Members of Pulled Apart By Horses, Menace Beach and Grammatics stride out as Magic Mountain with ‘Zodiac’

Hello! Can you tell us a bit about how Magic Mountain came to be?

It’s essentially a culmination of us all playing together in various bands over the last decade and having a love of fuzzy garage rock n roll. After Mother Vulpine broke up I had a bit of a hiatus from playing guitar, relearning cello to play with Grammatics, Lone Wolf and Sam Airey. But the idea has always been there, to create this kind of music and feel free playing dirty guitar riffs with musicians I’m totally comfortable with. I guess the timing is just right and there’s been an influx of awesome bands to inspire us over the last couple of years - Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Meatbodies, Fuzz etc. We kind of started this band so that we could just have fun and try and play gigs with bands we love - mainly so we get to see them! We’ve played our second show with Meatbodies at the Brudenell, so that’s not a bad start!

Come Play With Me are doing great things at the moment - how did you end up linking up with them?

Yeah they’re great, they’ve put out some really ace bands recently so it’s nice for us to join that list. Tony approached us having heard we were playing together as a new band, and asked if we’d like to do a split with him. It was pretty trusting really having not actually heard anything other than a couple of Garageband demos from us! It’s great as it gives us a chance to get something out there while we’re still in fairly early days of writing and playing. It’s also given us a bit of a kick up the arse to actually make things happen.

‘Zodiac’ is a pretty brilliant introduction - is it a good indication of what’s to come?

I think we picked Zodiac as it is a bit of an all-rounder in terms of what we’ve written so far, it’s got a kick to it, but is a little bit jam-my, spacey feeling too. The other songs are generally pretty riff-y and fuzzy, with dual vocals - there’s a lot of different influences in there but we’re trying not to overthink anything and play to each others strengths. It’s come together really naturally, I guess because of how much we’ve each played in other bands and with each other before.

How far ahead are you thinking with MM at the moment? Are there plans for an album?

We’re kind of taking it as it comes and chipping away at writing and recording more songs as we go. We recorded this single with Rob Lee (of PABH), so we’re planning to keep recording with him, keep gigging and see what happens. As we’re still working around PABH and Menace Beach also being touring bands we’re keeping things quite open and just saying yes to gigs that we want to play. But yeah, hopefully there’ll be an album to come next year…

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