The Big Sonic Heaven 7 – Midsommar

The Big Sonic Heaven 7 is 7 questions we ask our favorite bands.
This time we asked Midsommar…

1. Where are you from/based?
We are a band from Warsaw, Poland. Our origin is, in a sense, important because in the last 30 years dreampop and shoegaze did not manage to appear in our country even in a residual form. With Midsommar and a few other bands, we’re trying to change that. I like to call it – a bit immodest – a First Wave of Polish Shoegaze.

2. Give us a brief history of the band.
The beginnings of the band date back to 2018 – then I started rehearsing with the drummer, Bartek Zdunek, and we used to play in a post-punk aesthetic: in the style of early Joy Division and Gang of Four. Our line-up stabilized in 2019 – guitarist Dawid Dziwosz and vocalist Alia Fay joined us and we finally defined ourselves in the sound of dreampop and shoegaze. I think it will stay that way.

3. What are your influences and/or describe your sound.
I think we are all big fans of Slowdive, especially their album “Souvlaki” and the big comeback of 2017 “Slowdive”. We play some of their songs on almost every rehearsal, and they remain an unsurpassed model of combining subtle melodies with immersive, deafening explosions of emotions. Bands such as Cocteau Twins, the solo work of Robin Guthrie, or the unique sound of Russian shoegazers are also important to us: we love Blankenberge and Pinkyshinyultrablast. The most important thing in our compositions is the atmosphere of sweet melancholy – creating a frame of imagination to which you want to come back. This is more important than formal experiments or attempts at innovation in creating sound.

4. What is your current release? Tell us about it.
At the end of October our debut EP “The Dream We Had” was released. In a way, the title speaks for itself – since we started playing together, our greatest dream was to create a musical trace, an artistic identity card that would remain with us. When we started playing together, we didn’t expect to be able to hit our music outside the circle of friends, and week after week our EP breaks through to more shoegaze fans, we often receive messages that we are bringing something fresh to the niche. It gives us a lot of satisfaction – the more that we released our album on our own, without the support of any label. Although when recording a full album – we already have the material – we would love to find a large label that would be able to understand our musical sensitivity and support us in promotion. This is our next dream.

5. Tell us something funny or shocking about the band.
Almost every time a journalist starts an interview with us, he/she asks if we liked Ari Aster’s horror movie “Midsommar” from 2019 and how much influence it had on our band. And each time I confuse my interlocutor by explaining to him/her that I have never seen this movie, I don’t like horror movies and I got to know Midsommar much earlier, during my trip to Scandinavia. Personally, Midsommar has always reminded me of the celebration that takes place at the end of Tove Jannson’s book “Finn Family Moomintroll”, where Moomins celebrate finding Moominmamma’s handbag – far from imagining that we were inspired by a horror movie.

6. What’s the best thing about being in a band?
The feeling of being completely drowned in the ocean of sound. Shoegaze and dreampop in this respect is an absolutely distinguished genre – everyone who has stood in front of the stage at least once listening to deafening and at the same time sweet walls of sound performed by Slowdive or My Bloody Valetine knows it. There is something almost mystical when the reverberated sounds of the guitars hit you with full force and you feel like you are melting into the music. Everyone should experience this at least once in their life.

7. What’s next? Are you touring?
Now we are focusing on promoting our EP “The Dream We Had” in digital media – we are extremely grateful to the editors of Big Sonic Heaven for inviting us to the interview – and planning to record a long-playing album that, as I mentioned, we would like to produce with the label: independent promotion and music distribution is very absorbing. We are not playing concerts at the moment due to temporary turnouts, but we hope that we will be able to play a small tour in the spring, as well as attend a few music festivals.

Darren Revell
Big Sonic Heaven Radio

Big Sonic Heaven is a 24/7 Internet radio station dedicated to the ethereal sounds of shoegaze, dream pop, post-punk, trip-hop, etc. Listen to the artists featured on the blog and discover more by downloading the app for iPhone and Android or listen at bigsonicheaven.com.