With half of us based in London and the rest of us in Toronto, the Flowers Of Hell are a trans-Atlantic rock orchestra made up of 16 or so experimental independent musicians. We mix orchestral and rock instrumentation while mainly creating wordless pieces that explore the intersecting points of classical and psychedelic blues based music (e.g., the Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3). Our name comes from the old blues ideal that the pleasure of the listener is born from the misery & toil of the musician.

Our second album, Come Hell Or High Water, has somehow turned out rather epic. It took a full year of work and involved recording 30 musicians in over 40 sessions that we pulled together in London, Toronto, Prague, Detroit, & Abilene, Texas. A lot of the people on it have played in acts vastly larger than us, including the Patti Smith Group, John Cales band, Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, British Sea Power, Bat For Lashes, Broken Social Scene, The Earlies, Guided By Voices, The Clientele, Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa, Tindersticks, The Early Years, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra amongst others. But were not to be mistaken for a supergroup. It isnt Patti Smith working with Jason Pierce, Natasha Khan, Kevin Drew, Stuart Staples & Robert Pollard - rather its Pattis bassist, Jasons sax player, Natashas violist, Kevins violinist, Stuarts saw player, and Roberts drummer working with the other guests and Flowers.

The record was produced by our own Greg Jarvis, who for assistance in mixing enlisted the services of three renowned artist-mixers: Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3/Spectrum, Tom Knott of The Earlies, and Jan Muchow of Pragues Ecstasy Of St. Theresa.

The composing, recording, arranging, and mixing of Come Hell Or High Water was done largely by following timbre-to-shape synaesthetic visions. Synaesthesia is a neurological phenomenon where two senses are intermingled and an estimated 3% of the worlds population are synaesthetics. With timbre-to-shape synaesthesia, sounds involuntarily trigger a translucent visual layer of moving shapes which follow a consistent audio-visual language. I see sounds, explains Jarvis, When I hear sounds, I see each timbre in front of me as shapes that follow patterns, often gliding, pulsing, and swirling with the rhythm and timing interlocking them all. Each timbre behaves differently, and thats the main reason weve got such a variety of instruments on this album, Greg explains. I spent a lot of time listening/watching the works-in-progress, and adding & 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.

Synaesthesia also underpinned the work on our self titled debut album, but with that record the main goal was to build classical tangents from The Velvet Underground & Nico and the late Spacemen/early Spiritualized sound. We recorded it at the Contino Rooms with Tim Holmes of Death In Vegas and had musical contributions & advice from Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3/Spectrum. It came out in the UK at the end of 2006 on Earworm - a long running bedroom label who has released top stuff from the likes of Spacmen 3, Yo La Tengo, Apples In Stereo, & many more. It was well received by the British and Japanese press and we set a BBC radio record for the longest live pop instrumental performance (13 mins, 59 seconds). We also did quite a special London gig for a crowd that included Sonic, Tim Holmes, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine, Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500/Luna, and Doug Hart of the Mary Chain.

Both the English and Canadian based halves of us will be doing shows separately through out the year on both continents, with Greg going back and forth.......[Read Less]