Seasick

Seasick is Geoffrey Lee from Bristol, England; Jasmine Golestaneh from Florida, France, and London; and Sam Levin from Orinda, California.

Before they set out to record their first full-length album, we sat down with them to talk about The Doors, mysticism, and the dynamics of  a trio in which two members are sleeping together.


What do you think of Seasick being described as a female-fronted Doors? Do you think that's accurate?  Are The Doors a strong influence?

Jasmine: Well— [laughs]

Sam: I don’t know – I mean yes, more for the other guys than me, we’ve all listened to The Doors. And they’re a great band. I think part of the reason people make that connection is the instrumentation; we’ll use the organ sound with the guitar and the drum beats could be thought of as Eastern-sounding and The Doors didn’t really have straight rock beats. But I think we’re a lot different than The Doors.

You obviously have influences, but you also have your own sound...

Sam: It’s kind of cheapening to sum it up and say that we’re like The Doors.

Jasmine: The Doors are great and I like the Doors. But I don’t reference any bands when I’m writing music. It’s a very personal process. It’s not really informed by anything really specific. I mean I could have just had a really nice walk in the park and been inspired by it.

Sam: And we all listen to tons of different kinds of music. I listen to all sorts of jazz and classical. Geoff listens to all sorts of punk rock, electronic and gypsy music.

Jasmine: To the extent that I embrace poetry and mysticism. I used to write poetry and I wanted to be a poet.

You are in some ways, right?

Jasmine: Yeah, exactly. I guess Jim Morrison was also a poet who chose to bring that format to music. In that sense there’s connection. I’m also into mysticism. And shamanic experiences and rituals – there’s a connection but it’s not really because of The Doors, it’s just my own personal interest.

You write most of the song lyrics?

Jasmine: Yeah. I write all the songs and the lyrics and then I bring it to Sam and Geoff and then it becomes something else. So I will kind of bring this skeleton into rehearsal.

Where are you from?

Jasmine:  Originally, I’m half-Iranian and half-Latvian. I was actually born in the U.S. and then I lived in France until the age of seven. And then I lived in England.

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Where are you from, Sam?

Sam: Orinda, California.

So where were you born?

Jasmine:  I was born in West Palm Beach,Florida.

Then Paris?

Jasmine: I lived there from age two to seven.

Then...?

Jasmine: London. From 7 to 22.

And New York...

Jasmine: I’d come to New York when I was a teenager when I was on a trip with a friend of mine and we just had a crazy time. It was so much fun.

You mentioned before that you found New York City to be a spiritual place. I took interest in that because I find it to be a very insane place. How do you both stay sane?

Jasmine: For a living I’m an energy healer.

You weren’t kidding about the shamanistic stuff.

Jasmine: No, it’s my life. I guess I’m very involved in personal growth and consciousness changing sort of stuff. My creativity is a part of that. Anything transformational.

How does an energy healer work – someone at the office has low energy, or low production.

Jasmine: It’s more about shifting consciousness and releasing blocks of energy in your system that inhibit you from being fully self-realized or just living out your potential. It’s just giving people freedom.

So it’s kind of psychological isn’t it?

Sam: It’s both isn’t it?

Jasmine: It’s philosophical in the sense that it comes from philosophy and you can create your reality and there’s infinite possibilities and the only thing that’s inhibiting you from doing that is your own conditioning and beliefs about reality. So I will just kind of tune into somebody and tangibly I can sense where they might have a block and it might relate to their emotions, their thoughts, their childhood or something. So I’ll tune into it and talk about it a little bit. I’ve been trained in energy modality, so I can channel energy that will unblock the structure of that limitation and it will create a freedom in their system and that will manifest a change in their lives and result in them just having more fulfillment and fun. Basically it’s about having more fun.

Good job, eh?

Jasmine: It’s great, it’s amazing. I don’t like to link it to psychology or new age or anything.

You guys formed together a trio?

Jasmine: Well there have been many incarnations of the band. But this is the final incarnation. This started in January 2006 and it’s through to today.

And you feel this is final. You’ve finally found what you’re after?

Jasmine: Yeah, definitely. [Laughs]

I’ll transcribe "Jasmine nods."

Sam: Yeah, it’s cool we’re both nodding. [Laughs]

The name of the band. Was it always Seasick or were there others that were in contention?

Jasmine: We started out as Magic Spells. And then we were called Sirens. But they had a very different sound. They were more psychedelic folk. And we didn’t have a drummer. It was a trio with a guitar player. We had a guitar player, I played guitar and sang and Geoff played keyboards. It was very different.

