TOPOGRAPHIES

[ Interview with Gray Tolhurst from Topographies by Diego Centurión. ]

TOPOGRAPHIES: THEY WRITE THEIR OWN STORY

At the level of new bands that introduce sounds that mix post punk with dream pop and coldwave with darkwave in recent years, I've been following Topographies for a long time. Although the band promises their debut album “Ideal Forms”, for this December 5, they already have some singles and EPs to their credit. We were lucky enough to contact Gary Tolhurst and we were able to ask him these questions...

Hi Gary, thank you for agreeing to answer these questions.

And to begin with, I can't stop thinking about your parents. And although I have many questions in this regard, I will try to ask just a few because I am interested in Topographies and their current affairs.

First of all I would like you to tell us how are you, as a band, living this madness called Covid 19.

We’re dealing with Covid-19 as best we can with the conflicting narratives going on in the US. We live in San Francisco which locked down early and thoroughly and we’ve been lucky to have lower rates of cases and deaths. That being said, it has changed a lot. Our spring tour this year was cancelled and we haven’t been able to play as a band since March. Early in the quarantine, we made an EP called Not My Loneliness, But Ours remotely by sending files back and forth and recording parts in our bedrooms and home studios. The EP itself was a meditation on the collective aloneness of humanity, how maybe our main unifying feature is this essential loneliness of being. Perhaps, this loneliness was revealed more starkly by the pandemic and ensuing isolation that many experienced.

We know that during your adolescence you have escaped into the shadow of your parents. I've read this and you've avoided The Cure. But I can't stop thinking about Lol, your father, and what I would like to know is if you have read "Cured" and if you recognize your father in the chapters?

Yes, I avoided the influence of The Cure as best I could earlier in my life. That’s not to say I wasn’t aware of the band or the influence they had on others. I grew up with many of the stories in “Cured” being family stories and I read the book several times, from it’s incubation. I studied poetry and writing in college and edited literary magazines, so my father asked me to do an initial pass on his manuscript for “Cured”. My father is a very open, transparent man. Nothing was revealed in the book that he had not already told me though perhaps some emotions were revealed in more depth.

I was with the two of them in Buenos Aires on the book tour, and I shared a few minutes alone with the two of them at the hotel and we talked about Topographies, Cindy had been surprised to meet the band. What do you find in your way of composing that you think you have learned from them? I think mostly of Levinhurst.

Hmm, that’s a difficult question. I think that I have had to learn songwriting and composition more or less on my own but I did grow up with a love for new tools and the utilization of technology. I’m more of an antiquarian than my father, who is always looking for the newest synth or software. I think that may be a generational thing. I see a lot of value in tools that are older and idiosyncratic, even difficult or flawed. He taught me the inspiration that a new sound source can bring but also about

seriously delving in to learn how to use each tool. I think songwriting is more intuitive and probably like writing in general is difficult to teach.

There is no doubt that the sound of Topographies is related to The Cure, I would say that from the EPs "Difference & Repetition" and "Not My Loneliness, But Ours" you can hear sounds of "Faith" and I even find sounds from the Presence project of your father. Obviously the sound flows naturally and I feel that sonic connection with your dad. Do you think the same?

Yes I think that some of the sounds and moods are inspired by my rather late listening to the first four albums of The Cure. I listened to them after we had started Topographies in early 2018. Before that I had only heard what was played on the radio. I still have not heard Presence. I was very inspired by the starkness and coldness of Faith and the structure of songs like “All Cats Are Grey” where there’s no chorus/verse thing going on, just a forward linear movement.

Beyond the inheritance received, Topographies achieves its own identity. Do you think you have found the way to go with the band?

I think we have set some sort of course forward. I think there’s maybe a colloquial understanding of bands as coming out fully formed but there’s a lot of things that have to happen to “arrive” at any cohesive aesthetic. We definitely started off understanding we were inspired by post-punk, coldwave, shoegaze, etc. but within even those fairly limited genres are about a million directions you could go. I think that through playing and trying different sounds we have arrived with Ideal Form at something that melds our influences and our experiences into a sound that is “ours”.

Speaking of Topographies. Tell us how this project was born?

Topographies was started in late 2017 in San Francisco. I met Jeremie Ruest through a band we were both playing in. I was asked to substitute on bass for a friend who couldn’t make a short tour and we went out to Treefort Music Festival in Boise, Idaho. We played our show and began comparing lists for what bands we wanted to check out. Jeremie and I had pretty much the same list so we spent the festival together. I really loved his guitar playing and we made plans to make some music when we returned. We said, “let’s do an ambient noise guitar band” but of course after about 20 minutes he asked if I had any songs. I showed him a demo of “Pink Thoughts” and we were off. We recruited Justin and our former drummer Lauren and began rehearsing and planning for recordings. Our first show as a My Bloody Valentine tribute night in LA at the Echoplex and it was just a better show than I had ever really played. I knew it was going to work.

