Temple Fang’s fantastic debut album, ‘Fang Temple’ almost never happened. It was shelved for months due to pandemic and personal reasons. After a while the band luckily decided to finish this spiritual space (jam) psych monster.

After a limited vinyl run quickly sold out, Stickman Records issued a 2CD version of this album. Temple Fang was originally formed in Amsterdam in the wake of the dissolution of bassist Dennis Duĳnhouwer’s previous band Death Alley. Joining with guitarist Jevin De Groot, bassist Ivy van der Veer and drummer Jesper van den Broeke, the band started gaining steam in 2020 with a slew of Dutch gigs culminating in the album ‘Live at Merlyn’. Temple Fang had hit upon a fresh and ambitious sound, crafting songs that run upwards of 20 minutes while exploring the outer limits of psychedelic heavy rock.

While working on preproductions mixes for a debut album, the band’s drummer left the group. The band decided to shelve the recordings indefinitely, unsure if they would continue as a band at all. When returning to the studio to mix some pre-lockdown live recordings, the band’s sound engineer suggested a new idea; to take the live tracks and use them as a base to build a ”proper” album onto. After months, the band had emerged with ’Fang Temple,’ a unique hybrid live-studio record with all the power of a live show and the polish of a studio album.

As with their previous album, ’Fang Temple’ comprises four extremely long songs hovering around the 20 minute mark, each of which is a different journey, from lysergic grooves to blistering space rock, from blissed out melody to walls of dense sonic atmosphere.

How did you guys get together originally to start Temple Fang?

Dennis Duijnhouwer: In 2018 I was still recovering from the break-up of my previous band and I really hadn’t made up my mind about starting a new one, it just felt like a daunting task to build a band from scratch, something I wasn’t sure about wanting to do one more time. But then I got contacted out of the blue by an old friend asking if I wanted to play a show opening for a couple of bands at Little Devil, Tilburg on a Tuesday two days before Roadburn. I told him I didn’t really have a band, but I’d try to put something together for this occasion, even if it was just a one-off. Called some friends, wrote some material and after 2 months of jamming played the show. It felt really great, better than expected and the crowd really seemed to dig it. From this show we got offered to open two shows for Coven and then we just continued playing and booking shows and after some time, we had to conclude we were a band.

The pandemic almost stopped your band, but we are all very excited that you actually managed to release ‘Fang Temple’, can you share some further words about it.

The pandemic came right at the moment when we were really starting to blossom as a band, we had played a lot of shows in 2019 and started feeling there was an audience for us and we started talking about taking a small break so we could try to make a record. That break became a long break and with nothing else to do (most of us lost our jobs and were unemployed), and since we all lived in the same city (Amsterdam) and had a rehearsal room, we just started endlessly jamming and coming up with material. We booked a day in the studio for pre-production and started the process of making the album, originally planning a triple record which was really ambitious, but we were convinced we could do it given the time we all had when the world came to a halt. When that day of pre-production came, the ambition of it turned out to be too much for our drummer. It was an enormous amount of material and since he was the only one of us who was extremely busy during that phase of the pandemic, working from home and also having to school his children himself, he just couldn’t commit to the project like the rest of us, which was totally understandable but nevertheless really hurt, and it basically halted the whole project and consequently our morale sank really low and we were ready to throw this whole record and band out of the window.

“It took months of sessions to complete the album”

Tell us what was the circumstances around it?

We originally had made what seemed like a solid plan towards the recording of the album, realising that we needed to develop the material for a live audience before the studio dates, so when the Dutch government opened up the clubs with restrictrictions (30 tickets per show, seated with a distance of 1.5 meters between them) , we saw an opportunity to book as many shows while we could, I think we were planning on doing 4 venues, 3 shows a day, back to back, this being a perfect scenario for playing these new songs a lot in a short period of time and working out the arrangements. We ended up doing one day at dB’s in Utrecht, 3 shows for 30 people each, before we were forced into lockdown again the next day.

When the album was scrapped, we were unsure of how to go ahead. Finding a new drummer to record these songs was briefly considered, but it was something that just didn’t feel right. We had recorded the dB’s shows for reference and when listening back to the recordings figured we could maybe use the booked studio dates to produce another live album, which would at least be a document of these songs and would generate some kind of income for us so we wouldn’t lose our rehearsal room.

