Explosive Heart’s front-man, Luke Costelloe, in conversation with Warhol’s Children’s Jeremy Au
Explosive Heart is one of those acts that just feel like the real deal- you know what I mean, a real labour of love with all the idiosyncratic little angles that people leave on things when the only person they’re really trying to please is themselves. The result is wonderful. Behind the project is the very interesting and very talented Luke Costelloe, Warhol’s Children gets to know him and his music…
How did you get the name Explosive Heart?
After months of brainstorming, we still hadn’t found one. Then it dropped out of the sky, as clichéd as that sounds. I was leaving a friends house in the city late one afternoon and this crazy sun set out over Victoria Park brought the words Explosive Heart to my mind, because that’s what it actually looked like.
How did the band start?
It’s actually not a band, but a duo; the producer of my previous band Dali’s Angels and myself. We had a few visits from the guitarist and bassist of Dali’s on a couple of the tracks but it is chiefly our duo’s brainchild.
You use the word “psychedelic” in our conversations. What does that mean, and how does that relate to the music?
Good question. Um, how does one explain that…? Surrealism, hyperrealism, or when things are so real they seem unreal…. Basically I just like to look at life from many angles or take an altered way or a different way of perceiving things. I think “psychedelia” has a lot to do with sensuousness, engaging in what is real via the senses rather than the way we habitually engage. The way we are programmed to engage. The music attempts to be sensuous without being a jumble of weird noises, but also the word “psychedelic” relates a lot to the lyrical content. Because the tracks are all about waking up and seeing the world altered. Like an alternate reality has taken over, or true reality has finally been uncovered.
So do you draw inspiration from Timothy Leary?
Yeah I do. He spent his life “reality hacking”. He pitted himself against the machine for a greater good. He wanted to re-order society for the better. And who doesn’t want to do that really. He was countercultural. I dig that. But he was one of a handful of inspiring people from that era. There are a few interesting chaps who picked up after him as well. Terrence McKenna etc.
So other than Leary, who do you draw inspiration from?
Damon Albarn (Gorilaz), Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys), John Lennon, David Byrne (Talking Heads), Beck, Robert Del Naja (Massive Attack), Thom Yorke, Dali, Aldous Huxley.
Interesting. Why Huxley?
He had such great insight. He struck a perfect balance between science and mysticism. He was all for humanity and the experience of being human. I loved Doors of Perception; the essay on his first psychedelic experience. The Perennial Philosophy is brilliant also, and Brave New World of course.
Following from last time’s interview, we only scraped the surface uncovering your roots from early indie rock band “Dali Angels” to dynamic duo “Explosive Heart”. So I’ve been listening to your music much more in depth since last time we met and I thought of categorizing your music into chillout. What do you think about putting your music into that category?
Um, I don’t know. I think it’s pretty chilled out, but it’s rock and pop music really. It’s chilled out rock and pop music. It’s just very melancholic.
Um, a melancholy feel. Due to a Romance? Were any songs inspired by some past relationship…or some girl? (smiles)
Yeh, that one…(embarrassed) that was a funny story (chuckles). It’s all there in the song really. It’s a tongue in cheek kind of account of some really small thing that went nowhere and I wasn’t sure if it was even a thing until I found her boyfriend wanted to murder me basically haha.
This is “Punch in the Face” right?
Yep, Punch in the Face. It says it all. I think I wanted to be punched in the face to clarify that she actually liked me.
Right, talking about inspirations, Radioactive Milk is my favourite off Light Doubles … but they’re all my favourites haha, anyways, that one also had some indication of some romance?
That wasn’t my romance. It was an imagined romance. That song is our threnody for the victims of Fukushima in a way. Um, about the tidal wave, the earthquake, the radioactive spill. I was feeling quite sympathetic towards the people in japan, but also quite angry about how their government was dealing with it. But yeah the opening scene of the song has and old villager loosing his wife to the water. I tried to put myself in his place; how would I feel with my loved one slipping out of my fingertips and being washed away.
Talking about the song, I really loved the imagery in the chorus-
‘Heal the wounds as raw as silk
Crying over thing’s we’ve spilt
A thousand years of lingering guilt
While we’re drinking radioactive milk’
It’s very poetic, similar to all your songs. You’ve obviously linked together your university studies in literature, philosophy, and music. Do they help with the poetry?
Um, I guess so. But all things help…I don’t know. I think lyrics have to be good, they have to stand on their own. I enjoy songs which have a solid narrative or point they want to get across and I just don’t want to hear a song where someone’s singing the same old clichéd thing. I want to hear something original and um, I don’t know. Something with energy about it, not just la-di-da, I love you… if it’s going to say that, it’s got to do it in a new way.
Yehhh, I definitely agree with that. Um, looking deeper into the lyrics, you want to be original, you want to be real….what’s your obsession with fingertips?
(whispers confusedly – “fingertips?”)
It’s kind of a theme in your music. A motif rather. Are you conscious you’re using the word fingertips a lot?
Where else have I used it?
Oh, take a guess haha
Ohhhhh Uncanny Valley as well….anywhere else?
Radioactive Milk….
Yeah…but are they the only two places?
Ok, but still…it’s a recurrent theme haha. Why fingertips?
