Chasing The Silent Era: An Interview with Chris Schwarten
The Silent Era have a lot to offer and are quickly rising to make their music known across the UK! From L-R: Chris Schwarten, Jo Eiffes, Nicolas Zappa and Bri Macanas. All photos provided by Chris from The Silent Era.
While in London at the end of March, I caught up with legendary Australian, Chris Schwarten, who is the guitarist in London-based four-piece, shoe-gazey, alternative-rock band, The Silent Era.
We spoke about how different the music scene is between England and New Zealand (Chris has been involved in the Auckland music scene previously), what animal he would liken the band’s music to and the long process of recording.
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I’m here with Chris from The Silent Era, hello!
Chris: Hello!
Thank you so much for coming on Welcome to the Gig, it’s awesome to meet you.
Chris: Thank you so much for coming down on this lovely day in Kings Cross.
How’s your day going?
Chris: It’s good, good, I’ve just been working most of the day which is fine, you’ve got to do something to pay the bills.
As I mentioned, you’re from The Silent Era. Tell me about the band a little bit, what’s your background, how long have you been going for?
Chris: We’re an alternative rock four-piece, we’ve only really been together for the last two years, but the core of the band has been playing together for at least four years now on different projects. We’ve had at least two bands that we’ve been in prior that have fallen apart or have changed line-ups, then we’ve ended up with what we’ve got now, which is a little bit shoe-gazey, a little bit goth-rock… We’ve also got a really powerful female vocalist up front, which is kind of not really common for either of those genres.
I noticed that when I first listened to your single that, oh, you’ve got a female vocalist! That’s so cool. I love the diversity that you guys have.
Chris: That was one of the awesome things to me, I wanted to do something with a female vocalist, especially if we were doing something heavy and sometimes the guitars can get so noisy that they’re almost like white noise at times, so I wanted to juxtapose that with something really strongly melodically and I think that when you’ve got something really heavy, not that I think we are really that heavy, but when you’ve got something and you put a strong melody in and strong vocal on top of that, I think that’s when you can get interesting results. Which is what we’re trying to do.
I think you’ve achieved that with the first single that you’ve got out. Speaking of your first single, Heavy Cure, was released mid-January, tell me about the process around recording and writing, how did it all come together?
Chris: We started working on that song just after - in the middle of our worst lockdown - basically, our previous band, we’d just started recording an album and our singer decided he didn’t want to do it anymore and we basically didn’t know what to do with ourselves and we had recorded all this music and we couldn’t really do anything [with it]. We just decided because we couldn’t go out, we couldn’t see anybody, we had our rehearsal room, we could technically go and play in, so we decided, “okay, that’s within the rules, so let’s go down and just play music for fun” and we just started working on the songs together on our own, just the three of us and that was the first song that we starting working on. Our bass player, Nick, just demoed it up and bought it in and we got it out. That’s what it was. It was just an instrumental for a year or something while we were looking for singers and there were about four or five different singers until Bri reached out to us one day and said “hey, do you want to a female vocalist?” and it was like, “yes, that’s what we were looking for!”
Amazing, so it all came together quite well.
Chris: Yeah, it came together, but it took quite a long time. We recorded it last August and we’ve only just got to putting it out now.
Good things take time and you hear that with a lot of bands that they record something a year or two prior whichever and it doesn’t come out for ages.
Chris: Yeah, I never wanted to be one of those bands. Our other singles, we were hoping they would have been out last month [February 2023] and we only just got around to doing that now and they were recorded at the same time [as Heavy Cure], but everything takes longer with us.
Do you have someone who mixes and masters all of your work for you?
Chris: So, our bass player has been mixing our ones for this. He’s got a background in sound engineering, he’s a real whizz with the studio stuff. We recorded the next single in a studio in Brighton called Small Pond. We also recorded extra parts in his studio at home. We kind of recorded all over the place. I think that’s something we will probably do a bit more of, as well.
So, you’ve got bits of stories from different parts of England where you’ve recorded them, which is pretty awesome.
Chris: We’re probably going back to Brighton, it’s a pretty cool recording studio at the Small Pond. I had a really cool amp set-up for that, my amp was about £4,000 and I recorded about 100 guitar tracks. It was good to have that time to actually do that. I’ve done recording sessions in Reading and a couple of ones in London studios and some engineers aren’t that keen for you to take your time, essentially.
