An interview with Sparkler

The San Diego "truegazers" discuss their new album 'Glidewinder', finding their sound through problem solving, soccer dreams, not titling songs, and throwing it back to the good old 'gaze.

Until I recently finished reading Andrew Perer’s Turn My Head Into Sound, I wasn’t fully cognizant of the agonizing struggle Kevin Shields faced in trying to write the follow-up to My Bloody Valentine’s seminal album, Loveless. As a fan, I had read press clippings over the years detailing how a new record would or would never come, but even when the band dropped m b v in 2013, I still didn’t give the 20-plus years it took him the kind of attention I should have. For any MBV fans in the same boat, I highly recommend giving Perer’s book a read. You might learn something like I did.

The reason I bring this up in a profile on a band that is not My Bloody Valentine, is because San Diego’s Sparkler are likely the closest current band I can think of that makes shoegaze as narcotic and otherworldly as MBV. I don’t think Sparkler would disagree when I say their music sounds heavily influenced by what Shields released throughout his years on Creation Records and beyond. There are lots of guitars in their music, but instead of overdriven riffs, they glide and whirl their notes into tornados of colours and textures.

Formed in 2020 by Chris Sennes and Tron Castillo in the aftermath of their previous Whirr-influenced nu-gaze band Hug, Sparkler sought to recapture the sounds that birthed shoegaze back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a way to help disassociate themselves from the glut of grunge bands calling their music shoegaze, Sparkler even coined a new term for their music: truegaze. While it might make some want to accuse them of purifying or gatekeeping shoegaze, the term makes a lot of sense when you hear either of their albums: 2023’s debut Big Sonic Chill or their new album, Glidewinder. Sparkler hit differently than other new-gen shoegaze.

As their publicist has pointed out, Sparkler lean more into the feminine side of shoegaze. That might sound weird to some, but when you take into consideration just how much masculine energy has fed into the genre of late, what Sparkler have to offer feels much more aligned with the ambiguous and fey characteristics that the original scene celebrated itself for.

In a time where shoegaze is starting to lose its lustre from a glut of monotony, Glidewinder offers up a divergent path inspired by the originators of the genre.

Can I just get a quick summary of how Sparkler formed?

Chris Sennes: Tron and I were previously in a band about nine years that was more um, nu-gaze or heavy shoegaze. “Whirrship,” as I call it. We did that for a little while and it didn’t really pan out. I pretty much caused the fall out of that band because of my drinking and drug use, and nobody wanted to be around me. So I got sober in 2019, and after that there was just no band. So we just kind of restarted.

I wanted to play something that was less gloomy and doomy, and more of a happy, fun shoegaze kind of project. It’s something that started in our old apartment, just between us two. We recorded demos and stuff and then started adding members so it could turn into a live thing. It was a change in lifestyle, but also about wanting to play music that was more characteristic of a happier and better lifestyle than I was living in at that time.

So the two of you formed Sparkler and the band is now a four-piece?

Chris: Yeah, I would say so. We’ve had like eight different drummers or something like that. There’s a joke that there are five drummers in San Diego and we’ve been through eight of them. So... we’ve had that, and then we had a long-time bassist who was a coworker of mine at Trader Joe’s. He played with us up through two years ago, and then Amelia [Sarkisian], our current bassist, took over. She played on the new record. Our old bassist Jesse introduced us to her and that’s how we ended up recording with her. So we added her and it was a really simple transition because she knew all the songs from mixing and recording the album. And then we had our old label head from Flesh & Bone filling in on drums, but that got difficult because he’s obviously not local. He’s from Chicago. So he was flying in for little tours and random shows so it was just not ideal, obviously. We’ve since found our friend Ian [Marshall], who knows Amelia as well, and played in a band with a really good friend of mine. So I would say that it’s a pretty solid four-piece we have at this time.

Tron: I think for the first time we feel that everyone here is where they’re supposed to be and really committed to the band.

The name Sparkler makes me think of those handheld fireworks that you put in birthday cakes. What other names did you guys consider for the band?

Tron: Ooh, dude! I remember you would send words or phrases that we liked via text, back and forth for a while. I don’t remember what they were.

Chris: I always liked the word Velour. But there was a band called Velour 100.
There are words that just tickle my brain. I wish I could remember more of them.
Velvet was another one too.

Tron: That’s a band now, from Brooklyn. They’re cool.

Chris: I think Sparkler just stuck for me. I love sparkles and like sparkling guitars and glittery stuff. So we were like, “Let’s just do it. It’s a great name.” People would ask us if it because of the Ringo Deathstarr record of the same name but it has nothing to do with that or the fireworks. It’s because I like glitter.

