by Chris Liberato (@chrisliberato22)
On their third full-length and what feels like their magnum opus, New Zealand psych-poppers Wurld Series pick up right where they left off: in the land of the giants. The Giant’s Lawn, the winding, cryptic follow-up to 2021’s What’s Growing, has the look and feel of a concept album even if bandleader Luke Towart thinks of it a bit differently: “I wouldn't say it’s a concept album, but the way I placed the songs together and how they reflect off one another was definitely inspired by the idea of a fractured narrative.”
The album’s title is a nod to The Giant's House, a public mosaic garden about an hour and a half southeast of the band’s home of Christchurch. “The idea of large public gardens is interesting to me,” explains Towart. “They often have overarching reference points or motifs.... a kind of narrative that's hinted at but not spelled out. Clearings with hidden meanings and paths. I think that’s how I see the overarching concept of The Giant's Lawn.”
For the album’s sound, Towart and bandmates (Brian Feary, Ben Dodds, and Ben Woods) filter influences including Guided by Voices, Jim O’Rourke, and Robert Wyatt through a DIY lens that’s uniquely their own, balancing Towart’s sturdy songcraft with pensive, pastoral experimentation. I caught up with Towart via email recently to discuss these and other influences on the band’s sound, and to talk all things The Giants Lawn.
Chris Liberato: Starting from the beginning, tell me about your early musical experiences. Did you grow up in a musical family? Did you always want to play music?
Luke Towart: The earliest musical experience I can remember was watching that old cartoon version of Peter and The Wolf on VHS repeatedly. The one where all the characters are represented by different parts of the orchestra. The clarinet for the cat, oboe for the duck and so on. I also loved singing hymns at school. On the last song of the new album [“The Cloven Stone”], we have a reference to one of the hymns we would sing at school assembly, “When I Needed a Neighbour” by the English folk singer and poet Sydney Bertram Carter.
My family wasn't musical but my mum always wanted me and my sister to try out playing music so we both learned guitar at an early age. I eventually moved on to playing bass in bands. I went back to guitar when I started writing my own songs.
CL: Is there a band/person/event that was especially formative for you?
LT: I grew up in a quiet, rural area of northern England so I didn't get exposed to much decent live music until I moved to Manchester to go to university. Luckily there was a pretty active DIY music scene at the time so playing and going to shows there around 2009-2011 introduced me to a lot of new music and ideas. Prior to that I had visited New Zealand and got to see a vibrant and youthful scene there. I met people I would go on to play music with including Brian [Feary] who is in Wurld Series.
CL: What did you study at university?
LT: I studied Film and Media at Manchester Metropolitan. You could choose if you wanted to be more practical or do the history and theory. I just wanted to watch lots of films so I went with the latter. I got into it enough to want to carry on and ended up doing a Masters in Cinema Studies when I moved to New Zealand. I still watch a lot of movies. I recently watched Penda’s Fen for the first time. A BBC television film from the 70s about a schoolboy having a mind meld with the ghost of an Anglo-Saxon Pagan King on the Malvern Hills.
CL: What brought you to New Zealand for that initial visit? What made you decide to move there?
LT: My dad and his side of the family are from here so I’ve always visited but that one [visit] between school and university was significant because of its length and how I was old enough to realise that I liked living here more than the UK. Then again I’ll be watching something like Penda’s Fen and miss England.
CL: Let’s talk about the new record because it’s been living on my car stereo for the past couple of weeks! It has a softer, more relaxed feel to it than What’s Growing? What would you say this is a result of?
LT: Just further embracing that I enjoy playing quiet, dynamic music or at least wanting a contrast with the louder stuff. There’s more room to put in other ideas and sounds when you’re not firing on all cylinders. The other three musicians in Wurld Series, Ben Woods, Brian Feary, and Ben Dodd also have lots of ideas and contributions in their playing so I wanted to create space for them too.
CL: The second half of the album has six songs over the three-minute mark, which is a bit of a change for Wurld Series. Did you make a conscious decision to write longer songs?
LT: Yeah, I love writing short songs but I think you have to realise when it's becoming a crutch or the easy way out. Workshopping a lot of the songs as a live band definitely helps to stretch them out... or having lyrical ideas you want to explore in more than one verse. Both of those things were behind the songs getting a bit longer.
CL: Tell me about the concept behind the album. I’m getting an Alice In Wonderland vibe from the cover art. Is it a concept album? Is the giant in the album title related to the giants in “Eighteenth Giant Brother”?
LT: I wouldn't say it’s a concept album but the way I placed the songs together and how they reflect off one another was definitely inspired by the idea of a fractured narrative. The cover art is by a Christchurch artist called Priscilla Howe and we had a talk beforehand about the album and visual influences. They immediately picked up on the title being a reference to The Giant's House in Akaroa which is a mosaic garden created by an artist called Josie Martin. The idea of large public gardens is interesting to me. They often have overarching reference points or motifs.... a kind of narrative that's hinted at but not spelled out. Clearings with hidden meanings and paths. I think that’s how I see the overarching concept of The Giant's Lawn. Alice in Wonderland is a good comparison. I wanted to create a similar sense of disorientation and the uncanny. I read somewhere once that truly psychedelic music often has to do with childhood and mourning the loss of imagination, wonder and innocence that comes with growing up. There’s something of that concept weaved throughout the record too. With regards to the Giant, I think of him as a guardian or keeper of the garden space and lawn. Welcoming but watchful. I can't say much about his relation to the previous album, only that sometimes ideas spill into the next thing when I feel like I'm not finished with them.