What was the inspiration behind going for the genre of music you make?
Chris: It kind of happened very naturally, it was more because of what we listen to, I guess. Nick and I, the first band we started doing, was this really experimental kind of industrial doom band. It kind of carried on from that. Him and I have quite a crossover in our musical taste, we’re both massive fans of Nine Inch Nails and Deftones, so those are the two big ones that come through, also The Cure. I mean, there’s probably 100 different bands that we’ll talk about at different times. Sometimes it’s The Cure, sometimes it’s Rage Against the Machine. It kind of varies. When we do our demos, I think, sometimes we’ll even call one song The Queens of the Stone Age song or something like that because it’s got a riff that’s like that, or that’s the Tool song, or that’s that. Nick used to do this thing where he would name his songs after cheesy things from the 60s and he has had some where Bri has taken inspiration from that and the lyrics end up in the choruses. I won’t tell you what they are, but you’ll hear them in good time. They come from all over the place.
I hear you’ve got a gig coming up at The Finsbury on the 15th April (editor note: for context, this interview took place back in March), what can anyone who hasn’t been to any of your live performances expect from that show?
Chris: It will be loud.
Maybe bring earplugs?
Chris: Definitely bring earplugs. You will end up with tinnitus if you don’t. Other than that, it’s kind of… We just sort of, rip through our set. We have a lot of songs to play and we just get through them basically, but we always have a curated set and we always try to have our visuals. We have a visuals guy who has done visuals for all of our songs. Everything transitions to another, so there’s basically one break in the show where we say “we’re The Silent Era, thanks for coming out” otherwise, we’re just going through it, which is good in some ways and bad in other ways because you sometimes find yourself changing guitars and going, “okay, alright. We’re coming with the next one.” But anyway, it’s good fun, but it’s a very fast 40-minutes or so.
If you’re non-stop, how do you deal with that?
Chris: It’s ah… It’s not too bad. It’s just because we rehearse it that way. We’ve got twelve songs or something to choose from and we change our setlist every time we play. We always plan that out before, so I guess it’s just a case of being prepared and knowing we’ve got cues to go with.
Is there a particular song you like to open with or close with? I know you did say it changes every time…
Chris: Yeah, we always close with Scorpio, which is our next single, so that kind of always ends up being the last one because it’s the highest energy one. We started opening with a brand new one… The single, we’re going to have an A side and a B side and the B side is going to be a cover of Mazzy Star’s ‘Into Dust’ and we like to open with that. That’s a standard opener and we don’t always open with it, but the reason we do that is because it starts off very soft and melodic and it stops people from talking over the top of us when we start playing. It’s kind of a good way of getting everyone to shoosh each other and getting everyone to pay attention.
I would love to be at one of your shows eventually, but of course, I don’t live in London.
Chris: Unfortunately, our drummer left last month, so we would have had a show lined up this month, because we tend to play three times a month. Next month, we were supposed to be playing four times, but things got in the way of that, as well. We are currently trying to get a drummer, our new drummer, up to show status. Unfortunately, the Finsbury’s the next one. It feels like it’s been ages since we played a gig, so we feel like we don’t remember how to do it.
I guess you’d miss it, when you haven’t played a gig in a while?
Chris: I didn’t think I would. I used to dread doing gigs and now I’ve gotten quite used to doing it. I start getting a bit, not antsy, but whenever I go and see a band, I’m always like “ah, I wish it was gig night tonight.” Hopefully we’ll get to go on a bit of a run after I come back from New Zealand. One thing we sort of started doing last year was playing outside of London. It’s very boring, but there’s regulations that you can’t play in London too often. Promoters don’t want you to play within two or three weeks of a gig because they want to ensure they get a good crowd for their gig. So, we started looking out and playing gigs elsewhere to get out of that. It is a bit of a slog when you have to go out to Reading on a Wednesday night or something. Anyway, it’s good. We keep cracking at it, though. If we could do it, we would probably play four times a week.
If you could choose three relatively unknown bands to open on support for one of your shows, who would you choose and why?
Chris: How relatively unknown is relatively unknown?