You mentioned Flesh & Bone. Glidewinder is coming out on à La Carte Records, which has a lot of great bands. Was moving labels just a logical transition?

Chris: I think so. They had more resources for what we needed, like a bigger distribution so folks could get our record in the UK or wherever else. They have a larger crew behind them that could help us take the load off because we were incredibly DIY. We still are. We were going to self-release the record just because it felt easier, but then we met with à La Carte, and they were like, “Oh, we can take care of this and that.” So we just felt it was a better step to take for what we wanted. They have a much more structured business model. We don’t have to bug them about tracking sales and all of that stuff. They are good about that and really well organized, so there are multiple people that we can reach out to for assistance. And they’re really good about integrating bands with all the other bands on the label too. It’s a community and a team, more than it is a label just putting out these bands. Everybody on the label seems to communicate really well and help each other out. They all want each other to succeed and grow and all that stuff.

With Flesh & Bone, we were pushing for a lot of things and there wasn’t really any movement. Some of the stuff that I wanted to do got shot down. I don’t mean to out them, but I felt that I wanted to do things and I wanted to grow, but that was not the priority for them. Their priority was selling the records that we could sell rather than trying to expand things with distribution or working with a label in the UK or Japan to release it there. I don’t see how that’s going to help us sell records. I care more about getting the music out there than selling records. I just want to play music and have people listen to it.

I like a lot of what Flesh & Bone puts out, but it feels more like a starter label, as demonstrated by bands like Greet Death and Doused, who both have moved on. I’m curious, how did the two of you discover shoegaze?

Chris: I probably got into it around 2012. There were a lot of adjacent bands that my friends and I were listening to. My best friend since kindergarten, who’s a fantastic musician, introduced me to My Bloody Valentine one night. We were not behaving ourselves the best that night. I think we were probably already listening to Nothing and Whirr, but that’s what introduced me to that and the classic stuff. I had really good friends around me. And I grew up listening to a lot of good music from the ‘80s and ‘90s too. So it was kind of natural.

Tron: I was living in San Francisco, going to San Francisco State at the time that Whirr and Nothing were getting big, around 2014, 2015. And we had a radio show that I had for one of my classes, and our first episode was like, “We’re gonna talk about shoegaze!” And I was like, “Man, that genre sucks,” because I didn’t like Whirr or Nothing. I wasn’t depressed, so I didn’t like that music. It didn’t speak to me. But then, I was forced to listen to the older stuff, and that’s when I discovered The Jesus & Mary Chain, Slowdive and MBV, and I thought it was pretty cool. So that was my introduction to that.

Do you guys have a favourite shoegaze band?

Chris: I think we agree that Fleeting Joys is our favourite, right?

Tron: Yeah.

Chris: The other two, I don’t know. Ian doesn’t really listen to much shoegaze as far as I’m aware. And Amelia listens to it a little bit more now that she’s been immersed in the genre with us.

You both mentioned getting into My Bloody Valentine. I just finished a new book called Turn My Head in the Sound, which does a pretty good job of explaining the band’s history and how they worked in the studio. Everything I’ve read about Kevin Shields in the studio is pretty fascinating. Since he seemed to lay down the blueprint, I’m curious to know how much of his process did you research or study for Sparkler? Basically, how did you achieve a lot of the sounds on your records, because it was a very painstaking, gruelling process for him?

Chris: Zero. I have read some articles explaining all the different things and experiments that he tried in the studio, but I don’t think we ever said, “We should do this.” We went into the studio with a blank slate, and Ameilia was really easy to work with. She was like, “We’re gonna just do this, and we’re gonna try a bunch of things. We’re gonna throw the kitchen sink at it. We’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna experiment.”

Tron: Yeah, you did a whole day of just sitting with every pedal and looping, making textures and messing with a couple boards and running it through whatever you could. For hours. And that was the experimental stuff that we did. Like, “What if we just did this? We’ll pick out what sounds really cool, and then use it as a transition for each song.” So it was like stuff like that. Playing with textures and sounds was a big one.

How arduous was the process?

Chris: It really just depends for sure. We only recorded it in a total of five days, but there were definitely hours that were pretty painstaking. But for the most part, it was fun trying to figure out what we were gonna do and how we would achieve it. It was fun. I like problem solving too. If there’s a certain sound or something that I want to achieve, I’m gonna find a way to do that. With percussion, because some of the instruments weren’t sounding the way I wanted them to sound, we ended up putting a urethane skateboard wheel on a drumstick, and used that as the mallet instead. That really got the pound I wanted. Just random stuff like that.

