ElonMusk | Interview with Ryon Westover
ElonMusk are an instrumental psych/space trio from the USA. ‘...As Your Wanderer Taps At The Invisible Gate’ is their latest release full of mostly instrumental, floating space-psych-acid rock.
How does three space rockers decide to name their band ElonMusk?
Ryon Westover: It’s started off as a joke. My friend Cameron and I were at an anniversary party for the recording studio we both worked at back in 2016. We were talking about spaceX and Elon Musk and came to the conclusion that Elon Musk would be a great band name. A few days later I walked into his mastering suite at the studio and saw him making some album art that had his cat, Yogi, out in space and the name Elon Musk on it. We laughed about it for awhile and then decided we should probably make this record. We didn’t really have the intention to start a band, but we wanted to do something with this idea. So we spent the next few days writing a song. Then, when the owners of the studio went out of town for Christmas, we went in and recorded it. I played bass, Cameron played guitar, we got my friend Jamie, from the local Nashville band Microwave Mountain, to come in and play lead and then got Kate, who was an intern at the studio, to play drums.
That was ‘Magnolia Moon’. We didn’t end up releasing that until 2018 I think. The band name is what it is. It’s better than most of the other cliché buzzword bullshit people are naming their bands these days. It gets us into some trouble every now and then. None of the streaming services will let us on their platforms, but it’s highly entertaining when people send us messages thinking we’re actually Elon Musk. People are very stupid. I really don’t give a fuck about Elon Musk because he’s just another shitty capitalist supervillain but I do really like his name.
Do you think he’s a fan, haha?
I highly doubt he’s heard of us. I’m sure he listens to really terrible music anyways, so even if he had he probably wouldn’t like it.
When and how did you all originally meet?
Well, like I previously mentioned, Kate came on as an intern at the studio I worked at and we became good friends. After we recorded ‘Magnolia Moon’, Cameron’s girlfriend had a baby so he didn’t really have time to try to make a band happen, so I continued on with the project by myself. I tried to get Kate to play drums after that, but during that time she was crazy busy. She was already playing in 3 or 4 bands so she didn’t have the time for another project. I found another drummer, which at one point was also an intern at that studio, and we started playing as a bass/drums 2-piece. We did some touring and recorded a record in 2017 but it ended up being complete garbage so I never released it. I took parts of it and wrote ‘Wanderer’ out of it later. We played a show in Nashville with this band called Poodle and the guitar player, Frank, told me that he loved our band and if we ever wanted a guitar player to hit him up. I loved his tone and his style of playing. About 6 months later I kicked out that drummer and called Frank. We started working on putting together what would become ‘Wanderer’. I called Kate in early 2018 to ask again if she wanted to be in the band and she said yes—so that’s where the current lineup started.
Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?
Yeah, Frank has his project called My Wall which is bitchin’ doomy noise-punk, Kate plays drums for Lilly Hiatt, and I play bass in my friend Kevin’s project, Red Feather.
What’s the usual creating process like?
Most of the time I’ll have the whole idea of the song in my head and the direction I want it to go in beforehand. I’ll show Frank and Kate the parts and we’ll just jam on it for weeks and slowly mold it into a cohesive piece. It’s tough though because I’m not really a musician; I don’t know scales or terms or really how to count music, so it’s often a struggle to try to explain what’s going on in my head to them so that we’re all on the same page. But we get there eventually. I record all of our rehearsals so I’ll go back and find the stuff I like and get them to try to do a similar thing in certain sections.
“Spacey post-rock with doom vibes”
Can you share some further details about how your latest album ‘ …As Your Wanderer Taps At The Invisible Gate ’ was recorded and released?
We tracked it at my home studio, Grey Gardens, in Nashville at the end of 2018. We didn’t have much time to track because of all of our schedules, which was a big regret of mine. I wish we could have taken more time to really work on tones and get everything right. It was a major learning experience. We took one day and ran through the whole thing 3 times and chose the best one. Then I spent about 6 months editing, overdubbing and mixing it. That was a nightmare trying to fix all this shit that I should have gotten right when we tracked it. Also mixing that long of a song was a major pain in the ass, so we’ll probably stick to 20 minute songs from here on out.
I sent it to probably 40 different labels but nobody was biting, so I decided I was gonna release it myself. I saved up about $4,000 to have it pressed, but then I lost my job right before my girlfriend and I were leaving on a trip to Europe in mid-2019, so I ended up spending all that money in Europe and having a great time. When we got back I saw a Facebook post from Dave of Electric Moon announcing their yearly planetarium shows in Bochum so I bought tickets to that and a few months later we went back to Europe to go to those shows. Best decision I’ve ever made. The shows were amazing and I’d been a huge fan of Electric Moon for years so it was nice to finally see them play. We talked with them for a bit both nights then we went back home. Their bass player, Lulu, started her label, Worst Bassist Records, right around that time and I think I had sent her the album before I met her. About 2 months after I got back from Germany she sent me a message saying that she wanted to put out my record. It was surreal. She’s a wonderful human and the band is very grateful for all she’s done to support us. Anyways, we had a release show scheduled for March 15th of this year at the venue I work at in Nashville. I had booked some awesome locals bands and had Mad Alchemy lined up to come out to do a liquid light show. Then on March 3rd, a tornado came through and fucked up a good part of the city.
The venue wasn’t damaged but buildings just down the block were completely leveled. We didn’t have power for a little over a week, so we couldn’t be open or have any shows. We got power back and opened up for one night—the next day we shut down because of the pandemic. It was a bummer, but I still released the record online. I also made a video for the entire thing that you can find on YouTube.
How would you describe your sound?
I always call it heavy instrumental space rock, but it’s basically spacey post-rock with doom vibes.
How important is improvisation for you?
I personally don’t improvise much, mostly because of my inability to play. I structure the songs where they feel right to me. When playing live I’ll stay on a part for longer than normal because it doesn’t feel right to change just yet, but that’s because Frank is doing something cool and I want to hear where he goes, I want to let him finish his musical statement. Frank is mostly making noise and soloing and he’s always playing it a little different which makes it kind of a new thing every time we play but the foundation is always more or less the same.
How are you coping with the current world situation? What are some future plans?
It’s been an interesting time, but we are all doing just fine. It’s been nice to take a break from humanity and focus on ourselves as people. We recorded a new song back in June that is going to be part of a project I’m working on with Lulu and Electric Moon and a couple other European bands. Hopefully we’ll be announcing it early next year. Very excited about that one.
Let’s end this interview with some of your favorite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?
International Harvester – ‘Sov Gott Rose-Marie’
Kingdom Come – ‘Galactic Zoo Dossier’
Tom Waits – ‘Blue Valentine’
Robert Wyatt – ‘Shleep’
Stereolab – ‘Dots and Loops’
Nick Cave – ‘Push The Sky Away’
Tangerine Dream – ‘Green Desert’
Gang Of Four – ‘Solid Gold’
Bambara – ‘Shadow On Everything’
The Cure – ‘Seventeen Seconds’
Depeche Mode – ‘Playing The Angel’
Gene Clark – ‘No Other’
New Order – ‘Low Life’
Slowdive – ‘Souvlaki’
Some stuff I’ve found recently is The Heliocentrics – ‘A World Of Mask’s and Kanaan – ‘Odense Sessions/Double Sun’. That shit has been keeping me going lately.
Thank you. Last word is yours.
Black Lives Matter. Fuck Donald Trump, fuck capitalism and fuck Elon Musk. Ryon Westover
Klemen Breznikar
ElonMusk Facebook
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ElonMusk Bandcamp
Worst Bassist Records Bandcamp
