Toronto-London based experimental group The Flowers Of Hell recently released their sixth studio album ‘Keshakhtaran’ via Space Age Recordings.

‘Keshakhtaran’ is tripped-out instrumental journey in two 20-minute parts involves 20 artists, including Rishi Dhir (Elephant Stone, Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Black Angels, Beck) on sitar, Montreal harpist Sarah Pagé, and avant-accordion legend Angel Corpus Christi (Suicide, Spiritualized, Dean Wareham). Produced by the band’s leader and composer Greg Jarvis, this album was mastered by Grammy recipient Peter J. Moore (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Joe Strummer). “Keshakhtaran” – an urban dictionary term for “seeking nirvana through meditation to sound, especially when you’re stoned” – is suitably named. This 42-minute instrumental psilocybin meditation piece is rooted in sax, flugel horn, chimes, harp, sitar and opera soprano vocals, augmented with tremolos, flutters, horns, woodwinds, strings and percussion.

For 18 years, The Flowers Of Hell have traversed the experimental edges of indie, classical and jazz, with music often rooted in the audio-visual synesthesia of the group’s mastermind, Greg Jarvis. Despite relative obscurity, they have been championed by music legends such as Lou Reed, Sonic Boom, Kevin Shields and members of The Legendary Pink Dots, Death In Vegas, The Wedding Present, The Fugs and The Plastic People Of The Universe, not to mention support from NASA’s mission control team and the Tate Gallery with an album installation and concert just a fortnight before London locked down.

The Flowers Of Hell | Photo courtesy of Greg Jarvis

“It’s a 42 minute psilocybin meditation piece”

Would you like to talk a bit about your background?

Greg Jarvis: How long ya got? In a nutshell: started in Canadian para-military marching bands, became a record exec at 19 for a decade getting to learn directly from legends (eg. The Moody Blues taught me how to write five-part vocal harmonies while riding around in a van in Barcelona doing a photoshoot!). I got to enjoy the hedonistic days of ‘90s Prague and Moscow where I worked for BMG which had labels like Geffen and Dedicated at the time. Started The Flowers Of Hell in London in the 2000s and evolved it into a “trans-atlantic space rock orchestra” by the end of that decade after relocating home to Toronto.

And onward and upwards The Flowers Of Hell have gone since, never getting very big but always getting acknowledgements from folks and institutions we respect whether it’s been Lou Reed, NASA, the Tate Gallery displaying our album art, the mentorship of Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember, or Kevin Shields having us open for My Bloody Valentine.

What initiated the project of Flowers Of Hell?

I’d gone on mushrooms to the Royal Albert Hall to catch Classical Spectacular, which is a 300 piece orchestra and 100 voice choir doing a “best of classical” – with lasers! I was so inspired and filled with melody by the end of it, I rushed home in a cab and played away, recording what I was doing. When I listened back the next day, there was this 20 minute bit that really quite stood out (later given the title Opt Out) and so I pulled a bunch of friends together to perform it at Club AC30, one of London’s rare psych-shoegaze nights at the time in 2005. It went down great – despite sparse attendance due to Kings Cross tube station being shuttered and covered in flowers after the previous days 7/7 Islamic terrorist bombings there. As we loaded out wheeling our Hammond we all agreed we oughta be a band and play more.

What’s your creative process like?

Different every time – wouldn’t be very creative otherwise would it? But generally, I like to book off for a swath of time and lose track of what day of the week it is, get a bit floaty, and see what starts to flow. Sometimes songs will come from the best bits of us improvising live off the floor at a session, sometimes I’ll write and record something and have people come over and overlay bits on it one-by-one – sometimes improvising, sometimes playing lines I’ll sing to them.

Sometimes I’ll build up a whole 150 track arrangement and then spend months carving away, creating space with-in it – sometimes removing the original main line I’d written and just leaving the arrangement that was built up around that line. Sometimes I’ll start out playing someone else’s song wrongly and grow it into my own thing from there.

“Seeking nirvana through meditation to sound, especially when you’re stoned.”

Tell us about your latest album, ‘Keshakhtaran’. There seems to be a concept behind it?

It’s a 42 minute psilocybin meditation piece in two parts that I developed in Toronto when we were in hard lockdown on and off for 13 out of 18 months. We were being told to meditate and I discovered meditation music is largely crap, it’s all just someone with an Enya synth and a gong telling you to breathe. I recalled in Lou Reed’s final years he’d been doing an hour of Tai Chi a day and had hated the music so much that he decided to make his own. Ever the inspiration, we decided to do as Lou had done.

I couldn’t write anything new while locked down (nothing in/nothing out), but I dusted off a 40 min space guitar piece I’d come up with not long before the pandemic that had been created from bits and bobs I’d come up with playing live for a girlfriend at the time as she meditated on my home studio floor – I’d watched closely to her expressions and posture noting what things seemed to resonate. I sent that around to my similarly caged up bandmates and friends around the world and over the next two years, as layers came on in. I carved and edited away, sculpting the final piece that you hear, ‘Keshakhtaran’.

‘Keshakhtaran’ is an urban dictionary term for, “Seeking nirvana through meditation to sound, especially when you’re stoned.” It seemed like the perfect title really as it also has that sense of conjuring up a drugged dream of foreign lands. And that’s what I wanted and needed, a way to escape my head and my walls. We weren’t allowed non-household human contact at the time but we were allowed massages – so I’d over-microdose on mushrooms and go see a bandmate who’s a masseuse and test out the work in progress mixes. Later I’d play the mixes for other bandmates in the “semi-outdoor contact” psychedelic shack I’d turned my garage into, complete with a lightshow and fog. It definitely helped us escape the bleak times.