How much do you rely on using digital processors or computer programming compared to pedals and amps when you’re creating your music?

Chris: It’s all pedals and amps. I don’t really think we used much digital programming or plug-ins. We didn’t do a lot of that. There are your standard plug-ins, but I think most of it was just working with guitars and amps, live drums, and some synth stuff. It was mostly raw.

Tron: Yeah, we tried really hard to capture what was coming out of the amps onto the recording. That was a big deal for us, to try to make it sound like that. So that way when we do play live, you’re getting that same thing just louder. It’s not gonna be too far off. As close as possible.

I was gonna ask how challenging it is to take these songs from the studio and perform them live.

Chris: Ha ha, I personally think it’s the opposite for me! I think it’s what we sound like live, and then trying to apply that to how we can sound in a studio. Microphones just capture sound differently. Different rooms catch your sound differently and stuff like that. So there’s stuff where it’s like, “Oh, I hear this coming out of my amp. But then when I hear it coming through the monitors, I’m like, that is not what my guitar sounds like. Why does it sound like that?” So there have definitely been some aspects of live recordings that’s been difficult to apply live, but we found a way to do that. We do play with backing tracks, like MIDI drums and synths, and interludes, and random programmed percussion, like weird little shakers that don’t sound like shakers. Stuff like that.

We have one fluid set. We press play: the right one goes to the house and the left goes to our drummer’s ears, and then we just play for 30-35 minutes. With interludes it’s seamless. There’s no stopping, there’s no quiet, there’s no silence, there’s no talking in between songs. Everything transitions, one into another. So that part is definitely difficult for sure, but a lot of fun as well. The more frustrating part is getting what you do live and applying that to the studio.

It’s funny because that sounds more like how a rock band thinks: trying to capture the live sound in the studio. Whereas I thought Sparkler would be a studio band, not a live band. I was not expecting you to say that at all.

Chris: That’s really cool! Thank you so much for saying that. It’s really nice that you think we sound that good in the studio. Because it was a lot of work and there were aspects that were painstaking, for sure, in trying to achieve the sounds that we wanted to in the studio.

There was a lot about Kevin Shields using the glide guitar technique in that book about My Bloody Valentine. I was wondering if the album’s title, Glidewinder, is a direct reference to glide guitar?

Chris: Yeah, 100 percent. There is also this blues record called Slidewinder by J.B. Hutto. He used a lot of slide guitar, and I think that’s really cool, so it was just a word that I came up with that was kind of reflective of the sounds and the style of guitar. So I thought it was just a fun use of words. I have words that tickle my brain and I like combining things to make weird, silly stuff. I think about words way too often. So it was something I came up with off of the J.B. Hutto album and off the glide guitar.

Tell me about “truegaze.” Is that your reaction to what shoegaze has become?

Chris: Yeah, 100 percent. As I just mentioned, I like coming up with weird words and phrases and combining words. So that was definitely one of those things because there are so many subgenres of shoegaze.

Which is so funny because shoegaze itself is a subgenre… I mean, it was originally just a scene, but there are now subgenres within shoegaze. It’s become so silly.

Chris: The evolution of it has gone so far beyond and into a complete recategorization of it. But “truegaze” was just essentially a play on words, where we wanted it to be more about the classic and original sound, than nu-gaze, grungegaze or doomgaze, or whatever the fuck else gazes there are. It was just a fun word, and I think it might bother some people, but...

Tron: It bothered [our publicist], but that was hilarious.

Chris: He was like, “I don’t know if I should use that in your EPK, guys. It might put people off.” He thought it sounded pretentious.

Tron: It can give off that vibe. But also Stereogum premiered the first single, and in the first line they wrote, “Oh look, another shoegaze band!” But that’s not what we’re trying to do. We want to be a throwback to the old stuff.

Do you worry about being accused of gatekeeping? Some fans don’t tolerate that.

Tron: I hope we’re not. I like to use it in a way where this is how you can identify what we’re gonna sound like without having to hear us. We’re not gatekeeping anything because we do like a lot of the modern new bands. We are friends with many of them. So we have nothing against the new stuff, but as a band you want to be able to say something that’s going to make people think maybe this is going to be a little bit different. The same way everyone else creates their own little fugaze, sludgegaze, happygaze, whatever. We’re just playing on that whole thing too.

Chris: People can interpret it how they want to, but it’s mostly just something fun for us. It’s kind of an identifier for us.

