The Infinity Chamber is New Zealander, Dylan Ware’s Istanbul-based band. The new single, The Lonely Gnome is a side-project undertaken by founding member and singer-songwriter Dylan and is released via Personal Space Records. It is an eerie and heavily psychedelic folky ode to the weekdays. The band is completed by lead guitarist Fatih Aygün, bassist Utku Karamuk and drummer Ertuğrul Akyüz.
The Infinity Chamber, the new darlings of the Istanbul scene, play hard, literate, diverse, well-crafted original folk-rock songs. You can check out their latest single The Lonely Gnome below!
We managed to catch up with the band as they talked about their latest single and more!
How pumped are you for the release of The Lonely Gnome?
It’s been a long and meticulously planned project and I’m stoked with the result. The song itself was some years in the making…. but we got it right. The video-shoot in and around Istanbul in late Autumn was a lot of fun. And now to be releasing it is the final culmination, and it feels good. It’s an interesting piece, in my opinion.
Can you tell us anything about the track nobody knows?
It’s ostensibly about a gnome enduring a bizarre week, except not entirely. It’s actually about the creative process involved in producing a song out of the nothingness, from the mundane, piecing it together, developing it. It’s a song about the soft, quiet, solitary business of art.
The “leaves” of paper you see at times hidden throughout the video are actually inscribed with old lyrics and poems of mine which, given that they represent the residue of dreams in the story, felt very appropriate. The gnome is named “Chomsky”.
If you could work with any band on a new song, who would it be and why?
My band will hate me for saying this, but I reckon Radiohead would be an interesting band to work with. Prickly personalities aside, I think the two groups’ sensibilities would meld very well together. Wine and cheese. And to be fair, cheese and wine.
What’s the alternative scene like in Istanbul?
Istanbul has undergone a lot of changes over the last decade and a half… hot-beds of nightlife like Taksim have gone from being cheap, seething, wild, urban jungles, to a sort of barren religious wasteland, to an anarchic centre of humanistic revolution, but what is well underway now is a revival. The music scene in Istanbul was always rather cover-band heavy, but there’s an explosion of original music happening, a sort of new maturity, and some legitimately interesting stuff is coming out as a result.
Do you ever go back to New Zealand and would you ever tour there?
No, I don’t. As beautiful as New Zealand is, its cultural backwater isn’t really a place to thrive artistically. Its rather cloistered music industry is more or less held captive by self-appointed gate-keepers. I recently read somewhere someone – somewhat sardonically – describing the scene there as 78% Cheesy Awards Ceremonies, 18% Government-funded PC identity politics, and 4% Music. It’s just too small.
If you could play at any venue you in the world, where you it be and why?
The Hammersmith Odeon. Because Lemmy.
Will you be releasing an EP/Album in 2018?
We very much hope to be starting work on the 4th album, yes. We have a bunch of new songs ready to go, things from our live set, and they are good. Some harder ones.
What was the first gig you all attended?
If by that you mean in the capacity of playing together, in our current incarnation, it was at Rock ‘n Rolla Live, in Istanbul.
If you mean the gigs we each attended individually first…
Well our bassist, Utku Karamuk’s was Sepultura, in Switzerland, on their “Roots” tour. Our drummer, Ertuğrul Akyüz’s was a concert of Turkish Classical Music, our lead guitarist, Fatih Aygün’s was The Scorpions in the summer of ’93. Mine was Billy Idol, in Auckland, New Zealand. Some very interesting things happened with my girlfriend in the back of the bus on the way home.