Interview with Rock Band Selve on New Singles and Upcoming Album ‘Breaking Into Heaven’

MuzicNotez: First off, it’s an honor to be doing this interview with you, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us.

Introduce yourselves, what are your names and rolls in the band?

Selve: The pleasure is all ours. We are Selve! Comprised of:

– Loki Liddle: Vocals, Lyrics, Vision, Energy
– Reece Bowden: Lead Guitar
– Creation Saffigna: Vocals, serious serious vocals
– Scott French: Bass but also producer of massive talent
– Michael Baldi: Drums drums drums
– Liam Kirk: Keyboards, pianos and hype man

How did you meet and form up? How long have you been together?

Selve: Fun Answer: A few hundred million years ago our spaceships collided at an intersection above Earth on our varying trajectories across the multi-verse. We decided to put our heads together and combine the particles of our devastated ships to try to get back on our way, but still haven’t had any luck yet. The band is our latest attempt to gather the kind of colossal momentum we need to get back out there.

Reality: Selve was the brainchild of frontman Loki Liddle, and it has undergone many transformations and ensemble shuffles over the years since we started releasing in 2019. Some of the members have gone to school together since kids, some of the members are in long term romantic relationships, some of the members met in university, some of the members met around the traps and some of the members have only just recently joined, but all are infamously great friends who consider each other family.

Website: www.SelveMusic.com
TikTok: @selvemusic
Instagram: @selvemusic
Facebook.com/SelveMusic

How did you come up with the name Selve? What does it mean?

Selve: Selve is definitely a kind of polyseme that is hard to talk about without sounding pretentious. Loki used to title his journals ‘Selve 1, 2, 3 ect’ before he started the band. Kind of a made up word to reference the totality that is also inclusive of the individual, rather than ‘I’ and ‘it’, or ‘me’ and ‘universe’.

Or maybe it’s kind of about imagining the big personality that is made up of all people on Earth like cells in a body. Or maybe that just a band of 6 x people creates a collective Self that is bigger than the selves in the band, so split the difference, call it a Selve, a whole greater than the sum of its parts blah blah blah. Maybe it just means Together. Who knows! Maybe that’s all bullshit. But it has a ring to it anyway.

Who were your musical influences, idols, or bands growing up that have helped mold you into the band you are today? Or helped mold the music that you create?

Selve: We are a band of 6 x members so the estuary of our merging influences creates a big pool, so I will only speak for myself (Loki).
As a child: It was all Dido, mum played so much Dido, and Missy Higgins, I know every word. But my first two CD’s I ever bought were Demon Dayz by Gorillaz + American Idiot by Green Day… so they are drenched into my psyche. As a teenager it was probably all the usual suspects from the 60’s cause I thought I was different and cool: The Doors, David Bowie, Hendrix, all that jazz. Then I started going to festivals at around 15 and actually started listening to the music of the living. Big influences from bands like Alt-J, Foals, Half Moon Run, Radiohead, Glass Animals etc. I guess currently over the last year some albums I’ve been rinsing are: Romance by Fontaines D.C, Submarine by the Marias and the Crux by Djo.

But to be honest I’m mainly inspired creatively by the legacy of incredible Blak artists that have paved the way before me, and are paving the ways all around me as peers! There are too many to mention.

What’s the greatest concert you’ve ever been to or performed?

Selve: I recently saw Marlon Williams performing his new album Te Whare Tiwekaweka in his hometown of Christchurch, which is an album sung entirely in Te Reo Maori. It was a really really beautiful show, and so moving to see the way that this celebration of culture was impacting people, and that an album that did away with English was selling out 2500 pax rooms multiple nights in a row all around New Zealand. It was just really inspiring.

The best show we’ve ever performed however, was our recent launch of Breaking Into Heaven with a 33-piece orchestra. We sold out the room at 700pax which is a first for us, and just played the new album front to back. It was as bombastic as it was intimate and i’ll never forget it.

What’s the ultimate goal you want your music to achieve, or for you to achieve in your career as a band? Any particular message you wish to send?

Selve: I think we really just want to make great art that we can be proud of. To put the music into the world that we would love to listen to. To know that we have absorbed the fruits of our various influences and created something powerful and interesting that deserves a spot at the long table of music history, perhaps talking quite loudly and flipping the table from time to time, or maybe dancing on the table and getting dragged outside, kicked out and banned for life?

