A conversation with Sianspheric from 1995 (about how they made the greatest Canadian shoegaze album of all time)
Revisiting the Burlington, Ontario space-rock band's classic debut, Somnium, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).
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THE OPENERS
Happy 7/4 to all those who celebrate.
Notes on this week’s additions to the stübermania 2025 jukebox:
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, “Full of Fire”: Toronto-via-Turin avant-pop maestro Daniel Colussi follows up a recent tour with Frog Eyes with his fourth FDM album, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, later this month, and fans of Destroyer/Father John Misty-style sleazy listening and enigmatic elegance would be wise to take note.
Boslen, “Whitney”: The B.C. MC’s new mini-album, Dali, marks his return to the indie trenches after a brief run on Capitol/Universal and, if recent social-media posts are to be believed, he’ll soon be bowing out of the rap game entirely to pursue other musical passions. Accordingly, “Whitney” finds him in a reflective mood (with Vancouver indie-pop veteran Louise Burns providing the wistful vocal hook), and while Ms. Houston gets a nostalgic shout-out, it sounds more like Boslen’s really pining for the old Kanye—in particular, the grimy glam swing of “Black Skinhead.”
Gus Baldwin, “Credit”: By fortuitous coincidence, on the very same day Gus appeared on my best of 2025 (so far) list last week, the Austin garage-rock phenom dropped a new solo single—and in sharp contrast to the smash ‘n’ grab racket he usually makes with his berserker backing band The Sketch, “Credit” complements its lockstep Can groove and pin-pricked guitar melodies with phone-sex chatter like an X-rated King Gizzard.
Blue Lake, “Cut Paper”: With his upcoming album The Animal (out Sept. 26), zither-wielding Texan-born/Copenhagen-based composer Jason Dungan continues to master the fine art of pocket-sized post-rock pastorales that are at once earthy and ethereal.
pôt-pot, “WRSW”: Speaking of multinational experimental acts—this psych-rock band hails from Portugal via Ireland, and both this song and their imminent debut album for felte reference Warsaw, but their motorik manoeuvres suggest their heart truly belongs to Dusseldorf.
THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Sianspheric
The date: October 26, 1995
Publication: The Varsity
Location: The stairwell at Lee’s Palace that extended from the old coat-check booth to the second-floor bathrooms.
Album being promoted: Sominium
The context: When you scan any list of the best shoegaze albums/songs/bands from any publication of note—Pitchfork, NME, Vice, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Screen Rant, to name a half-dozen—they all have something in common (well, aside from MBV and Slowdive inevitably jostling for the top spots): zero Canadian presence. And the sites that do acknowledge bands from north of the border—like Treblezine and Complex—had to significantly stretch their definition of shoegaze to accommodate them (indie-pop faves Alvvays in the former case, doom-metal merchants Nadja in the latter).
It’s not like the country has ever been lacking for flange-pedal fetishists—shout out to An April March, Sully, Hollowphonic, Mean Red Spiders, and Southpacific—but in the pre-internet era, it was difficult for Canadian indie bands to tap into the international conversation, and there was no real unified domestic shoegaze scene to build any kind of critical mass. And while there have since been a number of globally recognized Canadian acts clearly influenced by shoegaze—Godspeed, Do Make Say Think, Caribou circa Up in Flames—their musical aesthetics are ultimately too eclectic to be contained under the shoegaze umbrella. These days, we have artists like Zoon and Sunnsetter proudly carrying the Cangaze torch, and there’s an amazing new No Joy album coming out next month, but, lamentably, I rarely see these or any other Canadian names pop up in shoegaze-revival trend pieces.
However, if there’s one Canadian shoegaze record I’d put right up there with the genre’s godheads, it’s Somnium, the debut album from Burlington, Ontario’s Sianspheric, released on Sonic Unyon Records 30 years ago today (at least according to Apple Music’s metadata). As shoegaze’s first wave was cresting in the mid-’90s, Somnium presented a mercurial melting pot of the genre’s myriad forms: the hazy-headed mysticism and space-rock propulsion of Verve’s A Storm in Heaven, the grungegaze fireworks of Hum and early Pumpkins, the infinity-pool serenity of the Cocteaus, the abstract expressionism of the Kranky Records roster (along with a hearty dose of Dark Side-era Floyd to remind us of where all this cosmic rock music began).
