Mountains under Oceans have a familiar face in Last Summer Effect’s guitarist, Robbie Tranter taking the same role in the Glasgow based band. The band journey up to Inverness to play in support of Akord at Mad Hatters, Inverness on the 28th of September.
Who are Mountains under Oceans and how did the band take shape?
We are an experimental band based in Glasgow. We all come from very different musical backgrounds, which I think definitely shows in the music. Our style is a strange kind of hybrid of metal and ambient instrumental music, with a big electronic influence hidden within it. The band consists of 4 members; Iain Macleod – Bass Guitar, Dan Stevenson – Guitar, Robbie Tranter – Guitar and Mark Norris – Drums. The whole thing really started as Mark’s project, before he asked Iain on board at the start of 2012. Mark and Iain began writing, just bouncing ideas back and forth using Apple’s Logic software. The ideas were developed and continuously worked on over a few months, before Dan came back from travelling the world around June. He was really interested in the project, and then Robbie then joined in December, which allowed the band to really get going and start to fully develop and rehearse the material.
Can you tell us a bit about the influences behind the band?
Our interests are pretty varied, but some of the people who’ve influenced us the most are bands such as Tesseract, Between The Buried And Me, Vessels, God Is An Astronaut, Deftones, Thrice, and a whole load more. The list is endless. Our general vision is plenty of big heavy riffs and catchy melodies, combined with a tonne of ambience and we also use a lot of electronic samples etc to fill out the sound.
Your debut EP is being produced by Aaron Harris, how did that come about and how are you feeling about the imminent release?
Dan originally messaged Aaron just telling him a bit about the band, and sent him a couple of demos, so we really just hoped for the best. We were all taken aback when he replied as he is such an inspiring guy and an incredible drummer, who we all each look up to. He said he was a big fan of the stuff, which was a huge positive for us, so we just went from there.
How much are you looking forward to touring with AKORD?
We’re all super excited. They’re doing extremely well for themselves at the moment, deservedly so – as they’re an extremely talented bunch of guys, and we’re delighted to be sharing a bill with them. Things are going to get messy.
You mentioned an official EP launch in your blog. What are your other plans for the future?
We still have a lot of music that we’ve been working on for a while, so there’s definitely no shortage of material. We all have a similar mind set when it comes to writing and once we start we can’t stop! The plan is just to push the name as far as we can to begin with and get ourselves out there. We’re going to be touring as much as we can, and we’ve got a huge support slot in Glasgow with Monuments and Dead Letter Circus on October 3rd, so again we’re all mega excited for that. Who knows what will happen from there!
Official Mountains under Oceans website.