When we showed up at the studio our producer Sebastiaan van Bijlevelt ambushed us with a whole other plan, he suggested taking these recordings as a foundation for a studio record, something we had never even considered at all. After setting up multiple stations of tape-echo’s and analog synthesizers, we took the plunge that same day. It took months of sessions to complete the album, there were all kinds of issues we had to tackle, the recordings having errors, tracks that had to be copied from multiple shows, lyrics that had to be written for parts that seemed too empty to hold up in the studio et cetera.

Some of the songs we had played live for the first time that day so it seemed bizarre to put those out on a record but we had no choice once we had started, we had to finish it and we did.

Originally you self-released it already, but Stickman Records are now doing a double CD version of the album. Are you excited about it?

When it was time to release it, we just didn’t have the money to press it up ourselves, this is where Johan from Electric Spark stepped in, one of my oldest friends in the world, he had just started his label and really wanted to help us out. He’s someone I trust and someone who thinks about vinyl the same way we do, we both wanted to have it be top quality and something that would really count as a piece of art, an artifact. I feel we succeeded in that with him.

<a href="https://templefang.bandcamp.com/album/fang-temple">Fang Temple by Temple Fang</a>

When Stickman contacted us it felt good right from the start, they are a label we have the utmost respect for and we feel understands our band. We’re kind of unpredictable, even for ourselves, and given the fact they’ve been working with Motorpsycho for so long, they’re quite used to that. We hope to keep working with them for sure, it suits us well.

Would you like to share some commentary about the tracks featured on the album?

‘Let it Go’/’When We Pray’
‘Let It Go’ was this weird riff we had for a long time that didn’t fall into place until I started lining out chords with the bass instead of following the guitars. Guitars and bass are from the live show, vocals were recorded in the studio through a Leslie-speaker. Lyrics are about letting love into your life and thus having to let go of control.

‘When We Pray’ is about a relationship with whatever you consider God to be and letting go of preconceived, one-dimensional ideas of God and letting it grab and change you. It’s a heavy force once you seek contact.

‘A Strange Place to Land’
It’s easily the most ambitious song we’ve ever done. We had to put this one together from two shows, since we didn’t have a good recording of one take because of some recording error. We added all kinds of things to this, from synths to piano’s, timpani’s, choir vocals et cetera. It was a tough one to put together but a lot of fun too, we figured that this song was gonna be divisive with the listeners but it turned out to be a lot of people’s favorite. Lyrically is inspired by a psychedelic trip and dreams that followed it, it’s about allowing life to take its course without interfering, giving up preconceived notions about how things should be. Resistance to the force is futile. This song we only performed that day in the shows, in set 1 and 2, and was never played again.

‘The Knife’
The pandemic song, written at a time when the world felt like a lonely, deserted place, while navigating the various restrictions the government was imposing on us.
Did a lot of mushrooms by myself one night at our rehearsal studio and ended up completely alone on the ferry on my way back home, with the city looming lifeless and dark in front of me, this song was born from that night. This song was only performed once at dB’s, thus a true one-taker.

‘Not the Skull’
Kind of the signature song for Temple Fang 1.0, a song we’ve never played the same way twice, one that kept morphing. If you hear the version on ‘Live at Merleyn’ it’s really different, we would add parts every few shows and this just happened to be the version we played that night. The only song I redid most of the bass for, I simplified everything in the improv part which gave the track more menace and focus. Lyrically it’s about revenge, writing/playing this song so many times helped me tremendously with exorcising a bunch a negativity from my life but I don’t think I could ever play it again, I’m not the same person I was when I wrote it and I’m not sure I believe in revenge for its own sake nowadays.

Maybe a few words about ‘Live At Merleyn’ and ‘Live at Vera’ releases?

We recorded three shows for a live album, and ended up choosing the show at Merleyn for a vinyl release. We released cassettes of the other shows in a very limited quantity. Apparently, people like cassettes, because they sold out very quickly.

They’re honest snapshots of where the band was at that time in 2019, and the only way for us to make a record at that time since we had to self-finance it.

“The sky has been the limit lately”

Did your approach to music-making change during the years? What’s the typical creative process for you these days?

We’ve always created most of our stuff collectively, someone brings in a riff or a chord progression and we just start jamming on it with amps blazing. Something relatively new for us is we’ve started writing on acoustics, parts of ‘When We Pray’ and ‘A Strange Place to Land’ were done like that and we’ve been cooking up a lot of new stuff like this. Also we’ve started to write for 3 vocals since Ivy also has a mic now, we spend a lot of time doing this and it’s been really adding a new dimension to the band. Bringing in Egon on drums has opened up our music much, he’s such a versatile drummer so the sky has been the limit lately. We have just finished recording an EP and have started working on the new chapter of Temple Fang. No idea where it’s gonna go yet, but that’s kind of the idea.