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Who landed on Seasick?

Jasmine: Uh, me. I basically... that new sound was...

Sam: It was time for a new sound.

Jasmine: Yeah, there was a part of me that wasn’t being expressed in it and it just felt like I needed to come to another level. We had Sam towards the end of Sirens. And Sam’s energy gave me a sense of what it could be. And then Sam went to Prague for six months.

What was going on in Prague?

Sam: I did a study abroad through NYU.

Jasmine: In that time, we kind of split up. We stopped playing music and I just really went into my creativity and came into myself as an artist and just wrote a bunch of full new songs. Completely different. And when he came back we started playing them. And it was just "Wow!" this was it. It was just on fire. It was amazing. I feel like everything up to this has been growing the evolution process for me. And as soon as we arrived at Seasick it was full self-expression for me.

When you first hear it you don’t really know what to expect. Maybe that’s what you're going for?

Jasmine: Yeah, definitely. It should be an experience. And it should be kind of thrilling and ecstatic but also unnerving and kind of "What the fuck is happening?" I think that makes it exciting. And also it’s the sense that before there is any transformation in your life there is an emotional sickness. And you can only have a sort of light after you’ve had that.

Would you say that your music has a way of executing what your healing energy beliefs?

Jasmine: I wouldn’t say beliefs. It’s just transmitting an energy, definitely.

The energy stuff. Music can invigorate, music can open doors...

Jasmine: It’s music as a form of transportation to another place. It’s transcendent. It awakens you. That’s what music has done for me my whole life and that’s what I am trying to communicate.

Let’s discuss the process. You came up with all this material while he was in Prague and when he got back you started throwing it around...?

Jasmine: We come into rehearsal, and I’ll play a song and then we will start to play...

Sam: It’s always – every song sort of comes about very differently. And a lot of the songs have ended up being different then I think she’d intended it because sometimes Geoff or I will come up with something. But we spend a lot of time writing songs. We’ll have rehearsals where we’ll play the same song over and over again for hours. And do that for a couple of weeks until we get to something that seems to work for that.

How do you handle the collaborative aspects?

Jasmine: It’s really about respecting everyone’s instincts. And maybe sometimes Geoff and I will agree on something and Sam won’t. People will pair up and have an agreement. And it’s all about respecting the third party saying, "No, that doesn’t work." And then integrating their idea. You always have to be democratic. Anybody’s instinct against something, you have to take very seriously. Once you have this sort of collective of people creating art you really have to respect that everybody is part of the art form and they all have something to say that’s going to contribute.

All the better to work with the right people.

Jasmine: Exactly. That’s the main thing. We all have this telepathic sense of what feels right, what moves us. And that’s the most important thing is that it’s meaningful for all of us. We’re all inspired by it.

In all truth you do come from quite unique backgrounds and you’re in different places in your lives. How does that play into the dynamic?

Sam: We spend a lot time together. I live with Geoff and we’re dating [referring to he and Jasmine]. It’s a pretty tight group.

Jasmine: And Geoff is an old friend.

Sam: And they’ve known each other for a long time. We spend a lot of time together and we listen to music together.

Jasmine: We’re all passionate about music. And that bonds us together. And we’re all very free people. Very open-minded and experimental.

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How do you guys manage to have a romance in a band that is a trio, and the friend/roommate... how does that work?

Sam: It’s just life. Sometimes it’s hard but we’re all really committed. We had the band before we started dating. I think when we started dating we both knew that we would also have to be respectful of the band and Geoff if it was ever to work. Everybody has tension so sometimes there’s tension but you are committed to something and you work through it.

What about you, Geoff? Are there any downsides to having an in-band romance?

Geoffrey: When Jasmine and Sam first started dating, it seemed to me like the band was a bit in jeopardy, given the way most new relationships turn out! But it's worked out really well, and probably helps the vibe between us, if anything.

Jasmine: We basically all love each other. It’s really fun, for the most part. We have a sense of humor.

Are there any secrets you can tell us on how you blow off steam and keep it all together?

Geoffrey: When things are getting tense, we like to sit in a circle and masturbate together. I don't know why we do it - it just seems to work, I guess.

Right... So... When you first started playing in front of an audience did that effect the music?

Jasmine: I guess I don’t think about it as though, "Oh this is really different, how are they going to respond?" It’s more like "Wow. This just feels so powerful and electric and inspiring and let’s just transmit this." And then you just feel the energy from the people and you’re transferring energy back-and-forth and you’re creating this collective field. It’s really a beautiful experience.