CL: What is “Lord of Shelves” about? It references King Billy Island, which I gather is an island in Lyttelton harbor. Do you have a personal connection to the island? Who or what is the Lord of Shelves?
LT: King Billy Island! It's a very small island between the larger island of Ōtamahua / Quail Island and the Banks Peninsula mainland. Its Māori name is Auha. I used to be able to see it from my living room window when I lived in Ōtomiro / Governors Bay a few years back and it always stood out. An inhospitable-looking dot covered in barren trees between two big landmasses. It's so small and uninhabitable looking that I began to think about what it would be like to live there and that's where the lyric came from. The history of its close neighbour Ōtamahua is interesting. It was an influenza quarantine station and then a leprosy colony in the 1900s. I think that history coupled with a neighbouring island that is so small but noticeable made it jump into my mind when I was writing the song. A sense of fantastical loneliness I suppose. As for the “Lord of Shelves”... I'm a Librarian so there's probably a connection there.
CL: What about “A Private Life”? That’s such a great track. How did that one come together? I understand it contains a mix of field recordings that you and Brian captured…
LT: Thanks! The frog noises were recorded by me halfway up a track in The Port Hills at dusk and Brian recorded the sound of cats yowling at night outside the house we both lived in at the time. I had the guitar part and for a reason that’s unknown to me I wanted the sound of frogs underneath, so it’s handy I found a pond full of them chirping away. It all feels quite solitary so I called it “A Private Life.” I see it as part of a tradition of instrumental pieces we have on our records. I guess it’s sort of a sound collage. The guitar is quite influenced by Jim O’Rourke, especially his album Bad Timing.
CL: You mentioned in an email that it took two years to finish The Giant’s Lawn. Tell me about the process of making the record and why it took this long. It looks like it was recorded in multiple locations…
LT: Most of the full band songs were recorded in 2021 over a few days at Sublime Studios in rural Otago, a few hour’s drive from Christchurch. Songs like “Lord of Shelves” and “Rearing Wesley” were pretty much rehearsed and ready to go. It was a different experience to what we usually do, which is just to record at our practice space/storage unit. A bit more rushed but productive. The rest was done at our practice space in Christchurch or in Brian's garage where we could take our time, think and explore a bit more. Two years is about the standard time for us as we all work full time and do music slow and steady.
CL: What about the songs themselves – how long of a period of time were they written over? Do you tend to write songs regularly or in spurts? Did any older songs that you’ve had sitting around for a while make it onto this record?
LT: I definitely write in spurts. Quite a few of the songs were written during a period in 2020/21 when me, Ben Woods and Ben Dodd played a few low-key gigs under the name Hob, a name I’ve used in the past for solo sets. There’s even a slower demo-ey version that me and Ben Woods did of “Friend to Man and Traffic” on this compilation from 2020. They were kind of primordial soup versions of the songs… looser and jammier. When I decided to put them on the next Wurld Series album and we recorded them with Brian they mostly changed into something else entirely.
With the other ones they just came along in dribs and drabs. I don’t really work at writing music regularly. I just make sure I’m ready when songs arrive in my head. With a lot of these ones, the titles came first and the song quickly after.
CL: What were your influences on this record? Did you have any specific reference points in mind for the album’s sound?
LT: The previous record What's Growing was important for Wurld Series as I realised I could combine both full band recordings and the more folk-orientated stuff cohesively. The idea with The Giant’s Lawn was to push that dichotomy further. Influences are numerous but I would say discovering the music of Robert Wyatt a few years ago definitely had an impact. Guided by Voices hangs heavy as always but more particularly their songwriting values and how bands like Genesis informed them and were filtered through their own unique sensibility. I'm always wanting to do the same thing with my own influences through Wurld Series. I made a playlist on Spotify that goes a wee way to showing the kind of music I was listening to when we made The Giant's Lawn.
In terms of books and lyrical influences, I read the four-volume Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe during the early phase of writing for this record. A tome of mystical science fiction fantasy. That reading experience coupled with a breakup I was going through at the time probably had a strange effect on the lyrical content of the album. I was watching and becoming obsessed with the intricate weirdness of 90’s Star Trek in that period also. Deep Space Nine gets pretty New Age.
CL: The Giant’s Lawn is a pretty ambitious album. Any thoughts on where you might like to take Wurld Series from here?
LT: I’m not sure but I think we deserve to do an EP after this one!
CL: What do your touring plans look like? Any plans to play outside of New Zealand?
LT: Definitely more shows around New Zealand next year. I’d love to play overseas. Australia, Europe, America… Not necessarily in that order!