We hope that the music connects with people, and of course we’d like to connect with as much people as we can, play the big festivals and tour the world ect…but really we have no control over that. So we just focus on making music that we like, love if possible, and also creating a universe around Selve through our music videos, the things that we stand for, and the way that we treat each other and the people around us.

So if it all goes well – great, but if we die rusting like an old machine in a sandstorm with no success, we can perish knowing that at the very least we made something true.

Your last music video for ‘Loki Horror Picture Show’; is spectacular! The track and video look like a lot of fun on the surface, but there’s some deeper meaning to it of course. Particularly evident with the back stage shooting. What inspired this track and the music video? How would you describe it?

Selve: Loki Horror Picture Show is a fever dream about the fine line between delusions of grandeur and seemingly impossible things coming true. Its about the spectacle of celebrity and fame, and all that we are willing to sacrifice in order to attain it in today’s culture…its a kind of sordid attempt to skewer the self-contradicting artistic stance of rebellion against and dependence on the opinions of others…and perhaps just an exploration of mental health, with a potentially self-transcending revelation buried somewhere deep inside it for the rabbit hole scuba divers.

In September, your second full length album is being released, ‘Breaking Into Heaven’;. Which was fully recorded at the legendary Abbey Road Studios. First of all, what can we expect from this upcoming album? What does it mean to you? And what was it like recording at Abbey Road?

Selve: Man it’s hard to summarize what Breaking Into Heaven means to us. A lot is the short answer. We really put everything into this album, and far from pretending that we don’t care how it goes and if people connect with it, we really really do. We are at your mercy!

People can expect to be surprised, is the main thing I will say. Over our 2 x weeks in Broome, 6 x weeks in France and 2 x weeks at Abbey Road…we were constantly striving to surprise ourselves, contradict ourselves and turn the tables around whenever we could. It’d be a heavy rock song one day, then a super tender acoustic song the next, then an EDM rock banger, then a bare all ballad. We tried to really push outside of our comfort zones. And at often times it was the vulnerable and sweet songs that were harder to achieve than the big energy badass ones.

The album is about subverting and overthrowing the narratives that illustrate and control our lives, and finding freedom and power in your own story + truth. We wanted the album to be like a brick through the window, hence the album cover, a rude interruption, but one that provides a gift…its all very cryptic, but you’ll just have to listen.

You’ve got a new single called ‘Strange Romance’ out now – tell us about that! What else are you working on? What can we expect to see
and hear from you in the future?

Selve: ‘Strange Romance’ was inspired I guess by how thrilled we were that we were getting the extremely rare opportunity to bounce around the world. France, London, Berlin…we were having a lot of fun, and probably listening to alot of Brat, and wanted to make a song that had a kind of naughty club attitude and yet was still a bit psychedelic…and Strange Romance was the result.

We have plenty more surprises up our Selve sleeve for this campaign, we can’t give it all away, but you can 100% come to one of the shows we’ve just announced for our Breaking Into Heaven tour right away!!!

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LIVE DATES
Tickets available here
*most album tour dates free entry

Thurs 14 Aug – Mo’s Desert Clubhouse – Gold Coast, Yugambeh Country QLD *^
Fri 26 Sep – Princess Theatre – Meanjin/Brisbane, Turrbal & Jagera Country QLD *^^
Sat 27 Sep – Gloucester Country Club – Gloucester, Guringai Watoo & Kabook Country NSW
Thu 2 Oct – The Lass O’Gowrie Hotel – Mulubinba/Newcastle, Awabakal & Worimi Country NSW
Sat 4 Oct – Vic On The Park – Eora/Sydney, Gadigal Country NSW
Fri 10 Oct – Felons Barrel Hall – Meanjin/Brisbane, Turrbal & Jagera Country QLD ^^^
Sat 11 Oct – Mo’s Desert Clubhouse 6th Birthday – Gold Coast, Yugambeh Country QLD *
Fri 7 Nov – Lulie Tavern – Naarm/Melbourne, Wurundjeri Country VIC
Fri 14 Nov – Elsewhere – Gold Coast, Yugambeh Country QLD

* non album tour date
^ with Velvet Trip
^^ with Winston Surfshirt
^^^ with J.B Paterson

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