Interview: Kindler

North Carolina based rock band, Kindler, took some time from their "space travels" to talk with us about their new album Cosmic Revelation, and upcoming plans for 2016. Read our full interview below!

SR: For our readers who have yet to hear you guys, how would you describe yourselves?

​K: We play space rock. At least, that’s what we call it. Other people call it progressive rock or experimental rock. We used to call it progressive rock, as well, before we went in to space. That changed everything.

SR: I got lost listening to your album, Cosmic Revelations, it’s so hypnotic. It pulls you in. What is the driving force behind your music?

​K: For the three of us, music is the one thing we can’t give up. Time spent away from it feels like time wasted. That mutual drive to create is the strongest force behind our music, and it is inescapable. Akin to a black hole, which we had to escape to bring this album to you.

SR: When working on this album was there any special place you went to for inspiration, whether a geographical location or a mental state of mind?

K: The music on this album definitely all comes from a similar place, mentally. We call it the “ominous question mark”. Much of the music deals with themes of uncertainty. There are so many questions surrounding life and existence that are impossible to answer, and, in a lot of ways, we were dealing with those questions and our inability to answer them when writing the material on this album. We were also preparing for our journey into outer space, which contributed greatly to our headspace.

SR: You self engineered this album, as well as your last EP, is there extra satisfaction in being able to say “we did this ourselves”? 

K: There certainly is. We also claimed a great deal of control over both projects by engineering them ourselves. We were not beholden to anyone’s creative ideas or abilities but our own, and only had to answer to our budget. We also had a great deal of experience as we had built our own space shuttle months prior.

SR: I hear so many different elements and inspirations, what is your key to putting it all together and making it work so fluently?

K: The key to that is the amount of time we have played together, and the extent to which we know each other’s preferences. We have been writing music together on and off for six or seven years, only forming Kindler in 2013. We mesh extremely well as musicians, and our disparate influences have really come together as well over the years. Also, spending lots of time in a tiny spaceship together will either bring you together or tear you apart. Luckily, we got the former.

SR: What are your plans for the rest of 2016? Any upcoming tours?

K: We have plans to collaborate with the filmmaker who made both of our music videos, Jack Pennington. We are going to score several of his short films over the next year, which will be debuted at Kindler performances. The scores will be performed live in time with the films when we debut them. The music we write and the films we produced will be released toward the end of the year as a CD/DVD package. We’ll be looking to play as much as possible in as many places as possible, as well, to support the album. All of this will have to take place in between space journeys, but we will make time.

SR: If you could put together a ‘dream lineup’ of living and passed bands or musicians, who would be on the list? 

K: As of this moment, our dream lineup would be as follows:
Rush, Yes, Tool, and Gojira
Most of our favorite bands live off-planet, so they wouldn’t be able to make it.