‘The Eighth Note’ is 8 quick Questions with Wellington Musicians.

A chance for us to catch up with people & see what they’re up to, or introduce you to a new musician/band and their music.

Today’s guest is Lochie from Transistor.

Who are you? Tell us a bit about your music:
I’m Lochie from Wellington band Transistor, in a live setting we’re a 3 piece, but on the recordings it’s just me doing all the sounds and stuff. The music varies from louder psychedelic rock, to more atmospheric and dreamier pieces, I try to get a good blend of both usually, that sort of thing excites me the most, all the different dynamics within a song, or album.

What have you been working on lately? Any new tracks or albums on the way?
Yeah definitely! Over the past year I’ve been working on a new 5 track EP, which will be out on the 21st, this Friday. It’s called ‘Soft Burning Silver’, and I guess it reflects more of our calmer, dreamier side to a degree. I like to think of it as the sort of ‘inverse’ to our self-titled EP, which focused on the abrasive side. The single (All You Remember and Waiting To BeFree) to the EP that we put out at the start of the month, are the lighter songs out of the bunch, the rest being darker in general. We’re very excited to put it out, it reflects where I’m at now and where I want to head with our next lot of songs better, compared to our older material. The next thing I’ll do is a full length album, hopefully mid-next year.

Where is the best place people can follow you & find your music?
I put all of our releases onto Bandcamp, that’s probably the best place to listen to it and all, we also have a Youtube channel and a Soundcloud account, nothing through Apple or Spotify yet. Social media-wise, I’m generally up to date on Facebook and Instagram, though I tend to get kind of slack with all of that.

What were the 3 most influential albums to you growing up?
There’s tons of albums that mean a lot to me and have impacted the way I approach my own music greatly, artists like Todd Rundgren, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, Ariel Pink and heaps more.
Syd Barrett’s ‘The Madcap Laughs’ is an important one, he’s one of my biggest musical heroes in many ways, especially the interesting approach to songwriting and guitar playing, with his first solo album being such an intimate look into his headspace at that point in time, with great diversity. It also nearly falls off the rails during the second side of the record, which is just amazing to listen to.

‘There’s A Riot Goin’ On’, by Sly and the Family Stone is another huge album for me. It opened up a lot of different musical avenues personally, such an emotional album, being made during a breaking point in the band’s history, and you can hear the sadness buried within Sly’s amazing muddy production, as well as the vocals. It was also basically commercial suicide for them at that time, being the full length follow up to their Stand album, as well as the amazing Woodstock gig. It’s such a complete work of art though.
For a third album, I’d have to go with any Bob Dylan album really, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is damn amazing though. It showcases his dynamics perfectly, and ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ is one of the most powerful pieces ever. Dylan also inspired me to start singing, he gets an incredible amount of slack for his voice, which I think is totally unwarranted. His raw emotion moves me just as much as Brian Wilson’s or Bjork’s. I like to think of him as one of the first ‘punk’ rockers, which is mainly due to this album really.

Which other Wellington musician(s) would you most like to work with?
Wellington’s got such an incredible scene, so many great artists and people around, heaps and heaps of quality. One band that we’ve played with a few times that I completely adore are Moon Lander, their album last year blew me away, the songwriting is a perfect blend of that Beatles-esque approach and originality. I believe that Anthony wrote and recorded the bulk of it himself too, which is bloody awesome.

What’s your favourite Wellington venue to play in?
Again, like the tons of quality artists around, the venues are equally as great. San Fran is surreal to play in though, we played a show there just the other day with Sloth Moth, but the last time I was there before that was at the King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard show, which is completely insane knowing that you’ve played in the same place and all. Caroline’s also
really really great. It’s really sad that Bodega’s gone though, that place was the best venue, the best people working there too.

In your songwriting or composing (or the band’s songwriting) how do the compositions and songs take shape?
Each song is created differently really, one thing that I was never that good at though was say sitting down with an acoustic guitar and writing a song like that. The songs and the recordings are usually created simultaneously, I like to view them as one whole thing. For the first EP there were basically no demos, the finished versions are the drafts that evolved each day with me adding more and more to them. With this new EP though there were separate demos for each song, so I definitely feel like I’ve gotten better at developing and fine tuning my output better. What tends to spark my creativity first though is a drum beat, so when writing a song, I’ll hop on the drums and record a few bars of some stuff that I’ve had in my head for a while, then add a bassline or guitar melody and go off that. One song on Soft Burning Silver that stands out to me though is the third track, Painted Game, nearly the whole of that song was created and developed in my head over a few days, before I actually sat down and recorded all the sections, which was a really fun and natural way of doing things.

Where/when is your next gig?
Our next gig is this Saturday night (7:30pm) on the Wellington waterfront, as apart of The Performance Arcade festival. It’s going to be bloody amazing, it’s over two weekends and there’s a ton of great local artists playing. The whole set up they’ve got going on there is insane too, we’re really looking forward to it. We’ll be playing some new stuff and some things we haven’t tried out before, I think it’ll be our longest set yet.