Some albums just make you feel good. How I Long to Feel That Summer in My Heart by the Welsh critical darlings Gorkys Zygotic Mynci does just that, leaving a bit of a tingle from airy but sweet harmonies and lush instrumentation. Think the Beatles and Belle and Sebastian chilling in the park with the Apples in Stereo. Some bands make you listen–Gorkys is proof.
After many failed attempts, the Herald spoke with Euros Childs from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci (unfortunately the Welsh accent doesn’t hold up on the page).
The Badger Herald: You guys are hard to get a hold of.
Euros Childs: Yeah, well, we’re in the bus from Vancouver to Minneapolis.
BH: Have you been enjoying your visit to the States so far?
EC: Yeah, we enjoy–well, we’re traveling on a bus–so we try and wake up quite early and kind of walk around the cities we are visiting.
BH: What was your goal in making the record?
EC: We just tried to make the best job we can, really. We rehearsed a lot of songs, you know. We rehearsed more songs than on any different album, just to cut it down to the strongest, I think. And also we wanted to make it run
together.
BH: It does seem to be a really cohesive effort.
EC: Well, that’s good–I think we tried that.
BH: Were you trying to make that atmospheric sort of feeling?
EC: I think we’re lucky as a band, really, because a lot of stuff that we do is quite . . . we don’t have to put too much thought into it, or sit down and discuss. If it feels really good on the record, it’s not something we tried to achieve, really. There’s good chemistry within the band.
BH: Where did you record it?
EC: We recorded in Rockfield. That’s in Wales, just on the border between Wales and England, yeah. It’s a quite famous studio in Britain.
BH: Are you guys kind of bigger in Britain as compared to here?
EC: Probably relatively. Some of the places, we play to as many of the people [as we do] in Britain. In Britain, it took us years and years and years to build up a following, because we weren’t a band that has really been hyped or has much of an image. Every time we play somewhere more people turn up, you know? Which is heartening for us, but we don’t mind playing places with not many people show[ing] up. We know it’s a gradual thing, you know? We’re not a band that expected overnight success.
BH: It seems also that you’ve gotten more exposure lately in national magazines, especially in the States. Have you been aware of that at all?
EC: We only see black and white photocopies of stuff that comes over in faxes. It’s very hard to gauge how big they are. It’s very hard to gauge how much press we’ve had. And in Britain we know every magazine there is, we know what it means to be in the NME. We don’t know what it is to be in
a magazine over in America.
BH: Who is the most influential to you?
EC: We look up to? people we like. Robert Wyatt, we’re big fans of Robert Wyatt cause he’s one of the greatest, very original. He’s our hero–he’s my hero, anyway.
BH: Who do you consider your contemporaries?
EC: Bands like Yo La Tengo, not bands that just made music to create cash in the end. We haven’t much in common with bands like that. Or Super Furry Animals. They’re both good bands.
BH: I guess I have to ask you–I’m sure you get it all the time–the obligatory band name question.
EC: Yeah. It’s a name our guitarist, John, thought of when he was 15 and a half years old. John’s left the band–he left, um, about two and a half years ago. He thought of the name. Three random words together, you know? It’s quite a long time ago now. It’s about 11 years ago, 12 years ago that he came up with the name, you know. I can’t remember exactly why he came up with it or what was in his mind at the time. That’s the three words he came up with.
BH: We were kind of guessing around the Herald that maybe it was about the painter Gorky, or something else like that?
EC: No, It’s hard–because he’s not in the band anymore, it’s been up to us to answer the question, and (laughing) we can’t remember.
