Sam Eastgate travels, explores and immerses himself in a more organic sound with “moon phase” (Domino, 2023). An album created between Mexico and Costa Rica with which she has decided to break down part by part all the possibilities that a guitar could offer her in her hands.
LA Priest With this new album, he builds a fantasy world to confront the real world with mermaid stories that fascinate him. He explores the enormous connection with nature that the creative process of the album implied, he takes a beautiful psychedelic journey among goldfish and continues to experiment to create new paths that enrich his project as only he knows how to do. We spoke with Sam during his visit to Madrid so that he could tell us much better and in detail about the construction of “moon phase”
It could be said that “Fase Luna” is a more organic, pure album that has moved you away from synths. Tell me about how this sound came to be.
When I started creating this record, they gave me a set to snorkel before I went to Mexico. Since I didn’t have many other plans, one day I decided to go to the beach and take a look at everything there. I was hooked, I couldn’t stop looking, I discovered a world that I had never thought of. Tropical fish, sharks, manta rays… If I’m honest, it even scared me, I’m afraid of heights and I felt a little dizzy in the water. I think that’s what inspired me and what stopped me from using synths on this record. I thought that there is actually nothing synthetic in the depths. Although I will tell you that I found that synths can also reflect that sound well. But hey, it had a lot to offer with the guitar and it was the best way to capture all those textures.
“He had a lot to offer with the guitar, it was the best way to capture all those textures”
In one of the short documentaries that you posted on Instagram to talk about the creation of the album, you said that part of the inspiration for this album also came from your childhood and your belief in fantastic creatures.
Yeah, well, I’ve always liked movies in that genre. One of my favorites was “Into the Labyrinth” with all these little mystical creatures. I also felt that I had to find new themes to explore and talk about to show the public. I was fascinated by the way my great friend Connan Mockasin sang in such a natural way about all these creatures that lived under the ocean. And obviously he became a big influence on this record. I was very clear that I did not want to make a copy of his style, but there was a subject that I could not get out of my head: mermaids. The reason was that a friend told me the story of a kind of mermaid Goddess that arises from the indigenous people.
All this imaginary transported me directly to the movie “The Woman and the Monster” and even more so when I saw the video clip for “It’s You”.
Actually, this time I didn’t have much to do with the video. I was working on another record, a little 4 song EP coming out soon, and I decided to outsource the video, planned it all out and ended up leaving it in the hands of others. I loved the creative decisions they made, especially how they handled that whole sewer thing. All of this happened on my street, the sewers on my street overflowed the same week that I was writing this idea. My garden was flooded by sewage, it was really terrible. So I’m still torn watching the video. On the one hand I find it beautiful, but on the other it horrifies me.
You talk about the record as a place to go when you need to escape from reality. What do you want people to feel when listening to it?
I want them to relax, you know how hard it is to relax. Now everyone makes music with a slow tempo and beautiful chords. But I think you have to go further, I feel you have to also distract them with fantasy, the unusual, something that is like a kind of movie. When you face a different world you relax because you get away from the things that worry you in your day to day.
And would you say that this album is also a call to the world to value and care for nature more?
Yes, hopefully. It’s hard because it’s not the end of this record for me. But, on the other hand, I also believe that my music is like dreams, those that we understand eventually in a conscious way but that can be analyzed much more later. I feel like I always say the most important things when I’m not planning them. But hey, what I want is to inspire people and generate good energy.
It is an album recorded in Mexico and Costa Rica. Tell me more about the recording process.
The process was connecting with the guitar, strumming it, exploring it, finding all kinds of atmospheres and ways to use it. The hardest thing for me was shaping the sound of the bass, because I only had one guitar and I put a bass string on it. I spent the whole time trying to figure out if the bass was in tune with the rest of the song. It sounded very unique to me, but there was also something technically annoying.
The result is practically a psychedelic trip that takes you away from reality.
Yeah, I guess, but it’s tricky because I didn’t want it to be all fantasy as it could just come off as empty. I always tried to balance things and also think about our normal daily lives. Sometimes the inspiration is to get one more point of tragedy or drama out of a story. But hey, other times it is simply to achieve a sound that I have in my head.
In “Sail On” there is a translation into Spanish, why in this song?
Well, it probably doesn’t have much to do with where the song came from, but I feel like it ended up meaning something. At first I sang the lyrics on the demo and it sounded like I was singing Japanese. So the initial idea was to do it in Japanese. But of course, I realized that in the rest of the song he used the sound “O” all the time and it made much more sense that being in a Spanish-speaking country he would try to speak a little Spanish. I went to a translator, I told him what I wanted it to sound like without understanding what he was saying and using it eventually became a creative way of doing it prioritizing sound over meaning.
It’s like using the sound of the letters almost as if they were beats regardless of what they say.
Yeah man, I remember there were like a lot of words that sounded like dreaming or crying. But, I was unable to understand everything he was saying, so I asked some friends to tell me if it made sense and sounded good. The initial idea was to talk about a kind of fairies that were on a roof, about the creatures of the night. When I was creating the record, they talked to me a lot about stories about a kind of elves that we can’t really see.
How are you going to bring all this to concerts? What sound do you want to achieve in live performance?
I want to go full band because this is a very different type of register and I think it would work very well played full on real instruments. But of course, I live very far away and everything limits me a lot. So I’ve decided that I would love to gather musicians all over the world. Hopefully some of them listen to my music and want to come play bass or drums with me, because that’s how I see this record live.
