Plunging head-first into dramatic orchestral crescendos that build, crash, roll and overwhelm, Cave Painting are the Brighton based five-man band making moments stand still with fragile symphony.
Gently rushing vocals over echoing compositions, layered together from intermittently woven bass, electric guitar, drums, keys and percussion solos, each Cave Painting track stems from a simple but structured idea. Creating mellow vibes to indulge in of an evening, this is emotional music for deep dissection. Listening to the reverberated lyrics, any number of moving sentiments can be heard, discovered and understood. These are rubix cube tunes for dreamers. Cave painting have the ability to make you think and help you heal.
Now preparing for their first tour, the seaside based quintet are exercising military style shuttle runs to get in shape for the heavy gigging ahead. i-D online got the exclusive scoop on the band’s recently curated short film and managed to get five on it, to discuss today, tomorrow and all that comes after.
From where did the name originate? A long drawn out process of family and friends suggesting names finally came to a head by sitting late one night tired and drunk frantically typing various words that came to mind into a document which we referred back to as a bit of a final resort. Then we saw we’d written Cave Painting and we all realized we really liked it.
There’s not much info about you lot on the internet, what’s with all the mystery? I think with us being at such an early stage it’s nice to hold a few things back, you see bands hammering social network sites, which is great but it’s a fine balance. It can become pretty monotonous fairly quickly.
What’s the music scene like in Brighton right now? It’s hard to say really as we’ve been back and forth recording and writing over the past year, but there is always something happening here musically, and you can take in live music any day of the week.
Your music is very beautiful, it feels ethereal yet purposeful, what are your creative processes when piecing together a track? The creation process can vary; sometimes songs form from running an initial idea in the studio and sometimes it will be a more structured idea, Sam will work on ideas via his Mac which we will then adapt into a live piece of music.
Why have you decided to release ‘Midnight Love’ with a music video? Midnight Love will be the lead single from our E.P. so we decided it would be great to couple it with something visual. Ideas for this song had been circulating for quite some time and actually the video was inspired by the song and then the song was adapted to fit around the video. Just to be clear, we didn’t and don’t really perceive the film as a “music video” in that traditional pop sense. We wanted it to be something other than that and we hope that we achieved that.
What’s the story behind it? The film is centered around a young man who is deaf, he has vivid dreams which are more pleasant than his actual reality, I suppose this is our visual interpretation of escapism.
If you could chose any band to support in the world who would that be and why? Arcade Fire would be great, guaranteed to be an amazing show.
Tell me about the first gig you ever played together as a band? Our first gig was at the Social in London, it was really special to us, we had friends and family from all over the country turn out which made it that little bit less daunting.
What comes next for you? We head out on the tour on the 19th of September for a month, and upon our return we have the November 7th release of our first EP and then we get ready to record our album, in December and January.
Text: Milly McMahon