Chris, at the beginning, you used a word that I’ve never heard before,“Whirrship,” which is a word that is more relevant than ever because Whirr are kinda the biggest shoegaze on the planet. I can remember when they first came out, and to see them become so huge is a total surprise for me. Do you think that band is responsible for a lot of these newer bands that have just materialized out of nowhere?

Tron: 100 percent. And there’s nothing bad about that. I think it’s amazing that you could take a genre of music that had its own vibe, and then you created a sound that was something completely new and different. Chris, you were talking to [Whirr’s] Nick Bassett about it, because he mixed our last record and he said, “I don’t know, man. I was just trying to sound like my favourite bands and Whirr is what we came up with.”

Chris: Like what he said about Whirr, Sparkler was a byproduct of what we tried to achieve in a way. We were doing this all in a time before there was so much access to the world of internet pedals and gear demos and videos called “Here’s how to sound like My Bloody Valentine” or “Here’s how to sound like Slowdive.” They really did that before shoegaze was more popular with the content creators and the YouTubers and all that. They did what they did with the resources that they had and Whirr became a byproduct of wanting to play that similar style of music. And then it kind of jumped a few phases, I suppose. They tried it in like two days and it just became the standard for what shoegaze is now, in a way.

Tron: I think that’s so cool. Like, your homies just like changed the trajectory of music forever. You gotta give them kudos.

What do you feel are the biggest differences between Glidewinder and Big Sonic Chill?

Chris: I’m still pretty new to music, like playing music and writing my own songs. I only started playing guitar when I was 22 and I’m 32 now. So it’s been a long time now. But I think Big Sonic Chill was definitely more like asking, “What do we want to sound like? What sounds do we want to achieve?” Throughout that entire record, we tried different things and I think that Glidewinder is more focused. I think it’s more intentional. I think it’s more direct with the sounds that we want to make, the music that we want to make, without skewing too far and having weird outlier songs.

[On Glidewinder] I wrote songs with more structure, whereas Big Sonic Chill was a lot more free form, which made it really hard for people to learn them. There were quite a few songs that didn’t really make any sense. If you break it all down into math, into numbers and parts and all that, they don’t make sense.

“Pet Hotel” reminds me a lot of Slowdive’s “Souvlaki Space Station.” It has the reverb and delay, and a pretty strong dub influence to it. What is the genesis of that song?

Chris: That song is ten years old and goes back to our old band.

Tron: That was the first song I ever helped you write. I did the vocals on that one and the bassline.

Chris: That’s still a song that we really liked from back then, and we decided to rework it and it ended up being really cool. We liked it a lot. It does sound like “Souvlaki Space Station,” for sure. Hopefully it doesn’t get called out too much. I don’t think we ripped it off too hard. We took some of the things they did and applied them to the song.

Tron: Honestly, it’s just a “bing, bing, bing…”

Chris: And honestly, I love dub. So the reverb-y drum machine snares with the delay and all that was really cool to do. I also love playing bass. It’s one of my favourite instruments to write with. I love putting down some guitar and then getting to have some fun finding a bassline to play underneath my guitar parts. But we think it turned out really cool.

Did you release an original version of that song with your old band Hug?

Chris: Yes, we did. We did, yeah. It’s somewhere deep, deep, deep in the archive. The good thing is that we wrote the whole song, so nobody’s not getting credit.
We didn’t steal anything from anybody else. We decided that this song is still good and still very much like Sparkler. So we just reworked it to be even more Sparkler. Originally I wasn’t totally all for it, but Tron loved that song and really wanted to do it. So I said, “Okay, let’s do it. Let’s completely tear it apart and add new bass and add new leads and new vocals and new drums.” It’s mostly just the guitar that stayed the same.

What happened with the naming of “Untitled 2”? Was it too tricky to come up with a name for that song?

Tron: 90 percent of the song titles leave without titles because Chris will do a demo on GarageBand and he’ll just name it whatever fun word is stuck in his head. I don’t think he ever named that one, so it was just “Untitled 2” because there was already an “Untitled 1” somewhere else. And then we just kept it “Untitled 2” and I never went in to update or change it at all.

Chris: I came up with names for it and then I got out voted. Everyone was like, “Let’s just keep it as ‘Untitled 2.’ I think it’s cool.” So I said that’s fine. I have plenty of other words that I would like to use for titles one day.

I know of a few shoegaze bands in San Diego, like yourselves, Blossom and Distressor. What is the music scene like there?