Just whatever you think, obviously not big hot shots out there.
Chris: There’s an excellent, actually, there’s two great Brighton bands I’d say right off the bat - I’d say Clt Drp, they’re a super interesting band. It’s really interesting because they’ve got the most amazing guitar player I’ve seen live and he doesn’t play in a traditional sense and he basically plays techno on his guitar. They also have the greatest drummer as well, they’re a super good band. So, probably them. Another Brighton band is InTechnicolour, they’re a really cool stoner metal band. They’ve been progressing in their latest album and you can kind of see there’s a bit of slickness about them, they’ve taken off the rough edges a little bit, so they’ve got a stronger sense of melody, but they’ve still got a grittiness to them. For a third one… How popular are Wet Leg in New Zealand?
They just have been to New Zealand, so they’re pretty popular. They can be the third answer.
Chris: Nah, I’ll say Wolf Alice. Let’s go Wolf Alice. They’re a big band here. We’d be a good fit for a Wolf Alice line-up. A very good band.
How do you find the support here in London, is it quite difficult or quite easy to get support from the public?
Chris: It’s easy to get gigs here. I also was trying to get into the Auckland scene. When I was in Auckland, I found it hard to play with people who had the same interests and tastes as me, whereas in London, there’s just so many people and you’ve just got to find people, so there’s a lot more opportunities in that sense. There are so many more pubs and we’re just in a random one in Kings Cross that just happens to put on gigs. It’s very easy to find places to play and I get promoters emailing us good offers from venues that I’ve never even heard of, it’s like, “oh, I didn’t know that was even a place in London!” whereas in Auckland, I know of all the places, I went to them. I find in Auckland, they’re a lot better at curating line-ups, so we’ve played with some jazz bands and folk bands. We’ve played with kind of a marching band last time we played at the Water Rat. It was a bit weird. They’re a bit like America’s Got Talent kind of thing. They played at Glastonbury. It was weird. You wouldn’t get that in Auckland and I think that’s probably a good thing.
If you could liken your tunes to an animal, which animal would you choose and why?
Chris: Dog. I just love dogs. My dream is to one day have a random patch of land that I have all these retired animals on and I’d have rescue dogs and rescue horses. I just think that dogs tend to bring so much happiness to life.
Scorpio/Into Dust is now available to listen to on Spotify and Apple Music and you can also check out The Silent Era’s Bandcamp to listen, too.
What’s next for The Silent Era, apart from the singles and the gig?
Chris: We’re going to start working on an album once I come back from New Zealand. It takes us so frigging long to do anything, we were hoping to start recording it this month, but we weren’t anticipating having a line-up change, so that’s kind of thrown things out, so it might be July when we start recording. As I say, we’ve got twelve songs so far and there might be two more singles out before the end of the year and hopefully some festival shows. That’s the plan. There are always opportunities that come up and there’s opportunities that we don’t necessarily always know about. I mean, we just started getting other bands who are just coming into town asking us to support them, so we are just getting those offers now. It’s exciting, just kind of getting opportunities coming along.
That’s great news that people are reaching out and asking you to support them. That’s huge!
Chris: Yeah, I mean, we kind of take things seriously, but I think in previous bands, we’ve taken things too seriously and it’s kind of taken the fun out of it. We try and be a bit more chilled out about things now because of us having been a few different bands at this point, so we’re trying not to lose sight of the fun aspect. We’re doing things we want to enjoy. If we have a shit time, we are not going to do it. If we play a terrible pub, we’re probably not going to play that place again. We’re just trying to take it one day at a time and have the best time that we can.
Where can people find your music and your social media?
Chris: Definitely follow on Instagram, I don’t have anything to do with it. Our singer, Bri, does all of that and does a good job of it. We’re going to try and be a bit more active on it. We’re trying to do a bit more behind the scenes sort of stuff. Spotify, Apple Music… But if you also go to our Soundcloud, we release demos well before we put them out. We’re just going to try and do that, we’re not being too precious about it. We want to be as accessible as we can be.
Thank you so much Chris for letting me interview you. It has been a real pleasure, especially here in London, I’ve never done an interview outside of New Zealand before.
Chris: Thank you so much!
For more on The Silent Era, you can check out their links below -