about
The FLOWERS OF HELL are a trans-Atlantic space rock orchestra made up of 16 experimental independent musicians who are based in London, England and Toronto, Canada. Their sophomore album, COME HELL OR HIGH WATER, includes guests from The Patti Smith Group, Spiritualized, British Sea Power, Broken Social Scene, Guided By Voices, & others. By special request from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields, the group have opened for MBV. Yet an accolade came from a much higher place when NASA’s mission control staff declared their love for the band’s symphonic space rock, synching one of their songs with footage of Discovery’s 2009 voyage. The video went viral amongst Space Center workers, resulting in the band appearing on the Space Channel. The Flowers Of Hell was started by Canadian Greg Jarvis as a studio project in London in 2002, expanded into a live British band in 2005 and extended across the ocean to Toronto in 2008. Their Death In Vegas produced 2006 self titled debut album received critical praise in the British and Japanese press for creating classical tangents from The Velvet Underground & Nico and the late Spacemen 3/early Spiritualized sound. Their name comes from the old blues idea that the pleasure of the listener is born from the misery and toil of the musician. Creating Come Hell Or High Water involved recording 30 musicians in over 40 sessions that were pulled together in London, Toronto, Prague, Detroit and Abilene, Texas. The extraordinary line up of musicians involved have been members or sideplayers in acts much larger than the Flowers Of Hell, including Broken Social Scene, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Patti Smith Group, John Cale’s band, Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, British Sea Power, Bat For Lashes, The Earlies, Guided By Voices, The Clientele, Primal Scream, Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, Tindersticks and The Early Years amongst others – however, the band don’t see themselves as a super group, but more humbly as an amalgamation of sideplayers with a few main men brought in as guests. The composing, recording, arranging and mixing of Come Hell Or High Water was done largely by Greg Jarvis following timbre-to-shape synaesthetic visions. Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where two senses are intermingled. An estimated 3% of the world’s population are synaesthetics. With the rare timbre-to-shape variant, sounds involuntarily trigger a translucent visual layer of moving shapes which follow a consistent audio-visual language. Greg Jarvis explains, “I see sounds. When I hear sounds, I see each timbre in front of me as shapes that follow patterns, often gliding, pulsing and swirling, while the rhythm and timing interlock them all. Each timbre behaves differently, and that’s the main reason we’ve got such a variety of instruments on the album. I spent a lot of time listening/watching the works-in-progress and adding and adjusting things so that each song would create the most beautiful moving images possible. It was a slow, involved process that took a lot of determination to stick with – hence one of the meanings of the album title.”
