The Wheelers of Oz

It’s Saturday night, smack bang in the middle of the long weekend so pop your boots and coat on and head to Rosie tonight (26th March) and check out locals The Wheelers of Oz do their thing along side Dougal’s Casino, Regular Boys and Drage Lion.

Questions asked, Questions answered.

Here’s some light reading for you to devour on your journey.

Alex and Sam… you’ve been making music for a while together how did you guys meet?
(SAM) We met through family friends when we were young kids. It was one of those situations when you go to your parents friends house and you have to hang out with the kids at the dinner party. As we got older we started getting into the same kind of things and naturally became best mates.

So there’s 7 of you in total and most of you are in other bands, how do you figure out logistics?
It can be pretty hard to get everyone together for rehearsals sometimes but we always find a time to make it happen. Alex and I live together and have a studio in our house so we are always recording new demos. When we get together with the whole band we show them the parts and everyone puts a little bit of their flavour on top. 

The album you released late last year is titled Revivalised – what does that mean/how did you come up with it?
The first album is a mix of all our influences, so in a way we were reviving anything from the past that influenced our process, perhaps it was music or some other everyday shit.

Your songs have been described as cinematic and other writers have noted your avant gardè influence, was this intentional? Do you have an idea of how you want things to sound beforehand or is it a gradual improvised process?The Avant Gardè thing started as a bit of a joke. I studied a bit of film making and film history in my degree at uni and wrote “Avant Gardè Cinema” in our influences section on good old Facebook while i was in a bit of a film phase. I guess people read that and latched on to it whenever they asked us about our music. It’s definitely a big influence when it comes to the idea of creating something but not so much an influence to the sound of our music.
We have certain style of music that we work towards. We are able to experiment a lot and the songs continuously change as we work on them in the studio and with the band, but the original idea is always in there somewhere.

I love that concept of the photo booklet you included with some copies of the album, why did you make the decision to do this and how did you choose the images?
I love taking pictures just as much as making music and really wanted to tie the two together somehow. I was shooting heaps of photos of feet around the time that we were making the album. I don’t know why haha. Every time I processed a roll of film I noticed a had a bunch of feet photos. Lots of them were of band members so Alex and I thought they would fit paired with photos of some gear that we used on the album.  

What is your favourite track you’ve recorded and why?
A new one that we just recorded. It doesn’t have a name yet.

What’re you vibing on right now? Give us some tunes you would recommend checking out.
I always come back to Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures, I go through phases of spinning it non stop. Some other stuff to entice the ears –
Fabio Viscogliosi – il nostro caro angelo
Morgan Delt – Morgan Delt
Foxygen – Bowling Trophies
The Jim Mitchells – Planet Absorbed
Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

Besides the gig, what can we expect up next?
We are going to head over east and play some shows in the next few months. We are also in the process of putting together another album which will be out later in the year.

If you’re reading this at a later date, you know where to look for their future gigs, dive into those links in the meantime.

Yep.