You have a powerful voice, and the music itself has a lot of tangents.

Jasmine: It’s sort of like being in a trance. Like being in a trance state.

Sam: One thing that’s cool about a lot of shows we play is a lot of times watching from behind this drum set I’ll watch people in the crowd and a lot of people will sit down and stay in the same place for the whole set.

So they sit down and listen and are sort of with you in this trip?

Jasmine: We’re so much in that together that it’s kind of like osmosis.

Sam: I think that if you’re going to get that weird exotic thing, it better taste good. As an artist, if you’re exploring I think the only judge you can have whether it’s going to sound good or not to people is if it’s meaningful to you.

Jasmine: If you’re moved – if you’re really profoundly moved by it then other people will be. Because we’re all human, it’s a human experience and if it’s unusual and it’s moving you’re enabling people to open up a part of themselves that they’re not used to awakening. But that is a powerful part of themselves. It’s an inspiring part of themselves. That’s really interesting to me. It’s "Look there’s this interesting dimension that you can open up to. It’s really fun, it’s really thrilling and it’s safe – you can be there with us and have that experience."

Sounds pretty inviting.

Sam: There’s a lot of cool venues in the city that also are open to have anything go on.

Jasmine: Yeah, being in New York has really facilitated that. 'Cause people are open and ready to experience something like that.

What’s the longest song you’ve created? One that’s kind of epic?

Jasmine: We have this instrumental song called “Submarine.”

What about instrumental songs. It would seem appropriate for the sound that you play. You can kind of drift.

Sam: Our songs, I don’t know – even "Submarine" runs only four-and-a-half minutes.

Jasmine: They’re not that long.

Sam: I think they’re going to start getting longer because we used to never improvise as a band and we have started improvising recently which has opened up a lot of stuff. We’re going to start to include moments of that in our sets.

Jasmine: I like playing all of our songs, and they all display different aspects of Seasick's character. "Sailing the Ocean" is perhaps the most archetypal Seasick song, since it's about drifting endlessly in the middle of an
ocean, and has many of the musical tropes that characterize our sound - shifts in time signature and mood, and drony harmonies with unexpected twists.

Sam: The current set is almost no improv. But “Submarine”, for instance, is just sort of three sections. And we build up the first section. Then we go to the second section build it up to the third. So there is some improvisation there in terms of how we do that. It’s not really free improv but now that we’ve been doing free improv it’s going to expand.

Probably good to try it out to see where it will go.

Sam and Jasmine: Yeah.

Jasmine: It’s amazing. I used to improvise when I started making music. I used to improvise with people all the time. And then when I went to college I didn’t have people to play music with so I was just writing songs. I didn’t study music, I studied history.

At Oxford?

Jasmine: Yeah.  And I’ve been in-bounds since I was 14. All my life that’s what I’ve been doing since I was a teenager. I left school when I was 16 and went to work for Southern, a record distribution place in England. I just wanted to do music.

That’s very bold.

Jasmine: That was just it. I’m going to do music and have a band and work on this. Then I just wanted to get curious about politics. I just felt I wasn’t very developed politically or intellectually and then this major switch happened and I left all that. I became obsessed with politics and became an anarchist. I went to Oxford and I was all into that. But I realized that I realized that I couldn’t really affect change in the world through politics. And I just found that I spent I would play with my guitar in my room and writing snags and that was more meaningful to me than studying politics. And I just felt more moved by that. So by the time I graduated I was like, "Yeah, I just want to do music." Which is what I wanted to do in the first place.

But in terms of learning instruments and studying the craft...

Jasmine: I just taught myself. I’m not technically educated at all. I just started taking guitar lessons to learn the names of the notes and the frets and stuff. I really have developed my own unique way of playing which also accounts for the sound of the songs. The meters can be weird. I’ll just play intuitively what I feel.

More of an advantage than not, maybe.

Jasmine: It’s just interesting being in a band with people who have studied music. Because they can interpret what I’m doing.

Sam: I’m kind of the opposite because I’m going to music school and learning how to technically analyze everything that’s going on. It’s really refreshing to play in this band where there’s no math and no technical thinking going into the creation of the music. It’s just about the sound of the music.

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Downloads

01 rings of fire.mp3
02 octopus.mp3

Websites

myspace.com/seasicksongs

Photos

Victoria Jacob

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