What gear are you using and do tell us more about the effects, pedals et cetera.

For me, I’ve been playing a Rickenbacker 4001 thru an ‘90s SVT since I first started playing bass. My original Rickenbacker got stolen, but the amp and cab are the same I started with. There’s better bass amps, but these have never once let me down so I stick with them. Effects-wise I’m pretty simple, essential for me are a Rotovibe (always on) and a wah-wah, sometimes a phaser. And different overdrives.

Jevin plays the same Strat he’s had since childhood thru a Hiwatt amp that was gifted to him by Tos Nieuwenhuizen, Amsterdam’s tube-amp guru. Our friend Mick Johan adorned it with a collage and coined it “The Black Magick Thunderhorn.” Jev loves his Old Blood Noise pedals, especially the Dark Star reverb, a pedal that gives us a modern touch and helps us to make clear we’re NOT just a seventies revival band, haha.

Ivy has two guitars that have been custom-built for him by Drubbel, a local luthier. The last one was built to his exact specifications, using wood that came from the construction of the new Amsterdam metro line, the Noord-Zuid line. Really beautiful instrument. Besides his Fender Twin, Ivy has a lot of pedals, several delays and different distortions. We all share each other’s pedals, right now I’ve just lost my Earthquaker Hoof/Reaper to Ivy, but that’s ok. At this moment, we’re still trying to get holy Duna Jam sand out of our pedalboards, we should have been smart like Elder and wrapped our boards in cellophane. But we didn’t.

Egon uses an Sakae Trilogy set with a 24×14 kick, diecast hoops and Vintage Emperor drum heads for a warm old school sound. Cymbals are a mix of brands, including a few vintage ones, and 3 large ride cymbals for lots of different colours.

Are you planning to tour?

For the past five months we’ve been doing blocks of shows, 3 or 4 at a time, since we’re still a small band and we can’t afford to lose money on long tours and we all need to do things besides Temple Fang to pay the bills. But now more that ever, we’re really committed to the band and the response we gotten at all the amazing fests we’ve played in Europe this season (Down The Hill, Alterna Sounds, Roadburn, Desertfest, Freak Valley, Sonic Blast et cetera) has really motivated us to not ever take this for granted and up our ambitions a bit. We’re speaking to booking agents now to see if we can find the right partner to work with, because it’s such a “soul” thing for us and not just business, we need to find collaborators that are sensitive to this, like Stickman is. So yes, we will hit the road hard when the time is right.

Let’s end this interview with some of your favourite albums. Have you found something new lately you would like to recommend to our readers?

We listen to vast amounts of music, old and new, but this is our most recent list of what’s been on the turntable/streaming device lately:

Dennis:
Motorpsycho – ‘Ancient Astronauts’
The Smile – ‘A Light for Attracting Attention’
Pharoah Sanders – ‘Tauhid’
Daniel Romano – ‘Finally Free’
Eefje de Visser – ‘Bitterzoet’

Jevin:
Ravi Shankar – ‘Chants of India’
Joni Mitchell – ‘Hejira’
Sacred Sound Choir – ‘Mantra for Healing’
Augustus Pablo – ‘Ital Dub’
Jerry Garcia Band – ‘3-17-78 Capitol Theatre’

Ivy:
Molly Tuttle – ‘Crooked Tree’
Miles Davis – ‘Bitches Brew’
Amenra – ‘De Doorn’
The smile – ‘A Light For Attracting Attention’
Bad Brains – ‘Quickness’

Egon:
Red Kite – ‘Apophenian Bliss’
Needlepoint – ‘Walking Up That Valley’
King Garbage – ‘Heavy Metal Greasy Love’
Grovgast – ‘Heptager’
Jorge Glem – ‘En El Cerrito’

Thank you. Last word is yours.

Just want to give a shoutout to all who’ve supported us through the pandemic and beyond, it’s amazing we came out of this hell better than how we came in, thanks to all who’ve come to the shows, bought merch and believe in our little band. We love you and will see you on the road!

Klemen Breznikar

Headline photo: Photo by Maaike Ronhaar

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