By Matt Fraser

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ivy Gardens before their Oct. 24 headlining show at the Black Alley - the band was relaxed and in a great mood when I came in the door and excited for their West Coast stops. Despite being on the last legs of their tour, the guys were full of energy and happy to sit down with me. Sadly, the original recording cut off a minute into our interview, but we got ourselves together and re-recorded the interview, chalking the first round up to practice. I've done my best to properly attribute responses to the bandmates based on their voices, and I apologize if some responses are misattributed. 

Matt Fraser (interviewer): Death of Don Valley has a big tonal change from Goon. What fueled this?

Sebastian Hogg: It was a bit more of a focused and deliberate thing [that] we had in mind. Just a more consistent tone and a sound we had been working on for a long time. It took us a while as musicians to keep touring and doing shows to get the experience through what we were doing to reach that sound. But it's the first time we’ve put out a project that had this kind of consistency and a central idea from the beginning. It's a lot different from the other stuff that we’ve done.

Andrew Blackborow: The main difference is that on every other project we’ve done, it's kind of just been a collection of songs over time, and once we hit a certain quota or certain amount of time, it's like “OK, great, this is an album or an EP.” This was kind of decided that we wanted to make a certain type of album before we had all the songs finished. That's kind of why it became more consistent-sounding than the rest of the projects.

Accidental button press, so we restarted the interview…

Matt: Beamsville is geographically between Hamilton's metal and punk scenes and Niagara’s alternative scene. How did that impact your sound?

Seb: In Niagara, there is a city called St. Catharines, and a lot of the scene there is kind of indie or even pop stuff. There's some punk, but there's not really a lot of heavy music. Hamilton is like an industrial area, so there's a lot of heavy bands and lots of heavy metal stuff. I think being in between that, not really being in one particular scene more than the other is kind of how we [got] our sound. We’re not really a full-on super heavy band, but we are also not a psych rock or indie band; we kind of are in the middle of there, where we’re loud and heavy, but we have these unique textural parts to our music that you don’t normally find in metal music.

Andrew: Yeah, to name drop a Hamilton band, there's this super cool, very oppressive, deathy, doomy band called Absorb, and as heavy and consistently oppressive as that is, there's lots of death metal and really chuggy stuff in Hamilton. Experiencing all that in that scene and then going to Niagara and playing to some venue with a bunch of, like, young people, like 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds who don't really know a lot about that kind of music, and don’t really have that in their scene, that's new to them. We might seem oppressively heavy compared to anything in St. Catherines, and then in Hamilton, it's like we’re not very death or doomy like a lot of the other stuff in Hamilton, right? So it's kind of an amalgamation of both scenes. 

Touring and going on the road is sort of the same thing, but on a larger scale. You're just seeing all these different little scenes and different little bands. So we get to see how they do things as musicians and artists, and that broadens your perspective. Having multiple scenes that you're active in means you see a lot more people doing a lot more things, and it just broadens our perspective as a band.

Matt: You guys have put people on to Absorb, and in some interviews, you've talked about “Desert Cruiser” by Truckfighters. Any other shout-outs come to mind?

Seb: The biggest thing nowadays for us is a lot of the early 70’s prog music. Bands like Yes, and we [Ivy Gardens] worship Rush. But [our] current most influential band, especially for the next project, is a band like King Crimson. It's a little more on the jazz side, a little more dynamic. It isn’t necessarily riff-based - more so, the overall tone of the song is what I think they are trying to capture. I think that's a bit more complex than most of the other prog bands, and I think we want to get there. As musicians, it would be cool to get there and really put in some intricate parts, some very complicated parts. We still listen to doom metal and stuff, so we keep it heavy and fun to listen to, but do some more complex stuff with it. 

Joe: We are aiming for a mash-up of Iron Monkey and King Crimson, that’s the next album sound.

All: YEAH!

Seb: It's like the ambition and compositional stuff of that kind of prog stuff, like King Crimson. Every King Crimson record is totally different than the last one. That kind of evolution, and not doing the same thing for too long, that's kind of ideologically what we are hoping to do and trying to accomplish as we progress and develop as a band. 

Most of our best stuff is like an amalgamation of that weird technical, intricate stuff, and then just absolute caveman pummeling. We’re somewhere with that mixed together, and that makes instrumentally dense music that still has something heavy and hard-hitting but simple at its core that people can get sucked into.

Matt: You guys have been playing together for a while. What kind of changes have you guys seen in the genre/scene/movement?

Seb: We have been playing together so long that there are loads of bands that we met and watched years ago that just don’t exist. Like, there are bands that we saw with similarly weird, plywood constructions in the backs of their vans that they would take down across the border or across the country, and a lot of those bands just don’t exist anymore. It's kind of interesting to see how people move around, scenes change, bands dissipate, but usually where there is a will, there's a way. Usually, there's some kind of an old guard that's left that knows kind of how things work from a bygone era of bands that don’t exist. That's kind of how we got into touring, we had friends who were there and kind of helped us get involved with our own DIY endeavours. 

Matt: On the topic of DIY, if you had to give tips to our younger selves or other bands, what would you say?