Um, fingertips. On that one, well, in Radioactive Milk, it’s like something…something slipping from your fingertips…losing something. The whole EP in general is about loss. Loss of humanity, loss of love, loss of life, loss of youth. Except for the last track which is kind of a positive turn around – It tells of a new beginning. Well the fingertips in Uncanny Valley, that’s kind of meant to be a horrific moment when the creepy clone like human beings who have no empathy are coming, creeping down the valley on their fingertips. But um, when I was using fingertips in that instance, I was thinking about iPhones and computer keypads. That track is about losing touch with out humanity and replacing it with technology. We’re never hand to hand, never face to face anymore – everything is mediated.
Interesting, and yes, I’ve been feeling through a lot of the content you write based your lyrics on, do you intend to be political or does it just sound that way?
Well, I don’t intend to be political. I’m not really trying to push some politics but the music offers a social commentary in some ways. I’m an idealist, and its hard to be an idealist without being at least slightly political. I want things to be perfect in the world, somehow. I guess I am most political when I picture the dystopia – like in Uncanny Valley. I’m big into science fiction – maybe that’s where the politics come from.
You mentioned Tim … and I’ve read a bit on your blog about your interest in psychedelic drugs. Do you think musicians rely on them as a source of inspiration? Do you use them as a source of inspiration?
I don’t think the Beatles relied on it, or Jim Morrison, or Adolf Huxley for that matter. Psychedelics kind of clear your head. They make you more aware of your own behaviour and your own personality. That can be quite eye opening. Knowledge of self enables you to express yourself a bit more. But they also at the same time give you space from yourself – space from your own problems – and its when you have that space, or when you’re in that space that you get creative urges and inspiration. But not necessarily while you’re on the drug – the creativity comes afterwards – once you’ve cleared your brains disk drive – as McKenna would put it.
That’s interesting because the use of hallucinogens & other drugs induced changes in both the sound and lyrical content of music, leading to the creation of the psychedelic rock of the 1960s. Talking about the aesthetic, can you separate that stimulus or motivator from psychedelic rock? Or are they simultaneous, in a sense?
I think drugs made people realize how the beauty of all sounds rather than just sticking to the traditional sounds being used before the 60s. Everything has it’s own sensual niceness about it. Drugs also dragged a lot more esoteric and less rational lyrics into music, and also helped with breaking a lot of social boundaries… Drugs and any art form are pretty inseparable I think. We always want to push it to the limit and see behind the curtain.
Were any of the songs on “Light Doubles” directly influenced by psychedelics?
Well last January I met a crazy German guy who was backpacking and sleeping on a friends couch. It turned out we we’re into a lot of the same books, music and I guess philosophy of life. So a few weeks after meeting we decided we’d go climb Mt Kozciusko. We found a nice spot to set up camp; a grassy knoll covered in wildflowers and surrounded by the most amazing mountains. Then we dropped some LSD and the rest is quite indescribable haha. When I returned home after our trip I was completely refreshed and feeling really creative. I picked up the guitar and “Out of Hibernation” just flowed out. It was all the peace loving thoughts I’d had up on the mountain combined with the rejuvenation of the experience coming out fused together. That was one of those moments. I think if music has been influenced well by psychedelics, maybe it’s enabled people to tap into that creativity by having wiped away all that shit that was on their minds and just let it flow.
Radioactive Milk is my favourite song by far, the lyrics mean a lot to me. But the lead single off Light Doubles is “Fading Out.” Why is that the case?
Fading Out was the only track to come out of a jam between me and Roni; the other half of Explosive Heart. I had most of the lyrics and the topic of song kind of figured out but the music didn’t happen till we started jamming on it and then it all kind of fell into place. But even though it fell into place it felt like the song we we’re trying to write during the whole recording process. The feeling of that song is the ideal destination of the whole Light Doubles EP. Floating, melodic, psychedelic, a mysterious cross-over between real and unreal, conscious and unconscious. The track is about the loss of life. What is left when the soul goes? It’s very much where the title of the EP came from.
That makes sense. I kind of instinctively compare “Fading Out” to “Uncanny Valley” in terms of context, despite one being upbeat and the other fading out slowly. The themes are similar, you talk bout ‘engineers planting souls inside of their heads’. And you go further by saying ‘We’re all just seeds drifting through space, I saw it in an algorithm now it has my face’. Engineers, Space, drifting, you told me you were doing The Philosophy of Modern Physics, did that have any contribution to your music?
Well if I haven’t told you, I dropped out of physics. I was getting this nausea from it. I couldn’t do the maths, it was getting too hard.
Funny you talk about nausea, you have a book right next to you called “Nausea”. How ironic aye?
Haha no not ironic. Let me explain. I had an argument the other day with my girlfriend and about not being able to do this physics subject, cause I really wanted to understand the quantum world. But I was just getting worried about time, wasting a semester struggling over this subject, and I started flipping out about it and just felt sick and confused about my life, and then a few hours later when I had settled down, I saw Nausea on the shelf and I thought that it was time to read it, since I was having some existential fit. What were we talking about? Haha
We were talking about your lyrics- engineers, space, and algorithms…
Oh haha, that track “Uncanny Valley” is about…you know how I say that loss is a big theme in the record, well…on this track, there’s a loss of human empathy and apathy because everyone’s soul has been engineered in this place Uncanny Valley. It’s a valley of clones essentially. I talk about space because the character in the song is very alone, isolated, alienated. The whole algorithm thing is about people being programmed.
So let’s finish up here, can all your fans and readers here, read all this in more detail on your blog?
They can read it the lyrics on my Bandcamp if they wish and they can read the blog…well the blog is not so much about the tracks, it’s the thoughts I cant fit can’t fit into song. It goes a lot deeper than the songs can, which I hope makes it worthy of reading!