s going to be a bit more of collaborative effort.
It will probably show various different sides of The Ocean we may not have seen before…
Yeah, probably! I can’t really tell you which direction it’s going to go in. We may write a lot more material and then discard half of it, pick the best stuff, we’ll see how it goes. Like I said after the end of this tour we’ll look into that and start to work intensely on the new material.
Is that what you’ve got planned for the beginning of 2016 or are you going to be touring?
Pretty much, we’re not going to be touring until March. We’re going to the US in March and we may play a number of European headline dates in May but only in territories we have not really done so far. So until then, there’s a bit of time there’s the months of December, January and February so we’re definitely going to use the time to work on new stuff and see where it takes us.
What inspired you to have a collaborative effort with Mono?
Well like I said I am working with them on my label already and we really wanted to make a Mono / The Ocean tour happen. For me personally, I wanted Mono to go out with a heavy band so that they play to a different audience. They have headlined a lot but they kind of always played to the same crowd, which is a kind of Post Rock crowd. They’re a very heavy band live as you will see tonight, I think that they would totally appeal to a Metal crowd as well and that was the idea to get them out and for us we wanted to play to more of a Post Rock crowd. The original idea was to play some of our more Post Rock-y material which we didn’t really end up doing but that was the idea.
So we made this tour happen and then it only made sense to release something new, in time for the tour and that’s why we decided to do this split release. I approached Taka with the idea back in January or February and he liked the idea, we just set the course, one track each, maximum fifteen minutes deadline August 1st then everyone worked on it on their own basically. So it’s not really a collaboration, we had no impact on the Mono track and they had no impact on ours. It’s a split EP like in the good old Hardcore days when you bought Split 7″ records at shows and would discover cool new bands through that.
The Ocean are currently working on new material for what we hope will be a 2016 release!