And there’s ‘Odes’ being reissued as well?

I’d had a great Instagram message from British cult label Space Age Recordings (Spacemen 3, The Telescopes, Acid Mothers Temple) asking if we had anything we’d be interested in putting out with them. I suggested a LP reissue of ‘Odes’ and they said, yes and that they wanted to do a deluxe version of it for Record Store Day 2023. And deluxe it is, with a die cut sleeve, a 180gm red pressing, in a polybag with a sticker that’s got Lou Reed’s mighty quote about it being “an amazing, amazing album.” I think I only have one die cut sleeve in my collection, a Sonic Boom -Sunray collab, so I’m thrilled to have this where a frame is cut into the front of the record and as you slide the inner sleeve out more artwork is revealed.

You released a lot of records and I think it would be really fantastic if you can share a sentence or two about each. What runs through your mind when you hear those records today.

‘The Flowers Of Hell’ (2007) – Heavily drawing from the early Velvets and the late Spacemen, but building our own new path with those sounds using our strings and horns. Fond memories of Sonic Boom mentoring me along through the process and of the excitement of working with Death In Vegas’s Tim Holmes at their legendary Contino Rooms studio.

‘Come Hell Or High Water’ (2009) – Got a bit proggy without realizing it as we began to venture into more deeply complex and flowing arrangements. Was so thrilled when it was displayed next to The Beatles ‘Revolver’ at the Tate’s 2020 Aubrey Beardsley exhibition as one of six records they chose to show Beardsley’s influence on album art.

‘O’ (2010) – An instrumental 46 minute orchestral-ambient piece with no rhythm and no repetition. We’d been invited to do something arty at Toronto’s long running Ambient Ping night and came up with that, ideologically inspired by Spacemen 3’s ‘Dreamweapon’ that was created under similar circumstances. I’m proud it sounds like no other album by anyone, yet is still beautiful and melodic.

‘Odes’ (2012) – A Velvet Underground leaning covers record in an orch-pop style that got the seal of approval from Lou Reed who premiered it on the radio, declaring it “amazing.” Worth trying to track down one of Space Age Recordings 2023 deluxe LP Record Store Day pressings of it!

‘Symphony No.1’ (2016) – Busted my ass for six years to make a full four movement psych-classical symphony and couldn’t get anyone to listen to it when I was done. But in 2019 we played bits live at the Moscow Conservatory (Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff , Prokofiev et cetera all tread the boards there) and they asked me to create a full score for their inhouse orchestra to premiere! Then right after finishing the score (was a lot of money, time, and brain work) the war came, fucking the project yet again.

‘Outlanders’ (2020) – A rarities collection – a lovely assemblage of non-album tracks, non-album mixes of songs (often the best versions), live recordings, Japanese B-sides et cetera. Over a decade and half, you end up with a lot of great extras sitting around that deserve their own spotlight.

‘Keshakhtaran’ (2023) – A tripped out 42 minute psilocybin meditation piece in two parts driven by harps and sitars and augmented with tremolos, flutters, woodwinds, opera soprano and much more. Out digitally May 12th and taking pre-orders for an LP that’ll be out later in the year, that’ll include a bonus CD with a reworking of it by Sonic Boom!

Are any of you involved in any other bands or do you have any active side-projects going on at this point?

Hmmm, everyone’s in other groups, the most successful at the moment is probably our UK trumpeter Ian Thorn’s Japanese Television. Our Canadian drummer Mike Duffield’s very active with his psych folk group Beams. My right hand in The Flowers Of Hell since day one, Steve Head, has his own group Steve’s 9th Incarnation. Our long serving Canadian multi-instrumentalist Brian Taylor has been getting busy with Martian Crisis Unit. Hypnotique, our longest serving member always has projects on the go whether it’s shows on the history of women in electronic music or playing with bands like Dawn Of The Replicants. Tom Hodges, who’s been with us since our early days, has a far out group called The Hare And Hoof.

What are some future plans?

I keep getting distracted with record promo and the odd live show, but I’m a fairway through writing a book that’s essentially my journals from the ‘90s when I was a crazily young Canadian record exec in the hedonistic Wild East watching Czech and Russian society change after the collapse of communism, while working with a lot of big name acts, and having some pretty risky travel adventures. Being backstage at Nirvana’s concert in Slovenia in ‘94 is there – of course that was the second last show they ever played.

There’s a few other Yugo/former-Yugo bits as well, such as a Serb border patrol ejecting me off a train at the height of the war in ’93 and detaining me in the mountains between Serbia and Bulgaria. They were pretty heavy with me until someone turned on a TV and everyone shut up to watch Depeche Mode’s new ‘Walking In My Shoes’ video – then our conversation switched to debating which of ‘Black Celebration,’ ‘Music For The Masses,’ or ‘Some Great Reward’ is the best Depeche Mode record! Later in ’96 I helped smuggle circuit boards into Sarajevo to repair Radio Free Europe’s knocked out transmitter – lots of stories are in the journals that form the basis of the book.

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?

Sarah Pagé is a Montreal harpist (who’s on ‘Keshakhtaran’) and through delays and amps she manages to do new things with a thousands year old instrument. She’s in the midst of dropping a new album and her last one, ‘Dose Curves,’ we were using as opening music at our shows – before Covid! It’s all instrumental, all great, and all innovative and she’s about to put out a new record.

For straight up verse-chorus-verse stuff, I’ll namecheck Vera Ellen who I caught in Auckland the other week playing a flawless release show for her ‘Ideal Home Noise’ album on Flying Nun Records – indie done great by an early twentysomething who’s truly feeling it. What a sense of melody, urgency, emotion, hooks!