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Irish post-rockers AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR have been trucking along for a decade and a half, delivering their anthemic brand of guitar led instrumental rock to the masses since their debut in 2009. Growing alongside the band has been the UK’s premier festival of all things post, math and generally a little weird, ArcTanGent, where the four-piece both performed on the Wednesday night with a fan voted headline set and on the Saturday playing their new album Megafauna in full. We sat down with guitarist Rory Friers, bassist Ewan Friers and drummer Chris Wee at the festival to get nerdy about post-rock.
Discussing their first set of the weekend, selected by some of their biggest fans, guitarist Rory says, “I mean we did stress. I think the entire catalogue got a vote here and there, but when it came to it, by the law of averages, we were safe and it was all the kind of popular tunes. The one thing we were saying was that it’s rare that we actually would put all of those tunes in one set together, it was actually really good fun.”
During one of the deeper cuts in the set, S Is For Salamander from their 2011 Letters EP, the band were joined by a special guest drummer, they explain, “so that’s Karina Palmer from a band called SOAPER and she used to play in a band called BEAR MAKES NINJA back in the day. She does loads of session stuff with loads of different bands. She played the song better than all of us.” Palmer also performed on the song with the band when they first played ArcTanGent festival back in 2013.
Going deeper into their two sets the band explains, “I think with the album landing last week it just made sense to do that, and then I think it was James from ArcTanGent that the idea for the fan voted set. There’s sometimes been chat of trying to do a record in full that we put out a couple years ago called Jettison.”
Being the band’s most ambitious album to date the sci-fi themed concept album Jettison seemed a little too packed with guest appearances and studio magic to be played in full at the festival, instead Rory explains “I think there’s only there’s only so many songs we can hold in our brain at one moment in time and Jettison’s pretty dense. So this just seemed like the perfect bookend for the 10 years of festival. We played the first one and now we’re doing a set that’s dictated by the people of the festival and then we’re getting to present the new record. It’s kind of perfect.”
After their two sets this year AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR are the band who’ve performed at ArcTanGent the most, playing the ten years of the festival a total of eight times, talking about why they’ve come back to the yearly event so consistently the band says, “getting asked back is a large portion of it. There’s something about where we were at as a band, when this festival began and the relationship between James and Jock and the organisers here and us and it’s like we’re all kind of part of this same community.”
Fellow ArcTanGent mainstays BOSSK also did two sets at the festival, the first of which was heavy on surprise covers, when asked what they’d like to play if they had the opportunity to do some covers outside of their post-rock comfort zone AND SO I WATCH YOU FROM AFAR explains “we did years ago. When we were in the states, when we toured with TTNG we nearly did a cover of One Thing by AMERIE. The two bands kind of worked it out and we didn’t do it in the end but it was really good. It has that great break. Back in the day we did a couple of covers. We used to do a cover of DJ SHADOW, High Noon, that was always banging.”
After their previous album, 2022’s sprawling, science fiction infused post-rock epic Jettison, the band’s latest release Megafauna, which was recorded in a week with only the four members and no overdubs, is extremely minimalist in comparison. “I think we could say that the environment in which we were writing it was like, right in the middle of lockdown. Everything was kind of zoomed in on our room, on our interpersonal experiences. And with that, we then reflected that on the record, it’s like our worlds had all shrunk so the conceptual universe of the band shrunk in a way.”
Drummer Chris Wee goes on to add, “on Megafauna there’s an ambition in itself, it’s like exercise and being very minimal. It’s like, very laid bare, nothing to hide behind on there”, with Rory Friers elaborating: “It’s a very honest representation of what it sounded like all those months in the practise room and that’s kind of what we were trying to present on the album.”
Megafauna is out now via Pelagic Records.
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