Vary Lumar

Half the fun of interviewing at Stereo Subversion is the ability to meet some of music’s greatest performers and thinkers, singers and songwriters. The other half involves introducing our audience to some of music’s newest gems – hidden, unearthed sonic treasures that seem to only need some momentum and platform to really burst upon the scene.

Vary Lumar is one such band and it’s our pleasure to feature them front and center in our latest interview. Their Euro-influenced sound is infectious and moving and definitely deserves your attention – at least that’s what Paul De Pasquale hopes you will give them.

We sat down with the band’s vocalist to discuss their beginnings, their studio sessions for their full-length debut entitled Waiting Room and what in the world their name means.

SSv: If we have to start somewhere, for me it has to be the band name. Where does Vary Lumar come from?

Paul De Pasquale: The name, unfortunately, doesn’t really mean a whole lot. We often get the question of what it means and back when we started the band, we just threw something together that you couldn’t tell what the band was going to be like or sound like by the name. We wanted something that was going to be mysterious, in a way. The only word that comes out of the name would be ‘vary’, which, if anything, describes our music a bit because we tend to jump around from a lot of different influences. But other than that, there’s not much to it. We’ve told people before ‘a variety of nothing’ but that was just to give them something… [Laughs]

SSv: The influence of British or Euro-rock seems strong on the Waiting Room. Is this something you were raised on?

Paul: We were raised on a lot of different things. As a rock band, we were raised on a lot of old and new rock from Europe. We all met in school doing music, so we were all coming from jazz backgrounds to electronic to just regular alternative rock. Some of us were doing folk and acoustic stuff. The music we make together, especially on this album, is its own thing within itself. If you heard any of us playing music outside of the band, we probably wouldn’t be doing anything quite like it. But we try and steer away from influences that were things that we grew up on. We wanted to steer from that and see if we can create our own cohesive thing. But you can definitely hear bits and things every now and then. I don’t know how much we’ll change from now until another album, but it will still be down the rock path with our next step.

SSv: Do you think much about further steps down the road and career trajectory of sorts? You mentioned the next step…

Paul: Yeah, prior to Waiting Room, we had an EP. It came out as a low-budget thing in early 2000. A buddy and I were living in New York and a lot of stuff we were doing was influenced by what was happening – the indie rock thing and grunge sound. By the time of Waiting Room, we were trying to make it darker and really not what seems to be going on now. It’s a darker, psychedelic sound that we’re comfortable with now. We’re trying to face our band with our sound. In time, probably in years to come, we’ll dive deeper in to that. We like the way that Pink Floyd progressed with their music. They had big sounding albums, but at the same time they had dark sounding albums. We’re trying to keep it in the rock zone and steer it away from everything happening around us.

SSv: You’re using a lot of language of intentionality, when a lot of other bands will just say, ‘I don’t know, we just play what naturally comes out.’

Paul: We all have our thoughts on what we want to bring to the band. We have intentions, but we had them before we started Waiting Room and halfway through that we were discovering things we never thought about. So that always plays a role, too. Right now there are things we want to consider doing with our sound, but between what everyone wants to bring in personally, the natural cohesive tone that happens on its own… there’s just a sound that we didn’t plan for. But we did have a lot of time before the album recorded where we wrote and pre-produced for a year. We had a lot of time. Everyone else in the band is usually on the same page. We don’t just go in there and wing it. But at the same time, what ended up recorded, were from endless recordings from jams and actually just winging it.

SSv: You said you would hear things from recording that would…

Paul: That we would hear 10 or 15 seconds of. If we liked it, we would take it in one day and keep jamming on it and we would eventually find choruses and verses. That’s how a lot of Waiting Room happened. It’s not like we sat down and said, ‘This is A. This is B. This is the chorus and the bridge.’ Going into pre-production right before we recorded, each song probably had two minutes extra on it because we had these long jammed out versions of everything. For the sake of the CD we cut it down, but it’s still a long album. It’s probably only half as long as that now.

SSv: How do you deal with expectations for a debut album?

Paul: Whether it’s a success right away or not at all, we can say we’ve opened ourselves up to people that we would have never encountered had we not done it. It’s also opened us up on the internet. It’s still intimidating – it seems hundreds of albums come out every day. That’s a huge back and forth kind of thing. At times, you’re really confident to put it out there and have people listen and, at the same time, realizing there are so many bands and so many people listening to other music. It gets stressful and tiring. You do endless amounts of promoting and networking, you still wonder if you’re still a small fish in a big pond. [Laughs]

SSv: For most of our readers, this will be their first time hearing of the band. What do you want them to know?

Paul: I don’t know if this sounds cliche, but the best thing they can do is listen to us with an open mind really. We don’t have much as far as wanting our sound to fit a certain people or fit a certain scene. We write and hope it just has something in it for everybody. Just listen to it. Some people will listen to a couple minutes of a song and make up their mind on a band, so maybe not be so quick to take this kind of music in. People listening to the album from start to finish will go through so many sounds and emotions.

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