Sianspheric may not have had a ton of fans, but they had the right ones, including Swervedriver’s Adam Franklin (who would go on to record a split EP with the group) and fellow Hamilton-area native Daniel Lanois (who was reportedly so taken with the band, he was jonesing to produce Somnium’s follow-up in between sessions for Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind; when the logistics didn’t pan out, he provided Sianspheric with handwritten notes on how to record the album that became 1998’s There's Always Someplace You'd Rather Be.)
Unlike most of the conversations that appear in this newsletter, the interview below—conducted when the band were still branding themselves as SIANspheric4—isn’t a raw transcript (because the original tape is long gone), but a reprint of the article I wrote for the November 13, 1995 edition of the University of Toronto student newspaper, The Varsity. This was maybe, like, the sixth article I ever wrote in my life, and it’s been preserved below—in photographic and text form—in all its occasionally cringey, dated-yearbook-photo inglory (though, for the record, I did not write the headline and cutline). But I’m more than willing to embarrass myself here for the greater good of retconning Somnium into the shoegaze canon, and if just one curious reader out there is inspired to get their skull freshly split open by the lightning-strike riff of “Watch Me Fall,” then it was all worth it.
*****
"I want to be one of the loudest bands ever. I want to do what My Bloody Valentine did and destroy all the speakers in the club!”
So goes the rock and roll fantasy for Sean Ramsay, guitarist for interstellar overdrivers SIANspheric4. The only problem is that Sean and his mates—bassist/singer Steve Peruzzi, guitarist Paul Sinclair, and drummer Matt Durrant—are masters at creating some of the most tranquil and soothing music in indie-rock today. Whereas most bands are preoccupied with making noise, SIANspheric4 exists to make sounds.
Their debut for Hamilton über-indie Sonic Unyon, Somnium, is full of cool sounds. Thick layers of reverb and swirling feedback mesh with just the right amount of white noise to create ear candy for the comatose. Like globulars in a lava lamp, mind-bending epics like "Watch Me Fall" and "Needle" float off in random directions only to burst apart spontaneously into different forms. Where a song begins and where it ends are two completely different positions in the stratosphere.
With The Verve having recently bit the dust, My Bloody Valentine on a permanent leave of absence, and Pink Floyd now preoccupied with the art of sucking, SIANspheric4 is the only logical heir to the British space-rock throne. So what if they're from Burlington.
"There's a certain coolness to minimalist stuff, like Guided By Voices, where everything's on four-track," says Ramsay. "That's cool for them, but I don't see that happening for us. I want an album to sound wicked!"
"Yeah," adds Peruzzi, "I want our album to sound like an album, I want the drums to be there. I like what we did, and I’m proud of it, but you’re always trying to totally improve. We want it to be all digital."
The quest for studio perfection may fly in the face of the raw one-take/lo-fi aesthetic so prevalent today, but SIANspheric4 is used to sticking out like a sore thumb. For instance, SIAN has recently found itself opening for the likes of Crash Vegas and 13 Engines, bands with whom they share nothing but Canadian birth certificates.
Ramsay hopes that such gigs can help SIANspheric4 "broaden people's mind and get them to try different music. No one buys any shirts or CDs and stuff, but I still think there's people who like us and are appreciative."
"People either really hate us or they really like us," observes Peruzzi. "But as long as different people get to hear it, that's cool."
"I think it's hard to find a band that is a lot like us in this area for us to play with," says Durrant. "We're happy to play with anyone."
However little in common SIANspheric4 has with 13 Engines (which is very little), the same could be said of their similarity (or lack thereof) to the relatively more straight-forward distorto-pop of Sonic Unyon labelmates like treble charger and Tristan Psionic. As is the case with every hot indie imprint (see: Sub Pop, 4AD), the tendency exists to put the label before the music.
"I was wondering about that the other day," says Ramsay. "I mean, there's certain places that wouldn't book us because of Sonic Unyon, because they want to stay really underground or something. But I figure that in the end, it helps everyone. If people get the wrong impression, I guess it's their problem. Like, if the label has trouble, it shouldn't be indicative of any problem we have.