Tron: Blossom, we love. We’re really good friends with Mateo [Ruiz]. He is like 18.
He’s a baby, so I call him my little cousin. We met him when he was like 16 years old, when he was a baby baby. And so, yeah, we love Blossom. Distressor, we’ve known Cory [Kurkierewicz] for a long time. I think we actually played their first show with them ever, as our old band. I think because the scene itself in San Diego, as far as shoegaze goes, is pretty small, you just end up becoming friends with everybody. It’’s all very interconnected and intertwined. I don’t think Distressor are even local anymore.

Chris: They’re split between Atlanta and San Diego. And Distressor’s drummer was our first drummer too in Sparkler.

Tron: So everything is connected, and that’s what the scene feels like. You play with your friends a lot, or you try to get on bills of the genres that you would normally play with.

Chris: I think San Diego’s community is pretty tight-knit, because for a big city, we’re not really a big city. We don’t have a hundred venues to play in San Diego.
We have two main ones that people actually want to play at and go to. There are a couple of DIY ones these days, but it used to be a lot different for sure. For such a big city it has such a small city venue kind of a deal, where a lot of us have played the same venues with the same bands and been a part of each other’s musical careers. Whereas in San Francisco, your friends play in a band but they have no idea who these other people in this other band are even if they’ve played with them before.

Tron: It’s funny, because every time we do interviews people will ask about some San Diego bands, and I’m like, “Yep, those are the homies. We know them.”

What is another band from San Diego that fans of Sparkler should know about?

Chris: The obvious ones are Blossom and Distressor, but we don’t really need to shout them out. I’d say Big Blue World. They’re really cool. Good friends that we have known forever.

Tron: I love Big Blue World! Yeah, listen to Big Blue World.

Chris: Also Pleasure Pill. They rock. I think people that listen to us should definitely listen to Pleasure Pill.

Tron: They’re true Oasis fans.

As San Diegans, have you guys ever gone to Dia De Los Deftones?

Chris: No, but I like Deftones. I’m not a huge fan though.

Tron: As a Latina, I have to like Deftones. I think they’re cool. Never in my life, would I ever call them any kind of ‘gaze band.

Agreed. I’m not sure when Deftones became shoegaze pioneers but a lot of people in the world feel they’re part of it. To me they escaped nu-metal and just became the best mainstream heavy rock band in the world.

Chris: Not to back track, but some guy we know tried telling me that Superheaven or Daylight was shoegaze, and I was like, “What are you talking about?” I was trying not to gate-keep, but he was convinced. “They’re totally shoegaze. They have the shoegaze guitar sound.” And I said, “I don’t really think so. Just because there’s distortion and chorus on some stuff doesn’t make it shoegaze. There’s not even really any reverb.” It’s more like post-grunge. And I think we’re in the post-gaze era now.

Tron: Superheaven are a great band though.

Chris: Yeah, I love Superheaven. I didn’t really like their most recent record too much, but their first two records are really cool. I think Ours Is Chrome was so ahead of its time. Because after that record they tanked as a band, but now every band sounds like that record. They were five, ten years too early and they’re doing really well for themselves.

I noticed you guys are big soccer fans. Whose idea was it to sell the soccer gear as merch?

Chris: Yeah, that’s me. I’m wearing a soccer shirt right now. I grew up playing soccer through college. But I drank too much and did too many drugs and I ended up getting kicked off my team and dropping out of school and getting sober. So I’ve been sober twice. First time didn’t last very long, but in the last six or seven years I got back into it. I really like the English football culture. I think football culture everywhere is really cool. It can be toxic too, but there’s really cool fashion.

Tron: And so many older bands like Oasis, Stone Roses are getting involved with it.

Chris: Swervedriver has a song that mentions their club too.

It seems to be a thing now. Deftones have those soccer jerseys, same with Hotline TNT. Was this a dream of yours to put your band’s name on some kit?

Chris: Yeah, I’ve been waiting a really long time to do this. I’m so excited to finally do it. What Deftones did was cool though. They sponsored a local youth team in Sacramento. I would love to do that. Put Sparkler’s name on this club youth team and just try to help run the organization. That would be really fun and cool. But yeah, the soccer thing is definitely more popular and I don’t know where that’s coming from. I’ve been dreaming of doing this for years. And it’s not like I’m ahead of the curve or anything like that, but it’s cool.

What team do you support?

Chris: I’m a Chelsea fan.

And you play in a league?

Chris: Yeah, I play in an adult league. Sunday League Superstar. That’s the name of the next Sparkler record!

Wait, does Sparkler have any songs about soccer?

Chris: No.

Tron: Maybe I’ll do you a solid and write a song about soccer.

Chris: “Blue Is The Colour” is actually our Chelsea song, but it’s just like the name of the Chelsea anthem. I hope that one day “Blue Is The Colour” becomes a Chelsea song.