Seb: The biggest thing is that we learned to give ourselves as much time as possible to organize things with shows, recording, and writing. We make our own videos and we plan our own tours. If you give yourself as much time as you possibly can to accomplish a certain task, the more likely that it will be successful. Another thing is being willing to collaborate with people, cause you're never gonna be the first person to be doing something. So if you can find people who have really good advice and can help you on the way, that's really important. When you actually go out and have these experiences, or you do these things and people ask about it, if there are other musicians or bands that are trying to accomplish things in a DIY manner, doing your best to give them the best advice from your experience so that you kind of carry on this trend of passing on the information to the next band because to create any type of music community, especially the DIY stuff, it's kind of just on you to pass on any of that information. 

Andrew: It's a collaborative thing. You gotta collaborate with other musicians who are doing stuff, and that takes it from being just you to being a community and an actual music scene. Like a tight scene in a city, or a broader scene like the southern Ontario scene. We have friends in bands that are scattered across Ontario, and they see what we’re doing and say “oh that's really cool” and they want to get into it, so we tell them, “you gotta go here, you gotta go there, don’t go here, don’t go there” and it kind of builds out of that. 

Inherently, the DIY spirit is a collaborative thing, because if all of this information you’ve learned as a musician doing this yourself as an independent artist just dies with you, that's not good for the broader scene and community. It’s kind of like a tradition, people have done this before you, people will do it after you, right? You gotta do your thing, figure out your thing, see what other people are doing, and emulate that in the way that you want and the way that feels right for you, and pass on that knowledge to other people you see trying to do the same thing. People who were in your place several years ago, when you didn’t know what to do, but now you do. You see some other young band that wants to get into that, and it's kind of your responsibility to pass the torch and spread the knowledge around and help other bands the way some other band probably helped you out, so you could accomplish that.

Seb: There is gonna be an expectation of failure. You are going to release music no one listens to, you are going to play shows no one shows up to, you're gonna play with bands that are assholes, you're gonna make money, and you're gonna lose money. The expectation has to be that no matter how negative an experience is, it can’t deter you from your goal. You have to kind of push through failure when you're doing things by yourself. Just like in our own little collective unit, which has very little experience, and it's just inevitable that things are going to go wrong, and you have to just kind of accept that and move on from it and not let it ruin the entire thing that you are trying to do and not let it spiral out from that.

Andrew: If you're gonna be a band and you're gonna do it DIY, you really just need the drive to actually do it. This tour is coming to an end; it's probably about a month off from being a full year from being in the making. It's a long process that takes a lot of effort, and you just have to really want to do it. 

Matt: With that, what are the first things you guys are gonna do when you get off the tour?

All laugh.

Seb: LAUNDRY! Maybe that won’t be the first thing. Once I get home, I’m gonna have the longest, hottest shower imaginable. I’m going to try and sleep as long as humanely possible. I’m gonna go see my beautiful wife, we’ll have a delicious meal, I’m sure it's gonna be 7-Eleven slurpees, a million taquitos, a bag of Doritos and then immediately go back to work to pay off all my debts! 

Andrew: Pretty much! Laundry, shower, sleep, and go work off some of my debt!

Jon: I got a lot of Warhammer minis to paint! I got a lot of Warhammer! In terms of what the band will do, we do have a lot of shows lined up in December already. They are Legion shows, one of them is like a charity show, we are kind of gonna give ourselves November to just relax. Despite the amount of time and effort we put into this album and tour, we still have that drive, even if it's at a minimal level, to continue working on stuff.

Seb: Yeah, we are gonna do a lot of local stuff. We’ve done a lot of big tours, as a band and in general, and usually our biggest shows locally are the Legion shows and stuff like that, but we want to really kind of put what we can into our local scene. We’ve seen some local bands that are really neat and heavier in the broader Niagara area. We just kind of want to focus on some local stuff and bolster that to the point where there's more stuff going on, and there's just kind of a healthier scene going on in general since we’ve done so much stuff all over the country.

Matt: Final question, you guys have name-dropped Neil Young a bunch in other interviews, the people need to know if you’ve heard from him yet!

Seb: No! We haven’t heard from Neil Young. But amazingly, I began a misinformation campaign saying that the band started in a Princess Auto parking lot and, shockingly, Princess Auto followed us on Instagram! We can’t mention them on Instagram; they don’t have mentions on, they haven’t messaged us, they haven’t done anything, but like, we’re out there taking photos of the vans' bodywork and trying to tag them, and they won’t say anything at all. But you know, they follow us! And that's our greatest claim to fame. 

Andrew: I can’t imagine Neil Young would be a fan of us at all, as much as we love him, and we constantly listen to his music, and it's always on while we are on the road. I respect him so much, but I can’t imagine he’d listen to anything we put out and be like “this is tight!”

When it was all said and done, the band was happy to share their thoughts on the music scene, their future and pass on tips to other up-and-comers. Keep your eyes open for a show near you and your ears open for their next project!

Ivy Gardens is Joe Zandwyk (drums), Sebastian Hogg (keys) and Andrew Blackborow (guitar.)
Find all of their stuff online at https://linktr.ee/ivygardensband!