"I would rather be where we are [than on a major label]. Even if we were on Sony Records, and were still writing good songs like we are now, you still have to pay everything back. Like, The Rainbow Butt Monkeys just got signed. They got advances and stuff, but I don't think they'll be too wealthy in the near future."
"I think all Sonic Unyon bands are different from each other," adds Peruzzi. "I don't mind [the association]. If it helps us, that's cool."
Unfortunately, rave reviews and being on the fastest growing indie label in Canada have yet to translate into every musician's dream: quitting the day job. But like all great minds, SIANspheric4 make the most of their limited means.
Despite the dense waves of sound that embody Somnium, the band insists that they have a very small arsenal of effects pedals and that the use of overdubs was kept to a minimum. For SIANspheric4, the recipe is simple: plug in the guitar, fuck around with it for a while, and see what cool things you come up with. Vocals are just another sound effect, carried off into space by the noises that surround them.
"I guess that comes from My Bloody Valentine," says Durrant, referring to both bands’ penchant for barely audible lyrics. "Right now, people are just so trained to listen to the vocals. Like, think of any music on the radio; the vocals are the first thing you notice."
"It's not the most important part of the music," Sinclair insists.
"And there [are] different interpretations [of] the music," Ramsay says. “Some songs may sound really upbeat, but Steve's lyrics have a totally different atmosphere.”
Hence, in SIAN's world, words suck/riffs rule.
"We usually have, like, one riff we jam out for a million riff we jam out a million times," says Ramsay.
"And we make sure it's right and then we go onto something else," Peruzzi continues. "Things happen by accident and then you go back and say, 'I like that!' The best things happen by accident. No one sits down and writes the song and says, ‘okay, this is what you've got to play.’"
Durrant adds: "We've written a whole song out of the ending of another song," referring to Somnium's "I Like The Ride," which emerges out of the ashes of "Needle."
For ultimate comprehension of the SIAN aesthetic, one need only listen to Somnium's closer, "Where The Planets Revolve, I Wish I Was There." A most mellow affair, “Planets” is 21 minutes of a single repetitive riff, a hypnotic tribal drum rhythm, and lots of freaky guitar shit. Sure, it's self-indulgent, but self-indulgence is these guys' middle names.
"It's total jamming," says Ramsay of the instrumental. "We all just add our own thing.”
"With that song, we get to do everything," explains Peruzzi. "Like, we can't get all our ya-yas out on the whole album. There's some songs we play where you can't get all of the effects out. But with that song, because we love effects and noise so much, we can do whatever we want. You get into it and then you look up and go, ‘oh, this is a bit too long!’"
As for knowing when to stop, the band replies, in unison: "we don't!" Which raises the question: is it a drug thing?
"I don't think we're any more of a drug band than any other band," Durrant says.
"I do drugs," says Peruzzi. "I guess we all do. Some guy came up to me and said, 'I was really high the other day and really enjoyed your album.’ So I guess you couldn't listen to John Cougar Mellencamp and do that."
ENCORES
Just to clarify for my non-Canadian readers: yes, there was a band up here in the ‘90s called the Rainbow Butt Monkeys, they were signed to Sony Music Canada, and, as Ramsay correctly predicted, they weren’t that successful—at least not initially. A few years after this interview took place, they changed their name to the slightly less ridiculous Finger Eleven and struck post-grunge gold.
For a thorough accounting of Sianspheric’s turbulent post-Somnium trajectory—which includes members going missing, near-death experiences, and all manner of druggy misadventure—read Cam Lindsay’s definitive Vice feature on the band from 2014 (and then subscribe to his newsletter, First Revival, for all your contemporary nu-gaze needs).
Sianspheric are still technically active, though the last time I saw them was back in 2019 opening for Swervedriver at This Ain’t Hollywood (RIP) in Hamilton, and we’re now closing in on the 10th anniversary of their most recent full-length, 2016’s Writing the Future in Letters of Fire. However, they did drop a handful of singles during the pandemic, including—how timely!—a codeined cover of The Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up-era outtake “4th of July.”
This is a free newsletter, but if you really like what you see, please consider a donation via paid subscription, or visit my PWYC tip jar!