Going back to these two EPs from this year, the sound of Topographies has become much more emotional and more ethereal. Has this year of quarantine served to write a lot of material?

Quarantine initially prompted some material because I was unemployed and looked on it as a sort of “artist’s residency “ ! As it continued, the emotions began to sort of dry up. Now I am going inward trying to envision a postpandemic world, what that might feel like. I’m looking towards what it means to be together, to be a community. I’m done with loneliness as a subject for now. I guess the quarantine prompted a fair amount of introspection and I think that's been the most valuable work. Songs come from experience in the world split through the prism of the self.

The first album "Ideal Forms" is coming. Tell us about the song writing process.

They will release the album under the label "Funeral Party Records" (whimsically I make

another relationship with "Faith"). How is the album pre-sale turning out?

We wrote Ideal Form pre-pandemic in Summer 2019 and recorded in November 2019 finishing the album up just as quarantine kicked off. After our 2019 tour, our drummer Lauren Grubb left to move to New York and we debated finding a new drummer but none that we auditioned felt correct so we decided to move in a different direction with more drum machines and synths. It was a sort of electronic production crash course writing these songs! We put them together piece by piece in our home studio at my house at the time, which was a 24 member artist’s collective housed in an old convent. So perhaps they’re imbued with that sort of somber, Catholic vibe a bit! I think the songs were a lot more fleshed out by the time we got to the studio than our other recordings which was helpful. We just sort of took on the challenge of doing a record and followed it. I think the songs trace a lot of the process of growth that I felt in 2019 thats continued into 2020. A reaching for a meaningful life. They’re born out of an uncertainty, a questioning if there’s an ideal way to live one’s life. Working with Funeral Party is great, we had wanted to work with them from almost the very beginning of the band. Pre-orders are great, Brian Cole (of

Funeral Party) really hustles and promotes his releases. We’re very excited.

How was the recording? And the Covid has delayed any process of the album? Recording was great, we worked with Chris King (of LA band Cold Showers) and the process was very smooth and creative. He’s a great engineer/producer and just very intuitive and dedicated. So far, Covid has not caused any disruptions to the album, besides of course that we can’t really tour to support it but alas.

The band is new, what is it like for a new band to work in this pandemic? Do you work hard so that the material is disseminated in different media? Did this time of confinement help you in any way to work harder to become a press?

I think we’ve gotten better at using the internet to promote our music especially without shows. I still have only a tangential understanding of instagram haha! But it has allowed us to tap into a worldwide community of bands and fans interested in the type of music we make which has been amazing. It’s all so geographically disparate that it was already kind of a remote community.

To finish this interview and waiting for the album in December, they have released two songs as a preview, "Rose of Sharon" and "See You As You Fall", tell us about these songs and if we will soon hear other songs before the departure from “Ideal Forms”.

Yes, we have one more single coming just before the record is released December 4th. I’ll keep that one under wraps for now! “Rose of Sharon” was written last. We have this tendency to switch up one song at the last minute for any recording project we do. The “rose of Sharon” is a biblical flower, a flower that blooms on the desert. The phrase just popped in my head, I had to research it to see what it meant. I write lyrics intuitively with snippets I collect over time in notebooks. To me the image of the rose of Sharon is one of goodness appearing in a time or place of ethical bankruptcy. Of living, despite.

“See You As You Fall” was written by our guitarist Jeremie Ruest and just sounded like, in the words of our inimitable label head Brian Cole, a “bop”. The lyrics ponder the difficulty of knowing another while being in a continuous process of becoming oneself. That's perhaps an extension of the thoughts of our EP.

I hope these songs will make sense in the context of the full LP. I’m really engaged in the idea of the album as a complete form. But the sounds/themes contained in these two tracks, of spiritual yearning and growth, are present throughout the entirety of Ideal Form. I hope the album functions as music/art has functioned for me as not an escape but a further grounding in the world, a coloring of the mundane that illuminates hidden truths.

Now, thanking you for the time you have taken to answer these questions and waiting for the album, in which we will surely communicate with you again, you close the interview by saying something to our readers.

Thank you to everyone who’s listened or will listen to our music, it is made real by your engagement with it and I hope it provides some joy or beauty to your world. You can preorder the record from Funeral Party here: https://www.thefuneralparty.com/new-products/topographies-ideal-form-lp

Hope that works! Let me know if you need anything else.

Thank You Gray! Thanks, Gray